

Apple Bans Another Developer, 1000+ Apps Pulled - vrobancho
http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/12/07/apple-bans-another-developer-1000-apps-pulled/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Techcrunch+(TechCrunch)&utm_content=Google+Reader

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bmalicoat
Apple should just monitor high volume developers. I'm not saying all
developers with 100+ apps are evil, some are ebooks or whatever, but they
should definitely keep an eye on them. Many developers with that many apps are
doing something weird like splitting an app into 50 overly specific apps or
sometimes very shady techniques like in this article.

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jfoutz
Neat. All I need is 40 accounts to eliminate my competition.

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stcredzero
That is, if you don't end up just eliminating yourself.

We could also interpret your comment as meaning: "I've already hacked into my
competitor's machines, so Apple can trace the IP addresses back to _them_."

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jfoutz
Yes, you could interpret it that way... Do you really think apple examined the
ownership of each IP? Oh, comcast ip XXX happens to be the mom of the lead
sales guy of this app! ban the app!

Seems unlikely to me, but I'm not privy to apple's internal investigation
system. I'd wager you aren't either ;)

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stcredzero
It wasn't a commentary on Apple's investigations. It was a commentary on the
lack of foresight in your scheme.

I see your point though. Tracing IP addresses through an ISP's DHCP is
probably _way_ too complicated and expensive for a little fly-by-night
operation like Apple. They wouldn't have any pull with Comcast.

(Hmmm, your "clever" rejoinder has a few problems of its own. Left as an
exercise. Take some advice: Keep your day job. Planning heists doesn't seem to
be your strong point.)

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selven
When trying to look at a product you're thinking of buying, ignore the 5 star
reviews. Those are always a mix of fanboys (whose posts amount to "<insert
product here> is awes0me!!1!1"), people paid to rate it high and other people
who like the product but don't tend to have much useful to say (you tend to
already know all of the advantages of the product from the marketing
department). Looking at the 1 and 2 star reviews is always better as you tend
to get an idea of what the problems with the product are and why you might not
like it. A balanced approach will always give you the most information.

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joshu
It seems like cliques like this should be pretty easy to statistically
discover.

Does anyone have a dataset I could try this on?

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ephermata
There's been some academic work on identifying these attacks recently. Most of
the work I've seen crawls social networks directly. You could try contacting
the authors to see if they will share their data sets.

Representative example: SybilLimit: A Near-Optimal Social Network Defense
against Sybil Attacks Haifeng Yu, Phillip B. Gibbons, Michael Kaminsky,Feng
Xiao <http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~yuhf/yuh-sybillimit.pdf>

A more recent paper looks at a data set from Digg to discover vote
manipulation; the authors are interested in further applications and would
probably appreciate your contact.

Sybil Resilient Content Rating D.M. Tran, B. Min, J. Li, L. Subramanian
<http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~lakshmi/nsdi09.pdf>

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webology
Apple should automatically flag accounts who release over a dozen, fifty, or
so many apps and review each account. This would cut down on abusers and let
them focus their efforts more productively.

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weaksauce
I doubt it. If there is significant money in this then the "scammer" will just
open up new bank accounts under different names and submit 49 apps a piece. It
won't be as easy but it will still be profitable.

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elblanco
This should clean up the App store a hair.

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param
What happens to purchases already made? Would your iphone still have the app
or will it disappear?

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thelibrarian
They stay on your iPhone/iPod. But of course you no longer can get updates.

I have the Delicious Library app that the developer pulled due to it violating
Amazon's API ToS (as revised after the app was released). It still works, and
has even made a device transition (iPod -> iPhone).

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nearestneighbor
Isn't this kind of vote fraud commonplace?

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jsz0
Probably but if they're mixed in with a fair amount of legitimate reviews it's
really hard to detect. It sounds like 90% of their reviews were coming from
the same users who exclusively review this companies applications.

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GrandMasterBirt
Hey, gota admit that its good that apple keeps tabs on such things. If only
Ebay did these sort of things.

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lylejohnson
According to the story, Apple wasn't keeping tabs on it. They only took action
when an independent third party pointed out the problem to them.

