The Story of ElliotSec: Part 1
It will be a small story of one small project that I created: elliotsec.com.
From the beginning, I was thinking about creating several apps. In our time, it is not so big of a deal, and moreover, I have some experience in this. While I had a bit of time, I paid a lot of attention to an app made by my friend called Icook. I saw a lot of subscribers—people who really like food apps. I am not one of them, so it was strange for me.
But I was browsing the internet and found out that there are a lot of pirated copies of her app.
Wow. It hit me right then: her app was way more popular than I could have imagined. Just not in the way she wanted.
Of course, I knew a lot of websites where you can download any kind of cracked apps. I cannot say that you didn't know about it—maybe we even used some of these websites before. But I never thought of the problem from this point of view: What if it is time to protect applications from piracy, instead of trying to find cracked ones?
I did some investigation on the internet to find what ways we have to protect our applications. The main one is DMCA.
The thing is, from one side, it's definitely much simpler to make a cracked application and distribute it; you have much less that can stop you. But if you want a pirate hub to delete those copies:
- In 80% of cases, it will work. You can force them to do it using the power of DMCA, an American law.
- With other websites, it will not. Some have servers in "law-doesn't-care-about-you" regions, like Vietnam.
- The workaround: You still have an approach to getting results—you can delete them from search engines. It is a good way as well, and it works.
The main point is you can write a DMCA notice, and the website or search engine will delete your application. You can try it yourself; it really works!
So, what is the catch? Let me tell you—and this is the important part. Those websites just continue to upload new pirated copies.
- They delete the app because of a DMCA? Okay.
- The next day, they upload a new copy.
- You have to write a whole new DMCA report.
It’s an endless game of "whack-a-mole."And that is exactly why I decided to create a service to handle this situation.
To be continued...
