Adobe AIR Development

[smiley]

I have just upgrade DM 6.0 the other and i can tell you that all BB apps purchased or downloaded from appworld are ENCRYPTED.  So i don't understand why RIM didnt bother encrypting PB apps

[rhgills]

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shawnblais wrote:

So Alice has just spent 1-3 hrs of her life, to steal a $3 app... For all that hard work, she can run my app in her browser!

Just don't make it publically available or I will call RIM and have them stick their lawyers on her.

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IANAL, but RIM would not file a lawsuit against someone for illegally reselling/distributing an application owned by a third-party that they happen to sell in their store. That is analogous to Best Buy filing a lawsuit against a street vendor for selling fake or stolen iPhones.

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TheMarco wrote:

The problem is not Alice.

The problem is Bill who is a developer and gets the code, changes some graphics, repackages it and puts it up for sale. Either on the PlayBook or even on a different platform, for example the HP TouchPad which also has Flash and a WebWorks-ish SDK.

Bad, bad, bad.

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Exactly. Any methods taken to protect the integrity of your assets (for example, checksumming) can be easily removed through the same process taken by Alice to remove a simple device lock. While Alice may have some difficulty removing such checks if she is not experienced with the toolset and language, Bill, as a developer, will have none.  Open bundle, replace resources, done. This will invalidate the signature, requiring him to resign with his key (if submitting to the App World).  Any DRM? Assuming he already has a decompiler and flash builder, open decompiler, find DRM, delete DRM, export, compile.  This is an extremely simple process.

[tensioncore]

So has anyone considered raising this as a Bug in the issue tracker?

[Marc_Paradise]

In progress as we speak

[Marc_Paradise]

I think this is not entirely correct. The apps are not stored in the encrypted back up in the case of BB phones, but in a directory structure that's mirrored to the desktop. Either directly or using a tool such as BBSAK, you can extract individual COD files directly from the device or from the windows filesystem.

The COD files can't be modified, but they can be redistributed freely after they are extracted. They are also very difficult to reverse engineer (I'm not awre of a any cases where it has been successfully done except for very basic examples)

This limits the risk to simple piracy, and not modifying, repackaging and reselling the app.

[shawnblais]

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rhgills wrote:

IANAL, but RIM would not file a lawsuit against someone for illegally reselling/distributing an application owned by a third-party that they happen to sell in their store. That is analogous to Best Buy filing a lawsuit against a street vendor for selling fake or stolen iPhones.

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My though was, that if the application is only available in AppWorld, than the user would clearly be guilty of hacking Blackberry's Appworld, something RIM might do something about. But I'm no lawyer...

[shawnblais]

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rhgills wrote:

Exactly. Any methods taken to protect the integrity of your assets (for example, checksumming) can be easily removed through the same process taken by Alice to remove a simple device lock. While Alice may have some difficulty removing such checks if she is not experienced with the toolset and language, Bill, as a developer, will have none.  Open bundle, replace resources, done. This will invalidate the signature, requiring him to resign with his key (if submitting to the App World).  Any DRM? Assuming he already has a decompiler and flash builder, open decompiler, find DRM, delete DRM, export, compile.  This is an extremely simple process.

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Sure, but this has always been the case for Flash apps. And this is no different than AIR for Android, where user's can easily grab an APK from the device, extract it and decompile the swf. Google does provide obfuscation when you deploy, but it's optonaly, and I'm not sure how effective it really is.

I agree it's a huge worry. But in practice, it seems that fortunately there are not alot of people out there willing to stoop to such shadiness. I think most developers inherently have respect for other developer's work.

[Marc_Paradise]

Bug report submitted:

https://www.blackberry.com/jira/browse/TABLET-189

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shawnblais wrote:

I agree it's a huge worry. But in practice, it seems that fortunately there are not alot of people out there willing to stoop to such shadiness. I think most developers inherently have respect for other developer's work.

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For PlayBook? No, not yet, it's a brand new market.  But pirated apps are incredibly easy to get for other platforms; it doesn't take a developer at all for that aspect.  ANd Android Market has many tales of developers who and regularly repackage apps for sale.  Google takes them down -- eventually.

[sergeh]

weird, link isn't working for me

It seems that you have tried to perform an operation which you are not permitted to perform.

[streak81]

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sergeh wrote:
weird, link isn't working for me

It seems that you have tried to perform an operation which you are not permitted to perform.

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...in the past, MSohm has had to go in and make entries publicly viewable.