Flash Lite 2 for Free
Looking through the shared links on a bookmarking service, I came across a site that saddened me. A site with lots of pirated Nokia Series 60 and UIQ Symbian software. I am not including the link here as I don’t really want to everyone going there. If you are from Adobe, contact me and I’ll give you the link!
The situation is much the same as it was with Microsoft in the late 90’s. At the time, I was creating lots of applications for the Pocket PC. Pocket PC warez was rampant and I saw many of my fellow developers give up or slow down Pocket PC development when they saw so much of their software being illegally distributed. Thanks to the Microsoft fraud team and a few determined Windows CE developers, at the time most of the warez disappeared from the public eye (probably underground to IRC).
So what can be done? The larger companies (like Adobe!) probably have enough weight to get the sites shut down. Smaller companies don’t have the necessary time to pursue these sites - they tend to move to a new domain when pushed and eventually close down when they have moved the site a few times - which takes a lot of time and effort.
What can the Symbian developer do? Currently, applications tend to tie themselves to one IMEI. Unfortunately, as the Adobe case shows, this can obviously be circumvented by a determined hacker. One advantage of the new Symbian Platform Security is that if applications are Symbian Signed, they cannot be tampered with - or more specifically, they can be tampered with but not put back into the original signed .SIS installation file. Putting the tampered application in a new .SIS file won’t work as the program will probably require capabilities enabled by the Symbian Signing.
With some developers currently unhappy with the extra time and cost associated with Symbian Signed, it may just turn out to be exactly what they need!