Apple’s newly launched App Store for Mac OS X has already become vulnerable to piracy.
Apple brought the iPhone’s App Store to Mac OS X this week, and in the process opened a second front in its war against App Store piracy. The Mac App Store was cracked within hours through multiple methods, though at least one group of hackers is waiting to release theirs until a lot of “crap” becomes available.
Surprisingly, one method that hackers discovered to play illegitimate Apps on the Mac was basically a cut and paste. Downloading a paid App from an illegal location, and then replacing the receipt and signature files with those from a free App sometimes allows the App to run. Apple recommended that App developers implement a measure to avoid this simple crack, but some apparently haven’t been listening.
Cracking group Hackulous, known for breaking Apple’s iOS DRM, has also developed a more thorough Mac App Store crack called “KickBack,” but doesn’t want to release it just yet. The group says: “Most of the applications that go on the Mac App Store [in the first instance] will be decent, they’ll be pretty good. Apple isn’t going to put crap on the App Store as soon as it gets released. It’ll probably take months for the App Store to actually have a bunch of crappy applications and when we feel that it has a lot of crap in it, we’ll probably release Kickback.”
Hackulous added that it doesn’t want to “devalue applications and frustrate developers” right away. It’ll wait to do that until later.
The Mac App Store launched with over 1,000 Apps including many games such as Lego Harry Potter, Angry Birds, and Bejeweled 3. It’s sort of like a purely Mac-focused version of Steam, but was cracked much quicker.
Sources: AppleInsider, Gizmodo
Published: Jan 7, 2011 02:04 pm