Seriously? The "Tap Zoo" thing?
FYI: the same apps are also available for... Android.
In the Android Market.
That "problem" you've reported boils down to illiteracy on the part of the parent. To quote the second offing line in the Apple App Store description:
"PLEASE NOTE: this game lets you purchase items within the game for real money. Please disable in-app-purchases on your device if you do not want this feature to be accessible."
This is following the typical "freemium" app model made popular by Facebook. You'll find many apps on that platform also offer this "feature".
This is hardly in the same league as *pirating* someone else's game and *injecting it with malicious code*, then *selling* your malware as if it were the original game, is it?
Yes, the malware does request SMS access permissions, but most users have long since been trained to just click through these. (Especially on Android, where the permissions system comes across like the old Windows Vista implementation of its "User Access Control" feature. You'd think Google would have learned from that, but clearly not.)
As for the point that the game does state that it could charge upwards of $4.50 for SMS messages, perhaps someone could point out exactly *where* this was stated. Was it at the bottom of a 5000-word EULA full of legalese and deliberate obfuscation, perhaps?
Users are not "stupid". Many will be ignorant—nobody can possibly know everything there is to know about every subject today—and that should be your *basic assumption* about your end users. Most people not only do not know how computers work, but they really could not care less. How many of you know how the railway tunnels your metro trains run through were built? How many of you know whether the trains use two-phase or three-phase electricity? No? And yet you'll happily use that technology without giving it a second thought.
Until the IT industry grows the fuck up and realises that its problems are its own damned fault, we will constantly repeat history.
Curation is not inherently wrong or evil. All museums are curated, as are all galleries, libraries, gated communities, apartment blocks with concierges, hotels, and more. Go ahead: try shoplifting in a shopping mall and see how far you get before the mall's own security services catch you. That's curation, that is. In real life. And nobody seems to mind.
The bazaar, so beloved of "Free Software" advocates, is also beloved of petty criminals, shysters, conmen and more. Now, I could spend my shopping hours being very carefully paranoid, wasting my time haggling over the price of goods and taking forever to get anything useful done. Personally, I'd rather not go through all that. I like convenience and curated shopping environments—be they real or virtual—suit me far better.
I fully appreciate that there are many who do enjoy that bazaar approach. I just don't happen to be one of them. And neither do Apple's customers.
The thing is: *I'm* not the one constantly shouting from the rooftops that every shopping mall and high street be turned into a bazaar. Zealots like you and others here, on the other hand, are. And it's getting fucking old.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
