I'd be willing to bet that at least 80% of pirates are coming from the US, UK. I think it would be interesting if a developer tracking piracy was able to more accurately determine the amount of pirates coming from undeveloped iTunes nations.
Ground Effect has already been pirated & the thing that concerns me most is that one of the pirates seems to be a member of TA who has recently posted on the thread! (The ID/usernames match). I think it's a shame as I would now have to think twice about trusting the site as a source of beta testers...
I think if developers discover with certainty that any TA members have illegally downloaded their app (or leaked a beta test), they should be exposed as such. Even a simple, "Don't trust these members" thread provided with evidence. A hundred problems with that though, which I imagine mean it would never happen, unfortunately.
I also think the same way, if you can prove without any doubt that this is the case you should warn other developer like us. And I would also report that person to the TA staff so that the person get his account banned. As I am sure TA wouldn't want to become a place where pirates come/stay.
It's not something we can be 100% sure of but the "cracker's" name on the pirate version is exactly the same as a junior TA member who happened to post one of the first few messages on the "Ground Effect is out" thread. "Cracker" has the quotes because all these people have to do is buy it first, run their little pirate tool, upload it to the obvious place and get a little bit of extra rep in their weird community of app collecting non game players who somehow imagine themselves to be freedom fighters... Pam mailed the site that was actualy hosting the file and they immediately pulled it but of course it popped up elsewhere almost immediately.
This is quite sad to hear , but I think those "cracker" just found the easy way to get the apps from us and release it out there. Become a beta tester, get the apps for free and then publish it... I think the best for beta testing is to let in people you know and trust.
I was quite free about recruiting beta testers, I just looked up the last few posts from each applicant, rejected a few for being too new/weird and let the rest in. I had no problems at all, they were great. I was a little worried that the ad-hoc might get out but after a quick search at the time, I found nobody complaining of a beta release hitting the pirate sites, do they ever get cracked?, presumabaly cracking an ad-hoc is a different process to cracking a released game. The guy I'm talking about seems to be making half hearted attempts at seeming like a normal, enthusiastic TA member, he tries to start new threads about games that already have them. He's already been accused of doing a lot of naughty stuff on another site.
