iOS Developers Criticized Apple

The new app of the digital rights group EFF was released only for Android smartphones, because its developers criticized the terms of Apple’s developer agreement. The Alerts app of the Electronic Frontier Foundation will show news on its campaigns and encourage users to take action by sharing it online or emailing politicians.

The EFF developers claimed they could not agree to the outrageous terms in Apple’s Developer Agreement and the company’s DRM requirements, as they are bad for developers and users alike.

For example, the EFF disagrees with Apple’s bar on app makers making public statements about the terms, its ban on reverse engineering and the fact that Apple must approve any releases and can remotely disable applications. What the EFF didn’t like most was the requirement to include digital rights management in its iPhone app. Apparently, most of developers just have to sign the agreement because the Apple App store is a huge market and can hardly be ignored.

At the moment, Apple has over 9 million registered developers for its Mac and iOS platforms and 1.3m apps available on iOS’ App Store. The iOS developers have earned over $20bn so far, with iOS users spending over $10bn on apps and in-app purchases in 2013 alone. But now Apple faces more public criticism of its policies, with the iOS developers pointing to “the rapid decline of Apple’s software”.

In the meantime, other developers went public over approval issues with features in their iOS applications, sparking wider discussion about how the tech giant enforces its App Store policies. Apparently, the EFF continues this debate, being keen to pinpoint the individual clauses that may infringe developers’ digital rights.

4/5 of “Dark Net” Traffic Is to Child Abuse Portals!!

According to a study of Tor “hidden services” portals, over 80% of the “dark net” online traffic comes from sites that offer child-abuse content. For over 6 months, the researchers have analyzed traffic to websites through Tor’s technology, which is normally used to hide their addresses from search engines.

According to the findings, while sites with pedophile content make up only 2% of the estimated 45,000 hidden services websites on the Internet, they account for 83% of visits without considering automated “botnet” traffic. The research focuses on online portals that used Tor’s technology to hide themselves, not on the online behavior of individual Internet users who use Tor, as they don’t spend 84% of their time visiting child-abuse services.

It turned out that less than 1/6 of hidden services websites have been online for all six months of the study, which shows a short average lifetime for such online services. In the meantime, drug-related websites like Silk Road and Agora made up almost a quarter of the hidden service websites but 5% of overall traffic. As for whistleblower websites like SecureDrop and Globaleaks, they made up 5% of websites but less than 0.1% of website visits.

In response, Tor questioned the accuracy of the findings of the study, pointing out that the results may include visits to pedophilia sites from law enforcement and anti-abuse groups, along with DDoS attacks from hackers. Tor also emphasized that hidden services websites only account for 2% of total traffic with Tor’s anonymizing technology. In other words, you should not confuse websites hiding themselves with individual users who use Tor to surf the Internet anonymously.

One should admit that there are important uses for hidden services – for example, when human rights activists use them to visit Facebook or to blog anonymously. Some also suggest that the habits of people searching for child-abuse content on the Internet may also be a factor.

So, the findings of this recent research bring up new questions for Tor about how it could try to shut down the abusive websites and track their owners. The researchers have pointed out that Tor might be able to block access to such illegal services, but it is unknown whether Tor operators would bother doing this.