Ratings Scandal Kills More than 1000 iPhone Apps

Bogus reviews have landed Chinese iPhone app developer Molinker in deep trouble, resulting in all 1000-plus of its apps being removed and banned from the App Store. This is great news for consumers who are tired of downloading subpar apps based on inflated reviews, and bad news for companies looking to shill their products with internal misdeeds.

The discovery of the phony reviews was made by a frequent reader of iPhoneography, known only as SCW, who recognized a similar erratic and poorly-written tone to many 5-star reviews of Molinker apps. SCW wrote a (long) letter to Phil Schiller, senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, revealing the major fraud. According to the e-mail, SCW “looked at 44 of the reviewers who posted reviews for this Molinker Inc app ‘NightCam Pro’ & EVERY Review except 2 of the 44+ are ALL FAKE 5 [star] reviews.”

The phony reviews didn’t stop there. SCW posits that Molinker employees obtained and redeemed promo codes in order to access the US App Store and publish an “endless slew of fake postings.” (Ever an opportunist, SCW also wrote: “I think I deserve a [sic] investigations reward for unearthing this blatant attempt at misleading & stealing from the public.”)

Schiller leapt to action and removed the apps. “Yes, this developer’s apps have been removed from the App Store and their ratings no longer appear either,” Schiller wrote to SCW and iPhoneography.

Molinker claimed ignorance in a brief statement given to the appfreak blog. “We got [an] email from Apple yesterday [Sunday 6th] which told us our contract [has] changed to pending status. Actually, we do not know what’s wrong so far. We had contacted Apple for such sudden changes, hope we can get quick response and actions from Apple.”

I think it’s a safe assumption that Molinker’s apps aren’t the only ones with fake 5-star reviews. Hopefully given the size of Molinker’s mishap — the developer’s apps made up almost 1 percent of the entire App Store — Apple, and its customers, will become more diligent when it comes to exposing fraud.

Source: YahooNews

AP asks Facebook users to vote on 2009 top stories

NEW YORK – The Associated Press is inviting Facebook users to vote on the 10 top news stories of the year, marking the first time the public has been invited to weigh in since the news cooperative began its annual survey in 1936.

In the past, the AP’s 1,500 member newspapers, along with thousands of broadcast news organizations that use its services, have voted for the top stories of the year. The AP will continue to run that survey and will publish both top 10 lists.

The Facebook vote isn’t a scientific poll, but it illustrates news organizations’ increasing embrace of social networking Web sites to interact with their audiences.

The AP and other international news organizations also are using Facebook this month to run an online hub that invites readers to interact with journalists covering the climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen.

Voting for the top news stories ends Dec. 17. This year’s choices include the inauguration of President Barack Obama, the death of Michael Jackson and the state of the U.S. economy. Users can also submit suggestions for a top story.

Source: YahooNews

Google search results to include ‘real-time’ data

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Fresh information from blogs, news sites, Twitter and other popular hangouts will appear in Google’s search results more quickly as the company aims to give people a more comprehensive look at what’s happening on the Web.

The feature unveiled Monday represents Google Inc.’s most significant step yet in the field of “real-time” search — a catch phrase for the torrent of information constantly being shared on blogs and the personal pages of social-networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

As those destinations have turned into increasingly popular forums for swapping opinions, offering news tips and highlighting interesting stories, Google, Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. all have been scrambling to retool their search engines so they reel in and showcase real-time data more rapidly.

Google reached a deal in October to blend Twitter updates, or “tweets,” into its results, but hadn’t explained how its system would work until Monday.

Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, has included a section for tweets since late October. Yahoo began relying on tweets to point out hot news stories in its results last month.

Twitter’s own search engine doesn’t attempt to identify which tweets are the most relevant to each request; it simply provides a chronological list of the updates containing a specified word or phrase.

In Google’s version of real-time search, a section of its main results page will include a capsule that automatically scrolls relevant information within a few seconds after it pops up in the Web index.

Normally, a new search request was the only way to see the blog posts, status updates and other information that Google had collected since the previous query.

With the change, a person requesting information about President Obama, for instance, will see the usual set of static links, photos and video, as well as the capsule with pertinent tweets, blog posts and news stories.

The real-time data won’t show up right away for everyone because it will take Google’s computer centers a few days to make it work everywhere.

Google’s real-time information eventually will be expanded to include some of the chatter on Facebook and MySpace, the world’s two largest social networks.

Although Google announced its partnerships with the sites Monday, the feeds from Facebook and MySpace won’t start appearing in the real-time results until early next year, said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president for search products and user experience.

As with Google’s Twitter alliance, Mayer declined to say how much the company is paying Facebook and MySpace for better access to their users’ musings. The contributions from Facebook and MySpace will be limited to commentary that already can be read by anyone logged into the sites.

Microsoft and Yahoo also have worked out deals so their visitors can see some Facebook material.

Google is trying to provide better real-time results to maintain its huge lead in search as Microsoft and Yahoo prepare to team up in a partnership that still needs regulatory approval. Google processes about two-thirds of the search requests worldwide while Yahoo and Microsoft handle a combined 10 percent.

“People expect search engines to make all kinds of information available to them,” said Amit Singhal, a Google engineer who oversaw the development of the real-time tool.

Google relies on its dominance of search to drive the bulk of more than $21 billion in advertising sales annually.

Besides introducing real-time search, Google also showed off several other new tools in an auditorium down the block from its Mountain View headquarters.

The company added a voice recognition to process mobile search requests in Japanese on phones running its operating system, Android (Google already does this in English and in Mandarin Chinese). It also provided a preview of a test product, called “Google Goggles,” that will enable people to send a picture taken on a mobile phone and get search results about the photographed object.

Source: YahooNews

Student ordered to destroy downloaded music files

BOSTON – A graduate student who must pay four record labels a combined $675,000 in damages for downloading and sharing songs online has been ordered to destroy his illegal music files — but a judge declined to force him to stop promoting the activity that got him in trouble.

Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston University student from Providence, R.I., was ordered Monday to refrain from future copyright violations and to destroy copies of recordings he downloaded without authorization.

Record companies wanted U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner to go further. They claimed Tenenbaum has been encouraging people to visit a Swedish Web site where they can illegally download the songs he was sued for sharing.

Tenenbaum said he had nothing to do with the Web site, and Gertner said she would not attempt to silence Tenenbaum’s criticism of the recording industry and copyright laws.

Tenenbaum said he was pleased.

“She said, look, this isn’t your business, he can say whatever he wants about the issue, he has First Amendment rights,” Tenenbaum said.

Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America, said the group was satisfied that the judge required Tenenbaum “to destroy all illegal music files and refrain from further theft of our music.”

In July, a federal jury in Boston ordered Tenenbaum to pay $675,000 to four record labels for downloading and distributing 30 songs.

Tenenbaum’s attorney, Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson, said Monday that he plans to file a motion for a new trial by Jan. 4.

In a separate memorandum released Monday, Gertner described her reasons for rejecting Tenenbaum’s “fair use” defense before the case went to trial in July.

Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognizes that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose — such as education or scholarship — it may be considered “fair” and not infringing.

Gertner said Tenenbaum acknowledged that a purpose of his song-sharing was so that his friends could enjoy the music — “that is, the very use for which the artist or copyright holder is entitled to expect payment as a reward.”

Gertner said that although Tenenbaum’s case does not constitute fair use, she could envision a fair-use defense for someone who shared files only during a period before the law concerning file-sharing was clear and before legitimate download services were widely available. She urged Congress to consider changing copyright law. The judge wrote that “there is a deep potential for injustice in the Copyright Act as it is currently written.”

“There is something wrong with a law that routinely threatens teenagers and students with astronomical penalties for an activity whose implications they may not have fully understood,” Gertner added.

Duckworth said the industry disagrees with Gertner’s assessment.

“Judge Gertner’s hypothetical statements on fair use are not supported in the law, and courts have routinely rejected this theory since it would essentially strip copyright owners of the important right to control the use of their work,” Duckworth said. “Regardless, it wouldn’t apply to Mr. Tenenbaum, who admitted to illegally downloading music long after iTunes and other services emerged.”