Posts Tagged ‘piracy’

Goings on

Saturday, March 23rd, 2013

It’s been a while since I last wrote anything here – I’ve been writing chunks of stuff at Google+, mostly regarding my current project, CocoaMSX.

I’ve migrated vast majority of my PSP emulators to Google Code – PSP’s SVN repository seems to be one of the most frequently accessed parts of my site, so I figured it’d make sense to make it a lot more widely accessible, as well as allow me to eventually retire my repository. All binaries have been migrated – including past releases and both 1.50 and 2.00 variants. Source is available as well, but since the original repository contained all the projects, I ended up discarding the revision history, in order to ease the transition. The only repository that has not been migrated is NeoPop, because RACE PSP made it unnecessary.

A while back, I wrote about receiving a note from Google regarding the Federal Government taking up interest in sites that hosted pirate Android apps. I’ve since received  official confirmation that indeed, the wheels of justice are turning – if only a bit slowly. If piracy did harm the sales of the app (and I have reasons to believe that it did), it did so at the worst time possible for me – at a time when no official client was yet available. While it’s too late for Spark 360, I hope it will improve the commercial landscape for current and future Android developers, and not drive them away.

I will finally be attending Google IO this year – after trying to secure attendance unsuccessfully in 2011 and 2012 – although I did attend an Extended session at one of Google’s campuses. It should be interesting to see what Google has coming this year – especially after the poorly received Google Q, and the disturbingly Orwellian Google Glass of last year. There has been a lot of speculation about a new Android-based watch from Samsung – something to which I’m particularly looking forward.

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Posted in Emulators, Spark 360 for Android | Comments Off

Android piracy crackdown

Thursday, October 11th, 2012

In the recent months, news has been coming out about the US Government taking action against sites that host pirated Android applications - specifically “applications hosted without the author’s permission”.

While I’m not sure whether the recent crackdown was initiated by Google, I am happy to see it finally happen. Apple’s been very authoritative on their stance against piracy, and was always quick to act against it, while my impression has been that Google’s been turning a blind eye to the rampant piracy of Android apps – including some fairly brazen ones that ran on paid membership systems.

I don’t want to blame the app’s lackluster sales on piracy necessarily – software companies do this all the time and come up with some fairly ludicrous numbers. Still, given that the top Google search term for Spark 360 was ‘spark 360 apk’ for as long as I can remember, it would be naive to say that it didn’t have at least a moderate impact on the app’s sales.

For myself, I hesitate to put any sort of figure on the issue, since I know that some of those who pirated the app would probably not bother to actually pay for it, while others would simply just hoard it and not use it. Ultimately, what made Spark 360 unfeasible as a commercial app was Microsoft’s official Xbox Live app – it killed almost 90% of the daily sales (which had already plummeted in February – for reasons still unknown).

My experience with being a mobile developer has been an odd one – it’s exposed me to various less-than-savory “businesses” that routinely contact (read: spam) me with offers of mutual collaboration, free app hosting, paid app hosting, and even the odd “we have created an account for you and uploaded your app, here’s your password”. I still get emails and offers about OpenSpark – an application that hasn’t even worked for two years. Hard to imagine this experience being unique – I’m fairly certain that many others app authors get the same treatment. Android’s open nature has sadly attracted the unscrupulous masses eager to turn a quick buck – it’s a fact of life for those of us who prefer an open platform.

In any case, I’ve always enjoyed supporting open source software – the pros certainly outweigh any cons – and am happy to contribute once again.

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Posted in Android, Rant | 2 Comments »

Spark, piracy, and account security

Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

I’ve been meaning to post something about Spark and piracy for a while now, but I’ve been unsure of whether that would be a good idea – I’ve been avoiding unnecessarily advertising the fact that Spark is (at this point) rampantly pirated. However, I’ve been getting an alarming amount of Market comments recently that claim that Spark has somehow “hacked” their Xbox Live account – which is not only patently false, but also impossible.

There are many possible ways that one can hack an Xbox Live account – including brute force attacks on the site, and guessing of simple, or easy to guess passwords. My assumption, for the sake of brevity of this article is that you use good, difficult to guess passwords – and if you don’t, you should. See Change Passwords for hints on picking a good password.

That said, I know for fact that a large number of people use illegitimate versions of the app. This is backed by the fact that sales of the app spike considerably whenever Xbox Live makes changes that break Spark in short term, and Google search results. Often, people who use a pirated copy of the app end up liking it, then purchasing the legitimate copy. This scares me most of all, because the people who just now purchased a legitimate product spent any number of weeks with a pirated version that could have been siphoning off account information for weeks or months at a time. If/when their account information is stolen, one of their first reactions is to post accusations in the comments, which unfortunately, causes a large number of other knee-jerk reactions.

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Posted in Spark 360 for Android, Spark Trophies | 3 Comments »

What I learned from FuSa, and other PSP musings

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

A while back, I posted about my experience with PSP 2000′s video output capability – specifically, disappointment with the unscaled output on large-screen TV’s, and the lack of support for games on older CRT’s. The post, surprisingly, resulted in a lot of feedback from the community, on this site, as well as many others – some fanboyish, some understanding or agreeing, but mostly positive and a few helpful. Main suggestion was to use a plugin called FuSa, which is basically able to do everything that the PSP alone couldn’t do.

FuSa scales the image sent to the TV, and can adjust the output frequency, to accommodate things like rendering games to CRT TV’s (which normally only works while watching UMD’s). With the several emulators that I’ve tested, the plugin works remarkably well, which only begs the question – why wasn’t this included in the PSP 2000′s firmware to begin with? While the scaled-down image on a composite output looks jagged and low-res (understandably so), many PSP owners would’ve much rather had bad output, than no output at all – myself included.

Whether or not FuSa is the reason why the newer PSP-3000 models actually will display games through a composite cable is something we’ll never know, but I suppose the point of all this is that custom firmware, and custom plugins make the PSP a lot more than a run-of-the-mill handheld. Don’t get me wrong – the PSP itself was, for its time, revolutionary – and in many ways still is. But I doubt that the system would be as popular as it is today, if it wasn’t for the homebrew community and all of its contributions and offerings. Piracy is an unfortunate side-effect of all this, and while it may be ultimately what Sony’s concerned most about, for classic computer/emulation enthusiasts such as myself, the PSP’s abilities as a homebrew development and emulation entertainment center are the only reasons why I own one (actually, two).

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Posted in PSP, Rant | Comments Off

End to Pandora?

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

Odds are that you’ve probably heard about the new PSP-3000 model (colloquially called “PSP Brite”) that’s due to be released soon, and one that will replace the PSP-2000 series (“PSP Slim”). The new model will include a built-in microphone and a brighter, more responsive screen – an improvement that is almost negligible when one considers the improvements between “Slim” and “Phat” (PSP-1000 series).

Like many other developers and hobbyists, I suspect that there’s more to the system than what the press release lets on – I’m fairly certain that the new PSP model will be built differently to eliminate the extremely efficient “Pandora” hack. A recent dcemu thread discusses just that – probability of the elimination of PSP’s “hackability”, and raises some interesting points, among them “will this stop piracy?”. I’m fairly certain that the answer is “no” – and not just to piracy, but hacking in general. After all, the initial hacks of the PSP centered around badly implemented loading routines in the PSP’s image viewer and GTA: LCS, and as long as there are inquisitive people, there will be exploits to be found and security holes to be exploited. While I expect to see the end of Pandora, I doubt we’ve seen the end of buffer overflow exploits – hardware (and firmware) necessary to deter/elminate buffer overflow exploits would, in all likelihood, break backwards compatibility (not to mention prove too costly).

One thing that I believe is important to remember, however, is that Sony shouldn’t necessarily be chastised for this step. Piracy is an unfortunate side-effect of homebrew development – while I’m not going to venture a guess as to how much money the company is losing/has lost due to piracy, I’m fairly certain that it’s a considerable amount. For many, like myself, the PSP is a retrogamer’s dream come true – there’s no better way to waste hours on end than by playing Legend of Zelda, a port of Doom, or any of the large number of homebrew applications. For too many, however, it’s just a way to hoard modern games.

Sony has stated in the past that they’re aware of PSP’s homebrew community, and that their problem is not with homebrew, but piracy. While I have no reason to trust any particular large company (Enron, anyone?), I have no basis to doubt this fact in the current situation – if anything, homebrew development has helped Sony sell more units. At the same time, piracy hurts those who make the PSP into what it is – the makers of the PSP games. No PSP games means much fewer sales (I don’t think homebrew alone will carry the PSP); fewer sales means no motivation to support or manufacture the PSP.

Comments are welcome.

UPDATE Indeed, Pandora is no longer bootable in the same fashion as the older models

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Posted in Custom Firmware, Rant | 4 Comments »