First iOS, Now Mac OS X In-App Purchases Hacked 110
An anonymous reader writes "Last week Russian developer Alexey Borodin hacked Apple's In-App Purchase program for all devices running iOS 3.0 or later, allowing iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users to circumvent the payment process and essentially steal in-app content. Apple [Friday] announced a temporary fix and that it would patch the holes with the release of iOS 6. While Cupertino was distracted, Borodin came in and pulled off the same scheme on the Mac."
Re:Overreacting (Score:2, Interesting)
Pretend you are a software developer (I can already tell you are not). By your logic, it's totally fine if everyone downloads your software without paying for it. After all, you've lost nothing, right? None of the software you have is gone, so everything is great. Right?
Yes indeed. Red Hat makes billions of dollars doing this, and Linus Torvalds (together with everyone who works on the GNU project) has done it for years as well.
Re:Overreacting (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not a developer, true, I'm more of a legal expert.
But let's imagine I'm a dev, and my product was "stolen", to put it this way. I check my hard drive, yep, source still there, binaries present, everything's accounted for. The problem isn't that something is gone, the problem is that there's now two of it, one not under my control. Nothing was taken per se, and hurting my commercial interests is quite another thing, not covered by theft.
So yes, the way you put it, "everything is great. Right.". What's not "totally fine" is what you don't emphasize: not paying for it (assuming I wanted payment in the first place), but that is not covered by the meaning of 'theft'.