Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Gawker is running an interesting story, Sarah Palin’s Personal Emails, about how Sarah Palin’s personal emails were leaked to Wikileak’s Sarah Palin Yahoo inbox 2008. Apparently an unknown individual loosely associated with the anti-Scientology movement Anonymous obtained access to gov.sarah@yahoo.com, Sarah Palin’s email address, and took some screenshots of the emails he found there:

It looks legit! The offending posts, screenshots, heretofore unseen family photos, and emails have all been deleted from Imageshack and 4Chan. But we have them. You want to read Sarah Palin’s email?

It’s kind of sad to see Palin’s email only has 174 total messages. I’ve been using email for hopefully less time than her, yet my gmail account has 48,163 email messages in it (say three years worth. Perhaps John McCain picked a running mate for VP as technically inept as he is.

Disclosure: I think Sarah Palin sucks for a VP pick.

Update: The suspect who allegedly hacked Sarah Palin’s email is University of Tennessee student David Kernell. His father is democratic state representative Mike Kernell. Interesting…

Apple has become notorious for removing applications from the iPhone app store, generating huge amounts of controversy as each application is removed. This post aims to aggregate the controversy into a single page, for reference.

The infamous I am Rich application sold 8 copies of the above glowing jewel for $999 a pop. The author, Armin Heinrich, said “I am sure a lot more people would like to buy it, but currently can’t do so,” Heinrich said. “The App is a work of Art and included a secret mantra; that’s all.” The application was pulled from the iTunes store on August 7th after reviews like

“I saw this app with a few friends and we jokingly clicked ‘buy’ thinking it was a joke, to see what would happen. … THIS IS NO JOKE…DO NOT BUY THIS APP AND APPLE PLEASE REMOVE THIS FROM THE APP STORE”

began to appear for the application. There is still no official comment from Apple as to why they removed the expensive, artsy application. According to the L.A. Times, Heinrich is also baffled: “I have no idea why they did it and am not aware of any violation of the rules to sell software on the App Store.”

Slasher, an iPhone app which “displays a common kitchen knife on the screen and plays a horror sound when you make a stabbing motion” was pulled from the App Store for violating section 3.3.12 of the iPhone SDK agreement covering objectionable content:

3.3.12 Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.

The Author is still trying to get clarification about what this means and get his application back into the App store. However, it sets an unfortunate precedent that any application (think about Religious apps, bound to offend other Religions…) can be pulled simply because someone, somewhere claims to be offended.

Carling Brewery’s iPint application was removed from the Apple store after a mistake in classification caused the enormously popular application to be listed internationally, instead of in the local UK market. iPint is still available for UK iTunes users.

Erica Sadun’s light-making application apparently made the iPhone’s LCD brighter than the default brightness. Somehow this was a violation of Apple SDK, and the App has vanished from the App Store. If you know more about “Light”, please leave a comment. I can find little on it.

PhoneSaber was an iPhone application to emulate swinging a Star Wars lightsaber around. As you swing your phone, it would emit various sound effects. According to this post, Mac Box took down the app voluntarily after a THQ rep communicated that they violated Lucasfilm’s mobile licensing.

As you all know, Netshare, the innovative app that let you use your edge or 3G cellular as a local wifi router, essentially tethering for the iPhone, was pulled by Apple after AT&T leaned on them. Nullriver notes that “we’ve received no communication from Apple thus far. NetShare did not violate any of the Developer or AppStore agreements.”

This is interesting, and at the same time scary. According to Engadget, Apple’s Fairplay (TM) DRM has been hacked for the new iPhone 3G App Store, and the applications themselves are appearing on torrent sites:

There’s also a more traditional crack which allows apps to be stripped of DRM and shared without using iTunes, although you’ll have to jailbreak your phone to do it. The first app to be widely pirated is Super Monkey Ball, which isn’t surprising, and it seems like several other apps have followed it out onto various torrent sites. In addition to the relatively simple jailbreak procedure, running cracked apps requires you to open up SSH access and do some mucking around, so unless your time is worth less than $10, it’s probably not worth it.

The latest apps appearing on a torrent search for iPhone include Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D, Super Monkey Ball, iBeer, and Enigmo, a total (so far) of $32.96 of potential revenue destroyed by hackers.

The original post at Haklabs, Super Monkey Ball iPhone – Cracked, explains the motivation for the hack:

After the WWDC ‘08 Keynote, everyone wanted this iPhone game, it received almost as much hype as the iPhone itself. Super Monkey Ball from SEGA definitely has some good qualities, however it does have some bad qualities as well. First off, this game costs $9.99 which might be a little steep for some.

1. Make sure you are on firmware 2.0
2. Download the Super Monkey Ball Cracked file and extract the .ipa file from the archive to your desktop.
3. Drag and drop the Monkey Ball.ipa file into the iTunes application folder and wait for it to install.

So because an irate iPhone user believes the Super Monkey Ball game costs too much at $9.99, he creates a hacked version and gives it away for free. I actually paid for Super Monkey Ball, because it’s one of the few applications worth my $9.99, and I advise you to as well. If there’s no financial market for creating great iPhone applications, the entire market will suffer, and we’ll have crappy apps to run on our $400 phones.