Reverse bitorrent technology, the future of piracy?
Hackulous, an online community against everything DRM and legal have been at the app cracking game for some time now. They’ve been making paid apps found on the iTunes App Store available for free on Installous, the “App Store” for jailbroken iPhones for the past two years and now they’ve announced the next step in app piracy. Because not every app has been cracked yet, Hackulous have devised a method to scour the world for more apps to fill the store. Mobile Hunt, nicknamed “Reverse BitTorrent”, is what they are calling it. How does it work? Users that manage to crack an app that isn’t available on Apptrackr (a database that lists all the cracked apps available for download from Installous) will receive a message telling them that they have an app that Apptrackr doesn’t. If users choose to do so, they can share the cracked app online by uploading it in the background. Users won’t have to spend all their bandwidth uploading the whole app as they’ll only upload bits and pieces of it (in the event that it’s a large file) – users all over the world with the same cracked app will be doing the same thing as well, just like in BitTorrent. So instead of having a torrent file to locate all the pieces of a file (like regular BT), Mobile Hunt will collect all the parts and pieces of a software from users all over the world, and then make the app available as a regular download on Installous. Sounds like a pretty nifty idea. We wonder what steps Apple will take to fight against this piracy. How many of you are advocates of pirated software on your iPhone?
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