Pirated App Store Client For iOS Found On Apple's App Store (helpnetsecurity.com) 55
An anonymous reader writes: An app called "Happy Daily English", which has been offered for download via Apple's official App Store, has been revealed to be a fully functional third party App Store client for iOS, offering users in mainland China a way to install modified versions of iOS apps on non-jailbroken devices. Its discovery shows that there are new techniques that can be used to fool Apple reviewers into allowing potentially malicious apps into the App Store, that enterprise certificates can be easily abused, and that there are ways for bypassing Apple's prohibition of apps dynamically loading new code.
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Yes, they are. Didn't you read the word "jailbroken"?
Didn't you read the word "non-jailbroken"?
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Didn't you don't not read the non-word not "non-jailbroken"?
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Easy removal? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm assuming Apple's walled garden approach makes it so much easier to remove this app and any apps, virusses and trojans potentially installed by it.
Re:Easy removal? (Score:5, Informative)
Not at all, Android can do the same and doesn't need the walled garden to do it. Play Services on Android will scan even sideloaded apps, and can remove apps that are found to be malicious no matter where they come from.
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Well Android is likly going to have a harder time preventing it from being resubmitted and showing up again.
Apple can deny any app that looks superficially similar to this one if they want to.
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Not at all, Android can do the same and doesn't need the walled garden to do it. Play Services on Android will scan even sideloaded apps, and can remove apps that are found to be malicious no matter where they come from.
And theoretically, the Police may be able to arrive on-scene before the criminals depart... but that only seems to be feasible in environments where crime isn't rampant. Let's face it, the walled-garden approach does result in better overall security for users (at a price), not unlike gated communities.
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Right on! Come join my World of Warcraft guild, dude!
Oh wait...
Law Enforcement Implications (Score:5, Funny)
So the FBI doesn't need Apple to help them get the information on the San Bernadino shooter's phone after all. They can just ask the Chinese.
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They're not going to tell anyone, let alone the FBI, if they have technique for getting information from locked iPhones. Many western politicians use them and that would be too good a source of intel to pass up.
Re:Law Enforcement Implications (Score:4, Funny)
And what would be a good source of AMD?
I knew something was suspicious about that app (Score:2, Troll)
The first clue was that is was called "Happy Daily English" instead of the proper "Happy Daily Engrish"
Re:I knew something was suspicious about that app (Score:4, Informative)
This is a really weird myth. The Chinese can say the L sound perfectly, it's actually the R sound that they have some slight issues with. Koreans too, which makes that puppet film all the more bizarre.
The Japanese have some issues with the L sound, which I guess must be the origin of the myth. Japanese, Chinese, Korean, all the same, right?
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Exactly! Just like people from France and Québec are the same, and people from the UK, the U.S.A. and Australia are the same.
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No, it's more like people from England and France are all the same... (in the historical and linguistic sense...)
Not in the linguistic sense, at all! English and French have been proven to be related, with high confidence. The same cannot be said about Japanese and Korean; nor do either of them even seem to be related to Chinese.
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https://xkcd.com/771/ [xkcd.com]
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The Japanese have some issues with the L sound, which I guess must be the origin of the myth.
The problem is R is pronounced very differently depending on where you are as well as which word it's used in. Japanese has 5 characters with the sounds ra, ri, ru, re, ro (unicode missing, look up hiragana on wikipedia if you like). Here is the twist: it's a very weak R, much like the Icelandic R and to some degree much like R sounds like in many European languages. However when Americans read the letter R, they pronounce it very strongly, which makes it sound really weird in Japanese.
The result is that th
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You can't spell an imported word the same way it's spelled in the original language if your alphabets don't line up.
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I'm not sure what you mean here by weak, but it is a rolled r, something between the English R and L sounds, exactly where between those sounds is dependant on dialect. The key thing though, is that they do not have two different sounds for R and L, so when they pronounce an English word with their in-between Japanese R, it can easily sound like the
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Is that arr you got, pussy?
There were warning signs... (Score:3)
The occurrence of the words 'happy' and 'English' in the same sentence should have started alarm bells sounding.
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Maybe it's just the English version of Happy Daily. There are lots of alternative app stores for iOS in China. They allow you to browse apps through their own interface and often have tie ins with social networks and let you earn virtual currency for using them. When you actually go to install an app it takes you directly to the right screen in the Apple app store.
I saw a Chinese friend setting up a new iPad a few years back, She installed some third party app store, logged in to here QQ account and could s
Times change (Score:2, Insightful)
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I want an Android app that's a jailbreak loader (Score:3)
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If one can load apps on a nominally un-jail-broken apple, how about one to load (and remove) apps from an android? My phone is full of crapware. amd I want a wifi tracking app that wants a jailbroken phone (:-))
Android on a Motorola? Google will help you (not the search) but the company. Only requirement is google apps must be installed, but a hosts file will cover that.
or.... (Score:3)
the Apple store guardians actually saw through it straight away but decided to let it through anyway since it actually promotes free speech/Apple's own agenda and because its a 3rd party app, it gives them plausible deniability.
QA (Score:2)