A source for this picture?

https://twitter.com/simonpang/status/562095677975441408/photo/1

by lfpa2 • 11 years ago

175 82 11 years ago

twitter.com

bilalel• 11 years ago

As replied the OP, it's an anonymous friend of him.

albedoa3• 11 years ago

He says in his very next tweet that he doesn't know if it's real:

https://twitter.com/simonpang/status/562201979603021824

There’s lot of pay-to-review service on the net but most ppl never seen how they work. Dunno if it’s real but still give us some insight.

robbyking• 11 years ago

There's a pretty big "if" in that sentence.

msoad• 11 years ago

How she operates that many phones?

valevk3• 11 years ago

I assume every phone is a different user, and she just goes around rating apps. I am not sure if you could automate that process, but then why would the phones be arrenged in such a way that one person can quickly click on every one of them, instead of a dark room.

markkanof• 11 years ago

Probably could automate it, maybe even by using a Mac and multiple instances of the iOS simulator, but that would require a lot of expensive development, so it's likelt much cheaper to buy a bunch of devices and hire super cheap labor.

sp332• 11 years ago

Just yell HEY SIRI :)

sosuke• 11 years ago

I'm impressed the first reply came from someone from WSJ looking to make an article I presume.

runjake• 11 years ago

Just to head off a lot of confusion stirring on the net about this: The person who posted the picture is claiming this woman is doing app ratings, not some outsourced App Store submitted app approval process.

waterlooalex2• 11 years ago

Ah interesting, as in: she's the person who rates your app if you "buy" some ratings?

giarc• 11 years ago

Yes. It's funny because everyone knows this has been going on forever, but I guess once they put a picture to it, everyone gets up in arms.

m3rc• 11 years ago

And I bet if you wanted she could rate your competitor's apps as well

mikeash• 11 years ago

Thanks, that does indeed help head off confusion. I was thinking age ratings, but those are self-reported, and any checking on Apple's end is just part of the overall review process.

valevk3• 11 years ago

But when you look closely, the screens show different images. Could it be that she is farming some in-game accounts to higher levels? Or dating?

arb99• 11 years ago

Or it could be ad click fraud

CGamesPlay• 11 years ago

Seems like this could be about app store ratings, but it seems more likely that this is about manual testing. Wake me up when there's some more (credible) information.

pavel_lishin2• 11 years ago

That seems like an awful lot of iPads for one person if she's just doing manual testing.

0xCMP• 11 years ago

Well, they might be testing many apps at once. A lot of bugs are the "well it was running a long time and it crashed" type that you'd outsource.

freditup• 11 years ago

All the devices look the same which would be strange for manual testing. However, agreed that to assume it's app store rating is a logical leap.

cwyers• 11 years ago

Well, the source of the image claims that it's about App Store ratings. It's not like we're making an intuitive leap here.

albedoa3• 11 years ago

The submitter is asking for an original source, not for the very source that he or she submitted. The person who tweeted it doesn't know any more than we do.

smackfu2• 11 years ago

If the paid-for app ratings don't do it like this, I would be surprised.

corobo• 11 years ago

Honestly I would. I figured it'd be reverse engineered and scripted rather than actual physical devices

coralreef• 11 years ago

Gaming the system will always be apart of the game.

flycaliguy2• 11 years ago

She could possibly make more money touring with a sound mixer and synthesizer apps on all those. I'd go see some live complex drone music, I'd help her set it up.

MichaelGG2• 11 years ago

It's quite probable if someone is manually entering ratings on hundreds of phones, that the owner of the phones is not the same person doing the labor.

Is there a reason that you think she, in particular, would make money using a synth app on those phones, versus anyone else?

flycaliguy2• 11 years ago

If she doesn't own them she should consider asking her boss if she can open for Melt Banana sometime.

What would happen if you used each phone to call another phone on the rack and then put them all on speaker phone? The feedback would be fascinating.

What if you created a FaceTime array in which each phone connected to an audience member's phone? You could then place tone emitters throughout the venue and the physical placement of each participant would shape a chord assembled on stage.

So much room for creativity beyond the creative grey market businessman's greed. That was the point of my post.

LiweiZ• 11 years ago

That's why I feel lucky that my very first attempt to make a food rating app for China market failed at product building stage almost 3 years ago.

dudus• 11 years ago

This looks something quite easy to detect and ignore if apple was serious about ratings

thrownaway2424• 11 years ago

There's no reason to believe they are serious about them. Search and ratings in the App Store are both awful.

smackfu2• 11 years ago

When people have a company based around abusing your systems, it's never "quite easy" to get around them.

mef2• 11 years ago

How would you detect it? Any detection algorithm that springs to mind seems easily defeatable. These devices are most likely all on individual pay-as-you-go cellular cards, each with their own iTunes account. Each review is probably either only a star rating, or for text-based reviews a randomly generated unique paragraph.

You could detect similar texts but that's just an arms race against new corpora being added to their generator.

Maybe detect the same app getting a lot of similar ratings in a period of time? But then the farm could just randomize the input list of apps among the farmers and stretch out the time period to make it look like more natural traffic.

Thoughts?

lelandbatey• 11 years ago

I think that those kinds of things are necessary to fight spam. Gmail isn't great at detecting spam because there's some invincible algorithm invented 10 years ago that catches everything and hasn't changed. To block spam, Gmail is always adapting it's spam filtering bases on behavior of spammers.

I believe one would probably have to do the same thing to moderate app store rating.

mikeryan• 11 years ago

multiple high ratings for the same app coming in over a short period of time via the same external IP or GPS location?

DesaiAshu• 11 years ago

Reviews are tied to app store accounts, which are tied to credit cards. Reviews also reset with each version of the app. You could detect the same accounts being used to review each version of the app, discount ratings from newly created accounts, discount ratings from accounts with reused credit cards, etc. It seems like an easier way to game the system would be to pay anyone with an iPhone $5 to download and rate your app.

zmanian• 11 years ago

Amazing illustration of a Sybil attack

pbhjpbhj• 11 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack - didn't know that one: "The Sybil attack in computer security is an attack wherein a reputation system is subverted by forging identities in peer-to-peer networks. It is named after the subject of the book Sybil, a case study of a woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. [...]"

baq• 11 years ago

I'm surprised the crowd here is surprised... you can also hire Chinese to solve catchpas, etc. and it's on the cheap side of things.

pound• 11 years ago

plenty of captchas solved by presenting them to pron sites visitors

jader201• 11 years ago

I definitely wasn't surprised, as I've known this principle has been going on for some time. But I, for some reason, thought this could be done somehow with a single device, or something. I never really knew how it happened, just knew that it happened.

So this picture answered that question for me (though I'm sure this isn't the only way it can or is being executed).

downandout• 11 years ago

Wouldn't it be easier to just use Mechanical Turk for this?

rxaxm• 11 years ago

wouldn't they need iphones?

jscheel• 11 years ago

Fiverr's headquarters exposed.

bhartzer• 11 years ago

It doesn't look like there is any EXIF data in the image, perhaps because it's been opened and saved so many times. If we had the original image, that might shed some light as to where/when it was taken.

nostromo• 11 years ago

Twitter strips EXIF. Most big sites do.

kefka• 11 years ago

Tineye also shows no hits on that image.

I was half-hoping that this image was somewhere...

ljk• 11 years ago

why do they strip the EXIF?

mFixman• 11 years ago

Can't you do this more efficiently opening several instances of an emulator on a powerful computer?

terhechte• 11 years ago

Not for iOS

0942v8653• 11 years ago

You wouldn't need iOS, you could do it perfectly fine in iTunes on Windows or OS X.

woebtz• 11 years ago

1) Setup VM with OSX, 2) Sign-in iTunes account created with a gift card, 3) Download/purchase app in iTunes (OSX), 4) Rate app in iTunes (OSX).

Step 3 might require a physical device, but 1, 2, and 4 do not.

GenerocUsername• 11 years ago

And everybody shits on google for trying to tie personalization to everything.

Do you want to sort your apps by the the rank and reviews of chinese laborors? Or do you want it to prioritize ratings by people you actually know?

Personalization is really the only way to nuke the arms race that is fraud/spam detection and crowd-sourced data.

There is no perfect answer. Just more abstract games to play.

Cakez0r• 11 years ago

Would I like more privacy... or more accurate app reviews... Hmmmm...

jtwebman2• 11 years ago

Na they would just create 1000's of personalities. Maybe by IP Address and time with personalities would work or even better stop ranking by it at all.

I would say having a group of trusted reviewers would be the best way to handle that. Nothing is a good substitute for trusted content curators.

hahainternet• 11 years ago

I would say having a group of trusted reviewers would be the best way to handle that. Nothing is a good substitute for trusted content curators.

The point they are making is that with Google, your friends app reviews matter more than random peoples.

benihana• 11 years ago

That's a false dichotomy. The choice is not between tie your identity to everything or Chinese rating farms (nice work invoking the scary Chinese other as some specter that is ruining our app processes by the way - remember when the Japanese were ruining everything in the 80s?). There is enormous room for improvement in app rating procedures and process. Saying the only choice we have is what you consider the lesser or two evils based on the current state of the current system is almost laughably short sighted.

jbigelow76• 11 years ago

I'll gladly take privacy over useless albeit "authentic" app store rankings.

joeyspn2• 11 years ago

I'm sorry to break it to you... http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2014/02/03/facebook-estimates...

Retr0spectrum• 11 years ago

I wonder if it is possible to reverse-engineer the whole iTunes connection and review process, and send fake reviews automatically from a server, or even from a botnet.

joeyspn2• 11 years ago

In that pic there are roughly 18*6=108 devices per panel. On the other side of the girl it seem there's another panel which could have another ~108 devices. That's 216 good reviews/votes coming from a single asian lady... notbad.jpg

shanemhansen• 11 years ago

The technical term is "growth hacking"

wonjun• 11 years ago

lol

A source for this picture?

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