... my rants & raves

Nov-122009

interesting analysis of app piracy

do you know the arguments people bring up when it comes to piracy of applications or games?
i just want to test it, if i like it i’ll buy it later” or “if it would be cheaper i would buy it”?

an iphone app developer has analyzed the usage of his new game “Tap-Fu” in the first week after release based on the high-score postings.
the results are interesting:

  • the original to illegal copy rate is 1:5. so for every copy sold on the app store there are 5 illegal copies
  • no one who is using the illegal copy did later on buy the game (again this is only based on the first week of sales)
  • the top slots in the game’s highscore list are all from illegal copies

And given that this is a 4$ game i don't think the argument “i would buy it if it would be cheaper” is valid either :)

you can find the full article here, it’s really an interesting analysis.


Published: Nov-12-09 | 0 Comments | 1 Link to this post
Tagged as: IT stuff

May-152009

random VOIP spam calls

since a couple of days our phone (connected with a Grandstream HT486 VOIP adapter) is ringing randomly several times throughout the day while displaying a “MeucciSolutions” as callerID. The calls are not listed as incoming calls on the sipgate servers (sipgate is my German VOIP provider), so i assume they are made directly to the SIP endpoint, maybe discovered via portscans. my router log also shows changing IP addresses the SIP calls are originating from, so i assume this might be either a distributed spam attack or even worse the code to do this might even be embedded in some kind of malware/virus/trojan.

Needless to say that “Meucci Solutions” (a provider of VOIP analysis and monitoring equipment) has nothing to do with these calls. They even have a complaint form on their site.

if my theory is correct and these are direct SIP initiations resulting from port scans, i hope my countermeasure of changing the default port for SIP signaling (usually 5060 UDP) to something different works.


Published: May-15-09 | 0 Comments | 3 Links to this post
Tagged as: IT stuff