Apple’s much-anticipated Mac App Store, which sells apps for your computer rather than your smartphone, scored more than a million downloads in its first day online. But how many of those downloads were actually paid for? Users already discovered an easy hack: Copy any legitimate App Store receipt and paste it into a download of paid apps and they will run. It doesn’t work for every paid app, just the ones where the sellers didn’t follow Apple’s advice on validating receipts like Angry Birds, which, at least for mobile devices, happens to be the most downloaded app ever. What’s more, one of the members of a pirate organization called Hackulous already figured out a way to crack the entire store. A hacker who goes by the name Dissident says by installing a software called Kickback, users can pirate any application in the store. However, the crack will not be available until February 2011 because there probably aren’t any “crappy apps” yet that deserve hacking, and if he did right away, it might “devalue applications and frustrate developers.” Don’t let anyone tell you hackers can’t be thoughtful … for a month.
Considering that the Verizon iPhone looks like it’s coming out February 3 and that Apple paid its COO $59.1 million last year for filling in for Steve Jobs while he was on medical leave, we think Apple will be just fine. So fine, in fact, it seems kind of petty to bother going after a Steve Jobs parody Twitter account for tweets like: “The next iPhone update includes several autocorrection fixes. For instance, typing ‘Android’ will autocorrect to ‘hemorrhoid.’” Don’t you guys have better things to do with your time? Like think of some form of restitution for all the people who missed planes, and lost their jobs, and sounded like they were lying when they blamed their cell phone because their alarm didn’t work for four days?
Without Proper Code Validation, Mac App Store Downloads Are Easily Bootlegged [Daring Fireball]
Mac App Store Cracked Open for Piracy [Gizmodo]
