“I have to work extra hard as it is on creating things for the App Store, but when people like paniK go ahead and make my software available to pirates and I watch sales vanish overnight, it means I have to spend much more time on marketing and development for my App Store apps to try and offset my losses, leaving no time for projects like Stack that earn me nothing.”

Click HERE for the full post on Steven’s blog.

Thanks to Mark for the tip.

SuperBall 2 and SuperBall 2 Lite are being removed from the App Store by Apple due to copyright infringement issues. Apparently Atari Interactive is not too happy about SuperBall 2 and is claiming infringements against the pong and breakout copyrights. So, if you want either the free version or the full version of SuperPong 2, you have until tonight (Friday night) to get them from the App Store. After that, they will be gone.

I apologize for not getting this out sooner…the developer wrote me yesterday but, when I checked for the app early this morning I couldn’t find it in the App Store and thought it had been removed. However, the developer said that you could get it until tonight so I checked again and it was still there. So, if you want it, now is the time to go get it!!

Click here to download SuperPong2 via the App Store

Click here to download SuperPong2 Lite via the App Store

The removal seems to be due to some hacking on Erica’s part. It seems that she hacked a little bit of code that allowed her application control the brightness of the iPhone. So, when you opened Light, it would force your iPhone to go to full brightness instead of the brightness that your iPhone was set at in your stock Settings. Then, when you closed the application, your iPhone would go back to the original brightness you had it set at. Although this is a feature that many of us desperately would like to have, it is against Apple’s rules to affect the brightness of the iPhone.

See original article and comments HERE.

Here are the dangers of this app. First off, all packages have permissions pre-set by the packager prior to going into Installer or Cydia. So this app is totally unneeded. Worse, it changes these permissions and you can never get them back without using SSH and having the knowledge to do so. Secondly, iPhone follows Unix file permission standards. This means all normal files must be 644 permissions. Only binary executable files should be 755 and in some special cases 4755 with owner set as root. This app stomps all over these proper permissions and just recursively sets every file to 755 in the entire folder!

This is wrong, but this is not the worst of it. There are several apps that require +s permissions. If you use this app and “heal” these apps, you will break them, and they will be unrepairable without a reinstall. If you run this app on the installer folder, installer is dead. If you are not proficient with SSH, you will have to restore. If you run this on Categories, BossPrefs, BossTool, Poof, (just to name a few apps) you will cripple those apps and have to uninstall and reinstall them.

I have explained to iSpazio how dangerous this app is and asked him to please remove it from community sources. I will post his response here.

See original article and comments HERE.

Unnamed Individual:

Hi!

First of all, I’d like to thank you for maintaining your repository and hosting many good apps for the community.

On 27/05 ModMyiFone added an app called “iAwake2″ to their repo, and I just noticed today that you included this app too. It looked suspiciously similar to another app Insomnia that was released quite long ago and is available from Ste’s source.
I downloaded both apps and, unsurprisingly, both executables are absolutely identical. So iAwake2 is just a repackaged version of Insomnia with different graphics.
It is worth to note that the “developer” of iAwake2 claims that his app is based on Insomnia with “some bugfixes and performance improvements”. But Insomnia is distributed under GPL v3, and if any bugfixes are distributed in binary form, source code must be made available. Of course, he won’t do that because his app doesn’t differ from Insomnia.I bet this guy doesn’t even have a compiler, otherwise he could change the code so it would be less obvious that his app is a rip-off.

It’s sad that there are such “developers” who want cheap fame by misleading the users and this kind of behavior is completely against the open nature of the iPhone community. I hope you’ll take action and remove iAwake2 from your repository.

Best regards
(Name removed by BigBoss)

Sent from my iPhone

BigBoss:

Hi Jash,

I was given this report below, and of course (at first) didn’t believe it was true. So I installed your iawake2 and insomnia and ran an md5sum comparison of both binaries, and it turns out that both binaries are identical. This means you could not have even taken the same source and recompiled the app because the timestamps in the resulting binaries would be enough to result in unique md5sums. This amounts to stealing the app, putting your own images in, and having it hosted as new, original content. This type of thing cannot be allowed in our community. It makes me look bad for hosting it in the first place. Therefore, I am pulling the package off my repository and also informing the other community source owners as well as NullRiver (all blind copied in this email) of the situation so that everyone is aware of what this package is and no one hosts it.

BigBoss