#65: Pirates and Piracy
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Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective. Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing
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news of note in iOS development, Apple and the like. I'm your host, David Smith. I'm
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an independent iOS developer based in Herndon, Virginia. This is show number 65 and today
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is a Monday, July 16th. Developing Perspective is never longer than 15 minutes. So let's
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get started. All right, first, just a quick note. Last Thursday, I may remember I linked
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to a post that included a bunch of different iOS and Mac-related, development-related podcasts.
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And one of the ones I mentioned was Edge Cases, which is the podcast of Wolf Resnick and Andrew
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Pontius. And over the weekend, I actually had the opportunity to just re-listen to a
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lot of those. That post had reminded me of like, "Oh, I really should make sure I've
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listened to all the back issues. And I just wanted to mention here again, it is a great
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show. I've really been enjoying it. It's focused very much on the craft of development rather
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than necessarily the business or the process. And it's been getting better and better. And
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so I just wanted to put that out there, highly recommended. And what I'd said earlier was
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was a bit too in the weeds, that has actually
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been getting him steadily better and better
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in terms of the way in which they're able to frame and manage
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their discussion.
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So highly recommended.
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Link in the show notes.
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All right, first, just kind of a random thought
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that I had that I thought could be interesting to some of you.
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So as you probably know if you listen to the show,
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on Twitter I am @_DavidSmith.
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And it's kind of a funny thing because the underscore
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in some ways seems to have become more famous than I am, that a lot of people seem to actually
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recognize me as underscore, or you know, as underscore David Smith rather than just as
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David Smith.
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And so it was kind of a funny thought.
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And I was like, well, maybe I'll do a quick origin story on why I'm underscore David Smith.
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So as you may imagine, if you live in an English speaking, sort of Anglo oriented country,
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you know, United States, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, one of those kind of places,
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I think a name like David Smith is fairly popular.
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There's quite a lot of parents who name their kids David,
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and there's a lot of Smiths running around.
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And so it's throughout my life.
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It's never been something that's been particularly unique.
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I actually was looking around for some stats on this.
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And I found this little study, which is interesting,
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it's in the show notes.
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But there's a study I found that someone
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was analyzing the data on Facebook
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for popularity of particular names.
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and David Smith is number eight.
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So I have the eighth most popular name sort of on Facebook,
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which probably translates largely to the eighth most
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popular name on the internet.
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So as you may imagine, it's always difficult for me
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to get a good name on something.
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And so I was a little bit late to the Twitter party,
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not that late.
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I've had a Twitter account for quite a while,
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but certainly not early enough that I
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was able to get David Smith or D. Smith or David or David Thomas
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Smith or almost any permutations of my name, all the actual literal ones were already gone.
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And I'm just used to that.
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And you know, that's just the way life works if you're named David Smith.
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So for a while I was like, okay, well, I'll try other boys.
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What am I going to do?
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I need a name that has my name in it.
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I'm not one of those people who likes kind of these weird names that don't make sense
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in and of themselves.
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Like they're just kind of like random gamer tags or stuff like that.
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So it was a little complicated because I feel like it's good for people to identify me
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me based on my Twitter name, especially the way Twitter works, where often if someone
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mentions you in a post, other people are going to see that and read it.
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And if my name is like, you know, CurlyBear68, that's not really helpful.
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It's much better for it to be something related to David Smith.
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So I was like, "Okay, what can I try?"
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And the only thing that was available at the time that I could find was to put an article
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in front of it. So for a while I was "The David Smith" on Twitter, and that was fine.
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It worked out alright. You know, people... at that point I didn't have that many followers,
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and it worked out okay. But I always felt kind of funny because I was... it sounded
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a little bit pompous to be "The David Smith." There are millions of others of us running
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around, so, you know, why should I be "The David Smith?" And then I came across this
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thing where someone was saying Twitter allows prefixes that are non-alpha-numeric characters.
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And specifically, really the only one that you're allowed to do is an underscore.
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And so I was like, "Huh.
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Well, that works.
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I can just be underscore David Smith."
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At first, I was thinking about doing David underscore Smith, but I think that's almost
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harder to type than putting the underscore at the beginning.
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And it also kind of made me laugh, because if you're an Objective-C programmer, it's
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pretty common to put underscores in front of your private iVars and things like that.
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And so it seemed kind of funny to be, you know, underscore David Smith.
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And so anyway, that's the origin of the underscore, and it's just kind of, I guess that's where
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it came from.
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And so it was, you know, that's why I'm the underscore, and like I said, the underscore
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seems to be more famous than I am sometimes, but I'll take that.
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I don't mind being less famous than a symbol.
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All right, and so that's the first topic.
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Hopefully that's interesting.
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And then the second topic that I'm going to talk about today
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And so if you've been following, I
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don't know, Apple Tech News for a little while, or last week,
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you would have heard this thing where some Russian,
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as you call him a hacker or a security specialist,
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he probably would like to be referred to as,
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or something like that, security evangelist or who knows. But anyway, he was talking about
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how he found this way to spoof in-app purchasing. And the story itself is not that particularly
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interesting to me. I think people have been able to do that on jailbroken phones for quite
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a while. I think the significance in the way this was kind of cool was mostly just that
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he was able to do without jail breaking the phone by installing like some
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two or three fake SSL certificates and then redirecting your DNS to some scary
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Russia who'll get your iTunes username and password
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a little bit creepy
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to say the least
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anyway so he found this way to do it and that's sort of made some news and
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Apple's probably working on it and they'll patch it up and make sure that they can work
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and thing that i was on the development side that i thought was interesting is
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that a lot of people like oh well
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this hack only works if u for developers who don't
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authenticate uh...
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in a purchase receipts on their devices that you know there's a way that you can
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there are a purchase is legitimate by sending it to your server and you send
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apple server you do this crack a cryptographic dance
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and then it says though you know is that correct is that not correct
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and that's true
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and that that is a way that if you it's important to you to not have
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you know pirated in-app purchases that's a way to to check it
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but at the end of the day
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i mean for me piracy and fighting piracy in your application is just a losers
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errand like there is
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you're just going to end up driving yourself crazy
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mean you could do all kinds of things on the same side of trying to detect on the
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device and asking people to then buy your app
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and i think it's at the end of the date and didn't do that
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the percentage of your users
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who are here
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your application is likely fairly small
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uh... and is is specifically on the iphone on the out on androids believe
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it's a much different
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super very different story
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it's a pretty small percent your iphone because you have to jailbreak your phone
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and the percentage of jailbroken phones is fairly small
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uh... is best i understand it at least
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less than one percent
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uh... of total of total phones are jailbroken so
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it's not the kind of thing that you
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it's not this massive market where you know eighty percent or ninety percent of
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users can easily and trivially install
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stolen versions of your software
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so as a developer i look at that and i'm like
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that's just not worth my time
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because that the biggest problem that you always have when you start to try and
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fight piracy
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is that almost anything you do
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has the potential
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even if it's the small potential
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annoying legitimate customers
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that there's some way that if if you can see you have a check that says hey
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uh... authentic you know it's like i'm going to try and detective this is a
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jailbroken phone
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there's a chance
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that a they could've bought the apple legitimately in the store and are just
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running a jailbroken phone
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and so if you induce something
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say hey you looks like you may be jailbroken please don't steal my stuff
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they may not have actually stolen your stuff
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and calling them
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you know calling them a
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you know a thief or a cheat or whatever
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that's not good customer service
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say you do things where
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you know you're going to have a service that is trying to keep track of pirated
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you know do anything anything like that
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no matter what it's like the actual what you do is kind of completely irrelevant
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it's completely
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there's no way to avoid the possibility of it hurting a paid customer
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small possibility even if it is
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minute even if I'm awesome and I write amazing code that has no bugs and there's
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no way that this is ever going to come back to bite me
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that .001 percent chance that I'm going to annoy someone who gave me
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to somehow try and prevent the person who is likely never going to give
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from doing that from not giving me money
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that just doesn't seem like a good trade-off to me and so
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i just don't think think or care about piracy very much and i mean some of the
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applications i do and some of the things that i have have fairly substantial server
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costs associated with them you know my audio books app
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i host and distribute
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you know i don't even know what it is, I think it's terabytes of
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mp3 audio every
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every month. Through my audiobooks app, people can buy books
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and they download them off S3 and off a server.
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that just always kind of drives me nuts when
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it's like, "OK, fair enough. Somebody's probably...
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some amount of my S3 bill is from people who never didn't pay
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But I can't get too wrapped up around that. I can't think too much about that
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you know, I have
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the ninety and... whatever, like say the ninety five percent of those people pay me a lot of
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And I'm going to focus my attentions and my effort
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and all of my resources into making their experience better.
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And maybe the better way to think about it in some ways
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is to say, any minute, any hour that I spend trying
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to fight a pirate is a minute that I'm not
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spending on making my customer experience better.
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And the best thing that I can do to fight piracy
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is likely to make my apps so compelling and so interesting
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and so awesome that people are going to want to buy them.
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and they'll feel bad if they don't because they're--
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the apps are great and they want to support the people who make them.
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That's my goal.
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That's what I'm heading towards.
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And so it's just one of these things that it came up a bunch
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and people are talking about it and all the things you can do.
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But as a developer, I just don't really care about it.
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And I think I'd recommend that most people don't.
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I mean, fair enough, maybe some of you have businesses,
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build business models where that just won't work.
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but generally speaking
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for me that's
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just that's just the way i roll and that's just the way that it works that
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i do as little as i can to prevent piracy
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and just trust that apples doing good general best practice stuff to make it
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difficult for people to pirate and that's really all i need
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you know it reminds me of the old thing that steve jobs used to talk about where
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he would say that
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many many ways
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itunes was the best thing to fight napster
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in that, for most people, if you give them an opportunity to trivially, like in a really
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easy way, buy something, just like a simple one click at a low, reasonable price, the
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vast majority of people will take that.
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And people only seek out the illicit version of getting that if you're making that experience
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very difficult for them.
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And I think that's true, and that's true for me, and that's true for a lot of things, that
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I never even think about, like, "Oh, you know, it's like the first place I do, say I want
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to watch a show.
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Okay, I'll go to iTunes.
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Okay, I'll go to Amazon."
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And it's only after going to one of those two places that I would ever consider, like,
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Well, I really want to watch this.
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I mean, I really don't want to pirate it."
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But those thoughts, I mean, at this point in my life, I don't particularly pirate things.
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I mean, I just buy stuff.
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There was certainly a time in my youth when that was not the case, and that's certainly
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something I wish I hadn't done as much as I did.
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But at this point, I have the morals to say, "No, that was a wrong choice that I was making
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But that thought never even enters my mind anymore until I get annoyed with not being
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able to get it in a legitimate way.
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And that's so frustrating.
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So for me as a developer, what I want to do
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is I just want to make my software as easy to get
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as possible.
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And that's ultimately going to be best for me
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and best for my developers.
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So just don't care about the pirates.
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Let them go off and do what they want to do.
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And I'm sure that has some impact on my sales,
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but it's nothing that I lose sleep over.
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All right, that's it for today's show.
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As always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns,
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complaints, the best way to do is to hit me up on Twitter,
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where you can also follow me if you think my 140 character
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insights are interesting.
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I'm Andrew Score, David Smith, as I mentioned earlier.
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And if you want to follow this show on Twitter,
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it's devperspective, D-E-V, perspective.
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And all that feed does is post when new episodes are available.
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There's nothing else there, so it's a pretty light follow load.
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But otherwise, have a good week.
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Happy coding, and I will talk to you later.