
A source for this picture? - lfpa2
https://twitter.com/simonpang/status/562095677975441408/photo/1
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runjake
Just to head off a lot of confusion stirring on the net about this: The person
who posted the picture is claiming this woman is doing app _ratings_ , not
some outsourced App Store submitted app approval process.

~~~
waterlooalex
Ah interesting, as in: she's the person who rates your app if you "buy" some
ratings?

~~~
giarc
Yes. It's funny because everyone knows this has been going on forever, but I
guess once they put a picture to it, everyone gets up in arms.

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baq
I'm surprised the crowd here is surprised... you can also hire Chinese to
solve catchpas, etc. and it's on the cheap side of things.

~~~
jader201
I definitely wasn't surprised, as I've known this principle has been going on
for some time. But I, for some reason, thought this could be done somehow with
a single device, or something. I never really knew _how_ it happened, just
knew _that_ it happened.

So this picture answered that question for me (though I'm sure this isn't the
only way it can or is being executed).

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flycaliguy
She could possibly make more money touring with a sound mixer and synthesizer
apps on all those. I'd go see some live complex drone music, I'd help her set
it up.

~~~
MichaelGG
It's quite probable if someone is manually entering ratings on hundreds of
phones, that the owner of the phones is not the same person doing the labor.

Is there a reason that you think she, in particular, would make money using a
synth app on those phones, versus anyone else?

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flycaliguy
If she doesn't own them she should consider asking her boss if she can open
for Melt Banana sometime.

What would happen if you used each phone to call another phone on the rack and
then put them all on speaker phone? The feedback would be fascinating.

What if you created a FaceTime array in which each phone connected to an
audience member's phone? You could then place tone emitters throughout the
venue and the physical placement of each participant would shape a chord
assembled on stage.

So much room for creativity beyond the creative grey market businessman's
greed. That was the point of my post.

~~~
MichaelGG
There's room for how many app store ratings companies/employees? With a
reasonably stable income, too. There's room for how many iPhone feedback
musicians?

In fact, what you're suggesting may have already happened. Boss took a set of
iPhones, then ran a band. And then bought more iPhones to grow his ratings
business. So the image you see would be the same, regardless.

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dudus
This looks something quite easy to detect and ignore if apple was serious
about ratings

~~~
mef
How would you detect it? Any detection algorithm that springs to mind seems
easily defeatable. These devices are most likely all on individual pay-as-you-
go cellular cards, each with their own iTunes account. Each review is probably
either only a star rating, or for text-based reviews a randomly generated
unique paragraph.

You could detect similar texts but that's just an arms race against new
corpora being added to their generator.

Maybe detect the same app getting a lot of similar ratings in a period of
time? But then the farm could just randomize the input list of apps among the
farmers and stretch out the time period to make it look like more natural
traffic.

Thoughts?

~~~
DesaiAshu
Reviews are tied to app store accounts, which are tied to credit cards.
Reviews also reset with each version of the app. You could detect the same
accounts being used to review each version of the app, discount ratings from
newly created accounts, discount ratings from accounts with reused credit
cards, etc. It seems like an easier way to game the system would be to pay
anyone with an iPhone $5 to download and rate your app.

~~~
titanomachy
You can have an app store account without a credit card. I don't think it was
always possible, but it is now. Also, the accounts don't have to be newly
created. This operation could be quite long-lived.

You could have some automated system which loads many different apps to be
rated, so that the person in the picture isn't rating the same app over and
over again in a short period of time.

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zmanian
Amazing illustration of a Sybil attack

~~~
pbhjpbhj
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack)
\- didn't know that one: "The Sybil attack in computer security is an attack
wherein a reputation system is subverted by forging identities in peer-to-peer
networks. It is named after the subject of the book Sybil, a case study of a
woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. [...]"

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sosuke
I'm impressed the first reply came from someone from WSJ looking to make an
article I presume.

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bhartzer
It doesn't look like there is any EXIF data in the image, perhaps because it's
been opened and saved so many times. If we had the original image, that might
shed some light as to where/when it was taken.

~~~
nostromo
Twitter strips EXIF. Most big sites do.

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ljk
why do they strip the EXIF?

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katbyte
i imagine it is to protect the identify and location of people who post images
and have no idea about exif/how to strip it.

Also saves us who do know from the hassle of stripping it out on our phones
before posting ourselves.

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jscheel
Fiverr's headquarters exposed.

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coralreef
Gaming the system will always be apart of the game.

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CGamesPlay
Seems like this could be about app store ratings, but it seems more likely
that this is about manual testing. Wake me up when there's some more
(credible) information.

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pavel_lishin
That seems like an awful lot of iPads for one person if she's just doing
manual testing.

~~~
0xCMP
Well, they might be testing many apps at once. A lot of bugs are the "well it
was running a long time and it crashed" type that you'd outsource.

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shanemhansen
The technical term is "growth hacking"

~~~
wonjun
lol

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joeyspn
In that pic there are roughly 18*6=108 devices per panel. On the other side of
the girl it seem there's another panel which could have another ~108 devices.
That's 216 good reviews/votes coming from a single asian lady... notbad.jpg

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Retr0spectrum
I wonder if it is possible to reverse-engineer the whole iTunes connection and
review process, and send fake reviews automatically from a server, or even
from a botnet.

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LiweiZ
That's why I feel lucky that my very first attempt to make a food rating app
for China market failed at product building stage almost 3 years ago.

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bilalel
As replied the OP, it's an anonymous friend of him.

~~~
albedoa
He says in his very next tweet that he doesn't know if it's real:

[https://twitter.com/simonpang/status/562201979603021824](https://twitter.com/simonpang/status/562201979603021824)

 _There’s lot of pay-to-review service on the net but most ppl never seen how
they work. Dunno if it’s real but still give us some insight._

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robbyking
There's a pretty big "if" in that sentence.

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albedoa
Yup! So important I repeated it.

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mFixman
Can't you do this more efficiently opening several instances of an emulator on
a powerful computer?

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terhechte
Not for iOS

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0942v8653
You wouldn't need iOS, you could do it perfectly fine in iTunes on Windows or
OS X.

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downandout
Wouldn't it be easier to just use Mechanical Turk for this?

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rxaxm
wouldn't they need iphones?

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GenerocUsername
And everybody shits on google for trying to tie personalization to everything.

Do you want to sort your apps by the the rank and reviews of chinese laborors?
Or do you want it to prioritize ratings by people you actually know?

Personalization is really the only way to nuke the arms race that is
fraud/spam detection and crowd-sourced data.

There is no perfect answer. Just more abstract games to play.

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jtwebman
Na they would just create 1000's of personalities. Maybe by IP Address and
time with personalities would work or even better stop ranking by it at all.

I would say having a group of trusted reviewers would be the best way to
handle that. Nothing is a good substitute for trusted content curators.

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hahainternet
> I would say having a group of trusted reviewers would be the best way to
> handle that. Nothing is a good substitute for trusted content curators.

The point they are making is that with Google, your friends app reviews matter
more than random peoples.

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jtwebman
But I also follow my non-friends as well, I also might trust one friend more
then another for their opinions.

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msoad
How she operates that many phones?

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valevk
I assume every phone is a different user, and she just goes around rating
apps. I am not sure if you could automate that process, but then why would the
phones be arrenged in such a way that one person can quickly click on every
one of them, instead of a dark room.

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markkanof
Probably could automate it, maybe even by using a Mac and multiple instances
of the iOS simulator, but that would require a lot of expensive development,
so it's likelt much cheaper to buy a bunch of devices and hire super cheap
labor.

~~~
pavel_lishin
You could build a hardware rig that's programmed to hit the 5-star rating
area, and then "submit" \- but you'd also need to find a way to launch the app
store to the correct app every time, and then debug the thing, and then still
pay someone to stand around and watch in case it gets into trouble anyway.

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lsaferite
Open CV could easily help in that area. Servo controlled stylus for input,
OpenCV based watchdog against pre-programmed motions. Maybe mechanical turk or
something to generate the reviews.

Perhaps you could fight it by doing statistical analysis on review patterns.
If the device is only ever giving great and/or crappy ratings and the same
group of devices rates the same group of apps the same way, you could detect
this.

Edit: Of course, they could fight detection by having a queue of apps to
review and an array of devices. Randomize the matrix and periodically retire a
device to prevent it from gaining too much history. Since it's running in a
machine it would likely be in pristine condition and capable of being resold
as new. Heck, they could buy one, use it for a period of time then return it.

