Apple Pulls Popular Movie Piracy App Kimi From the App Store (wired.com) 25
After climbing the charts of Apple's App Store, the trendy Kimi app, with its collection of bootlegged movies, has disappeared. From a report: Pretending to be a spot-the-difference vision-testing game, the widely downloaded app ranked above Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video in Apple's charts this week for free entertainment apps before it was removed. Without having to pay for anything or log in to any kind of account, iPhone owners could previously use Kimi to browse a wide selection of bootlegs for popular movies and TV shows. Many of the movies up for Best Picture at this year's Oscars were on Kimi, at varying levels of quality.
Poor Things was included in a grainy, pixelated state, but a high-quality version of Killers of the Flower Moon was on Kimi to stream, although an intrusive ad for online casinos was splashed across the top. That definitely isn't the viewing experience Martin Scorsese imagined for audiences. Not just limited to movies, viewers were also able to access episodes of currently airing TV shows, like RuPaul's Drag Race, through the Kimi app. Who was behind this piracy app? It remains a mystery. The developer was listed as "Marcus Evans" in the app store before Kimi was taken down, and this was the only app listed under that name, likely a pseudonym.
Poor Things was included in a grainy, pixelated state, but a high-quality version of Killers of the Flower Moon was on Kimi to stream, although an intrusive ad for online casinos was splashed across the top. That definitely isn't the viewing experience Martin Scorsese imagined for audiences. Not just limited to movies, viewers were also able to access episodes of currently airing TV shows, like RuPaul's Drag Race, through the Kimi app. Who was behind this piracy app? It remains a mystery. The developer was listed as "Marcus Evans" in the app store before Kimi was taken down, and this was the only app listed under that name, likely a pseudonym.
Re:Apple claims to do human review (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know how you can conclude that. The human part is the most likely place where errors will occur, after all. It's perfectly possible that somebody was responsible for the app this cycle, half-assed it because their cat was depressed and they weren't paying attention, and waved it through the process. Human observation isn't the thing meant to capture "all else".
If I'm carrying cocaine on to an airplane, I'd rather get a pat down than go through a scanner.
I'm also curious about "lying so often". I'd like to hear why you judge them as so fundamentally dishonest.
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I'm also curious about "lying so often". I'd like to hear why you judge them as so fundamentally dishonest.
When Apple rolled the TIL into the KB they deliberately removed articles that made them look bad, like the one about the B&W G3 data corruption bug where they told you to buy an ATA card or use FWB toolkit to slow down your disk. This is just one of a zillion episodes like this, that happened to affect me personally. They do shit things, then they hide the evidence. Meanwhile Microsoft still has documents about bugs in DOS 5 on their site. Apple is even more deceptive than Microsoft, defending them is b
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Mac/ipad/iphone, windows os/mobile/surface, android, etc....
They all suck. Every single one has technical flaws, politics, business inspired bullshit, fan boys and cultist followings, and all the rest of the bullshit that comes with technology. None are perfect. They all have good things about them, too. You just have to pick your poison and go with what works for you.
I've chosen iPhone/ipad for the "it all works well together" garden experience. I still have my Windows PC in the office but MBP in the
Re:Look, I triggered the iFanboys (Score:4, Funny)
And the other half swears at them, I presume?
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Lol, the other half have iPhones.
I get a fair mix of blue and green when talking to her family.
Last year I had to use her mom's Samsung for a few minutes and separately figure out how to wipe and reset an older foreign language one from someone else. Not to my taste but they like them. The wipe n reset was fun. I didn't know the language at all and it was a right to left language too as if it wasn't hard enough already. But it was interesting to fish around the underlying administrative menu system once
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> They all suck. Every single one has technical flaws, politics, business inspired bullshit, fan boys and cultist followings, and all the rest of the bullshit that comes with technology. None are perfect.
We knew this since 2010:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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"defending them is batshit crazy.
I don't know why you think I was defending them. I wanted to know why you think what you think, so I asked.
I'm saying that the human part of this isn't dependable, and it isn't, on its own, supposed to be a bulletproof shield against all things nefarious. That would be silly.
You said that they "clearly" don't do the human review they claim. I'm only saying you can't support coming to that conclusion.
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Please stop trivializing cat depression.
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You are right in general, but to be fair, in this particular case, all the app developer had to do is have some limited non copyrighted content when the app was reviewed and add more content later.
Exactly.
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Re: Apple claims to do human review (Score:2)
Re: Apple claims to do human review (Score:2)
Re: Apple claims to do human review (Score:5, Insightful)
The amount of new apps per day is massive (thousands), a human cannot fully review every app in depth
"A human" can't review them all in-depth. However, the most profitable company in the country can afford to hire multiple humans, who could review all of them.
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When every app these days is a glorified "Webview," it's really easy to bait and switch by swapping the web end after the app is published.
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Apple clearly does not do the human review that they claim they do.
How can anyone believe anything Apple claims when they get caught lying so often?
Do you really think that the Devs. Submitted their Bootleg Library to Apple along with their App?
Not much mention of this app prior to now (Score:2)
I did a google search for 2023, mentioned on appadvice and similar spammy websites, app store listings, and nowhere else. Curious.
Well... (Score:2)
He probably also didn't intend for them to fall asleep (during an admittedly decent movie) but he's been allergic to sub 3 hour runtimes since shutter island. He should hire an editor to shorten the runtime and also remove that intrusive ad.