Aside from the community forums, Hackulous is known for its direct connections with Apptrakr, a huge web-based index of cracked apps and Installous, a clever piece of software which allows the installation of iOS software found via Apptrakr and elsewhere.

But as of yesterday, Hackulous is officially no more.

“We are very sad to announce that Hackulous is shutting down,” the team said in a statement.

“After many years, our community has become stagnant and our forums are a bit of a ghost town. It has become difficult to keep them online and well-moderated, despite the devotion of our staff. We’re incredibly thankful for the support we’ve had over the years and hope that new, greater communities blossom out of our absence.”

While the announcement was made on Hackulous, it didn’t mention the fate of either Apptrackr or Installous, the software that relies on Apptrackr to function.

Installous is installed on millions of Apple devices such as the iPhone and iPad and was the key way for people to transfer pirate apps to their phones and tablets. However, following the Hackulous announcement the app has been rendered completely non-functional, apparently disabled by the Hackulous team that controlled it.

TorrentFreak tried to contact Dissident, the admin of the projects, for an official statement. He has spoken with us on numerous occasions in the past (and has even guest-blogged here) but the emails bounced. It appears that for whatever reason he’s preferring to keep a low profile at the moment.

We did manage to speak to two other people familiar with the sites’ operations and they told us they were surprised at the decision due to a number of factors.

The sites were apparently healthy and still had plenty of users. Indeed, the shutdown statement appears to carry a contradiction – “ghost town” forums are by their very nature not particularly difficult to keep “well-moderated” since nobody uses them. Nevertheless, this is the cited reason for the shutdown.

Also, Installous was used by millions and served up ads each and every time someone carried out a key app-related action within the software. Regardless of whether the Hackulous forums were doing well or not, Hackulous was still installed on millions of machines leading to (presumably) some half-decent advertising revenue to fund the project and more. It’s difficult to see why that would be terminated due to a quiet forum.

The other issue is that Dissident has always gone out of his way to say how passionately he feels about the “try before you buy” aspect of Installous and how important it is to give people a chance to taste an app before committing to a purchase. Trials are certainly more readily available officially than they were before Installous began so it’s possible that Dissident thought the mission was over.

The final piece of the puzzle could come on the back of rumors that a jailbreak for iOS6 won’t be forthcoming. No jailbreak for future iOSs means that Installous and indeed the completely legal Cydia can no longer function on new machines. Did this play a part in the shutdown decision? We’ll need to track down Dissident to find out more.

The closures of these Hackukous projects raise more questions than they answer but will still come as a shock to those who relied on Installous for their software fix. Time to start shelling out a few cents an app it seems – luckily that’s not going to break the bank.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Last September it was revealed, much to the delight of millions of iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users, that a version of VLC would now be available on Apple devices through the company’s App Store. Developed in the open source spirit and offered for free by mobile company Applidium, the app was given the blessing of VideoLAN. The reach of the mighty VLC had been extended and users far and wide rejoiced, but not for long.

One of the original developers of VLC, Rémi Denis-Courmont, angrily pointed out that incompatibilities exist between Apple’s DRM policies and the terms of the GNU General Public License under which VLC is offered. While the GNU license allows Apple to offer an iOS version of VLC, the layer of DRM it puts over the top of the application was a no-no.

“Today, a formal notification of copyright infringement was sent to Apple Inc. regarding distribution of the VLC media player for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch,” wrote Denis-Courmont on October 26th 2010, adding that the likely outcome would be that Apple would be forced to pull the free app from the App Store.

And yesterday, that’s exactly what happened.

In a post titled “There’s no app for that (anymore),” Denis-Courmont celebrates his victory.

“At last, Apple has removed VLC media player from its application store,” he wrote. “Thus the incompatibility between the GNU General Public License and the AppStore terms of use is resolved – the hard way. I am not going to pity the owners of iDevices, and not even the MobileVLC developers who doubtless wasted a lot of their time. This end should not have come to a surprise to anyone.”

While disclosing that i’m the fairly happy user of three iOS devices, i’m going to take the stance of the layman here and risk incurring the wrath of the hardcore supporters of the GNU public license. For the man in the street this decision sucks and this statement from Denis-Courmont is insensitive to say the least.

Look, I loathe Apple’s restrictive practices and DRM with a passion too but the vast majority of Apple users – the vast majority of regular computer users, period – couldn’t give a rat’s ass about this kind of dispute. And why should the layman care? DRM? Open source what? GNU? Isn’t that some kind of cattle?

The net result is that a perfectly good product, a free product wrapped in DRM that serves no practical use in this case, is no longer available to the masses. And understandably the man in the street won’t give a damn about the great philosophy of freedom behind the GNU license nor the evils of DRM. He will care only that VLC is not available any more and he can’t play his videos.

The great irony here is that it’s these kind of disputes, between the interests of one company and those of another, that causes all sorts of complex licensing issues in the music and movie industries. Those issues cause distribution problems and an inability to fulfil demand. The result is gaps in the market which cannot be served because of legal issues.

And what fills that void every time? Piracy.

It’s no surprise then that the free, open source VLC for iDevices is only easily available from the likes of Installous. What has the world come to?

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Hackulous are most well known for two products. The first is Apptrakr, a web-based index of cracked apps which has between 10 and 11 million unique users per month. The second, Installous, is a piece of software resident on 8 to 9 million jailbroken Apple devices which allows the installation of software found via Apptrakr and elsewhere.

Hackulous admin Dissident has just announced a number of new developments and innovations. The first related pair are upgrades to ‘Clutch’, a piece of software which allows the cracking of iOS software, and its GUI called Crackulous. The second is ‘Overdrive’, a piece of code which stops applications becoming self aware.

Apptrakr is also receiving various upgrades but an update included in the new Installous 4 package is of particular interest.

While Apptrakr has an absolutely huge database of cracked apps, by no means does it index all apps currently available. However, as millions of Installous users are also buyers of apps from the App Store, most titles will already be installed on their collective devices. But how can they be shared with the world?

In the past, owners of App Store apps would have to crack the software using something like Clutch then patch, test, upload and submit it to Apptrakr in order to grow its database and enable others to download. Not surprisingly the learning curve dissuaded all but a tiny minority from even trying.

Described by Dissident as a kind of ‘reverse BitTorrent’, Mobile Hunt is a clever way of utilizing an existing network of millions of peers to provide a solution to the app supply bottleneck.

“Essentially what will happen is when you’re using Installous you’ll get a little pop up that says ‘Hey, you have an application that Apptrakr doesn’t. We will add the application to a queue in the background (if you say yes) and it will start uploading tiny pieces of it, kind of like a torrent, up to the cloud’,” Dissident explains.

So, unlike BitTorrent, where one starts with a single file that multiplies the more people jump on the torrent, with Mobile Hunt the start point is perhaps hundreds or thousands of copies of the same piece of software, and little tiny pieces of each upload from each person’s device to the cloud in order to make one final copy, which will then become available from Apptrakr. From there it will be available for millions to download.

The other announcement from Hackulous is also very significant. On January 6th, Apple will release the Mac App Store and before it’s even released, Hackulous have cracked its security.

By removing DRM from products available from the Mac App Store with a new product called ‘Kickback’, Hackulous will be able to offer the same kind of free download service for Mac as they do for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they will do so immediately.

“We don’t want to release kickback as soon as the [Mac App] Store gets released. I have a few reasons for that,” Dissident explains.

As mentioned earlier, Hackulous and its suite of services exists to provide a try-before-you-buy trial service and this was only needed when Apple allowed “tons of crap” software on the App Store.

“Most of the applications that go on the Mac App Store [in the first instance] will be decent, they’ll be pretty good. Apple isn’t going to put crap on the App Store as soon as it gets released. It’ll probably take months for the App Store to actually have a bunch of crappy applications and when we feel that it has a lot of crap in it, we’ll probably release Kickback,” says Dissident.

“So we’re not going to release Kickback until well after the store’s been established, well after developers have gotten their applications up. We don’t want to devalue applications and frustrate developers.”

So how long will it take for the Mac App Store to become polluted enough for Kickback to be released? Maybe February…..

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The timing of this announcement is perfect, as rumors persist that the iPhone 4/iOS 4.x jailbreak will be released today. As soon as it does, many hundreds of thousands of owners will rush to carry out the procedure which will allow them to run 3rd party software on their device completely legally.

UPDATE: Jailbreak has just been released and it is web-based – http://jailbreakme.com/

Of course, free pirate copies of material otherwise available from the App Store also become available, largely through the Installous app which is installed via Cydia, a piece of software included in the jailbreak package.

Installous is developed by the Hackulous community which is run by a guy called Dissident. TorrentFreak hands you over to him for the rest of this article.

Guest article from Dissident of Hackulo.us and apptrackr – undoubtedly the web’s largest resource for cracked iPhone Apps.

Firstly, I would like to thank TorrentFreak for giving me this opportunity to publish this article on their website. My name is Dissident, and I am an administrator of a website called Hackulous — an online community which has, for the last two years, been working to circumvent the DRM on Apple’s iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad products.

Apple has always been very stringent regarding what programs can be run on these devices. These products are distributed with a tightly locked down operating system and are forced to work only with Apple-approved software available on the iTunes App Store. Since the beginning, even before the advent of Apple’s portable iDevice product line, “jailbreaking” has been the attempt of talented reverse engineers to find ways to exploit the devices. The goal is to break out of the software jail imposed by the operating systems, so as to run any kind of software that users want on their devices.

Jailbreaking the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad is no different. Several millions of owners of Apple’s devices have used jailbreaking to push the boundaries of what is possible with their devices. Installer (now defunct), Cydia, Icy (also defunct), and Rock are well-known examples of distribution centers that jailbroken devices can access to obtain homebrew applications that really add a lot to the overall experience.

For example, Winterboard, the application that allows theming of the iDevice’s interface, is one of the most often downloaded items and is marked on every “must-have” list of homebrew applications. For iPhone users displeased with the subpar Messages app that came with the iPhone OS, there are at least two texting apps on Cydia, biteSMS and iRealSMS, that add features such as Drafts, Quick Reply, Quick Compose, and more. Before Apple introduced their backgrounding and folder features in iOS4, we already had Backgrounder and Categories. These are just a few examples of the freedom of customisation jailbreaking afforded us.

Eventually in 2008, Apple unveiled the App Store, a virtual marketplace for developers to sell their applications via an Apple-controlled channel. Since the beginning, one of the key missing features of this store has been a trial service, or even a refund policy. Considering that many competitor products have had these policies for years, some would expect them to be unquestionably employed by Apple, yet two years later in 2010 people are still being swindled by sub-quality applications.

The iPhone “cracked app scene” started from the idea of people being able to trial apps before sinking their money into them; an especially useful and welcome exercise considering that such a large number of apps on Apple’s App Store are pointless, underdeveloped, overpriced, and with deceptive descriptions to boot. In the two years that have passed, our community has enjoyed an explosion of activity resulting from the interest of many to trial iPhone apps. Many of our users appreciate the opportunity to be able to make a confident and informed decision when handing over their money for apps.

Understandably, the developers who paved the way for jailbreaking are not too eager to join our community. These are the forefathers of the iPhone jailbreaking scene, who have released tools such as Pwnage Tool, redsn0w, and Spirit, and they are collectively known as the iPhone Dev Team. The team members have shown disinterest in our community, citing that a considerable portion — perhaps a majority — of our users are pirates.

Various Dev Team members recently did an interview on TWiiPhone, and the consensus among them was that they detest anything remotely associated with piracy. They have stated that they believe piracy gives jailbreaking a bad name, and while I concede that point of view, I would like also to present three important details that demonstrate that Hackulous’ brand of activity is not causing as much damage as the Dev Team and everyone else may think.

1. Most of the pirates who use our services do so because they simply cannot afford to purchase the applications. One of the prominent members of the Dev Team, planetbeing, described the pirates who use our software as “predominantly in their early teens where money is scarce and time is abundant.”

Since these users have never had any intention or capability to purchase the applications whether or not cracked versions are available, developers of these apps are losing significantly less than what they believe they are to these people.

2. Another portion of our pirates are those who have the capability of purchasing iPhone apps, but not the desire. These pirates typically do not “need” any particular application for free, they just want whatever application that can provide a certain level of entertainment for them.

They are not so much making the choice between purchasing or pirating software A, but rather making the choice between pirating software A or B. So again, the profit lost attributed to this tribe of pirates has been overestimated; these pirates would not have forked over their money anyway, they would just move on.

3. Over three million devices are running our software, Installous, to download and install cracked iPhone apps. The people using these devices are Apple customers who are likely to purchase another device, purchase new Apple products, or refer their friends to Apple. As I have stated before, the people who use our services to trial iPhone applications actually help Apple more than they hurt it.

Why, you ask? If a majority of our three million users are pirates, the value in Apple’s devices is significantly higher: These millions of users, who would otherwise be incapable or unwilling to purchase apps, now have a rich source of entertainment that greatly enhances their experience with their devices.

Apple does not like piracy, but as long as piracy increases the value of jailbroken iPhones, they have no need to be passionate about stopping it. As music has shown Apple and Steve Jobs himself, DRM can always be defeated. Apple is in fact embracing piracy for what it can accomplish for their company.

4. Piracy also helps to expose an application to the masses, much like music piracy helps artists and bands get more publicity. Without cracked app sites like apptrackr, a lot of applications would be left languishing in the pits of the App Store among the rest of the 240,984 apps (at last count) available.

Only the top 100 free and paid apps and the top 10 free and paid apps in each of the 20 genres, summing up to 600 apps, get any considerable notice. A large number of apps only get to enjoy recognition from the people within the developers’ circle of influence. When they are placed on apptrackr, however, they are exposed to an extensive audience which make up millions of unique visitors a month.

Plenty of these visitors might have never discovered these apps if not for them being placed on apptrackr. Now that they have, developers stand to gain an arbitrary percentage of profit from those who choose to buy the app after trialing, rather than to not get any customers at all.

To sum up my points, the negative impact of piracy on the market has been overstated. Contrary to what people see on the surface, piracy is not truly as detrimental as developers claim. Even Apple is likely to be more concerned with unofficial unlocks than our DRM circumvention.

This article is not in any way an attempt to convince anyone, much less the Dev Team, to condone piracy, but more to demonstrate that the population has no need to feel that piracy is corrupting the concept of jailbreaking.

The community at Hackulous, for one, has never sought to blur the lines between jailbreaking and app trialing, and we do put in effort to educate our users about the difference. Our core community has always embraced the true spirit of jailbreaking, which is to free our devices from the grips of Apple’s closed platform, and while we parttake in circumventing Apple’s DRM, we have always disapproved of associating piracy with jailbreaking.

In addition, none of the Hackulous staff are pirates and our moderators are advised not to discuss nor encourage piracy. Appulous, Installous, and eventually apptrackr, were created purely for trialing purposes. I am aware that most people think we say this to save face or for plausible deniability, but it is the honest truth. We know that a large portion of our users do not use our services as intended; this is an unavoidable fact of life. There is nothing we can do about this except to shut down our services entirely, but to be frank, our legitimate users mean a lot more to us than the pirates who use our software for unintended purposes.

I would like everyone to understand and acknowledge that we would not be operating our websites and creating the tools if we were to believe that pirates are truly harming Apple or its developers. We have our conviction that they are not, and that is why we persevere.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Of course, just as was the case with the iPhone, a resourceful hacking community is standing by to tear the tablet apart too, forcing it to run their own software designed to do tricks that Apple never intended. The holy grail – running pirate software.

The original Installous application was created by a coder named Puy0. For use on jailbroken iPhones, the web-browsing, downloading and installing application was used by hundreds of thousands of iPhone users to obtain free applications.

After completely rewriting the original Installous code, Puy0 subtly renamed Installous to Install0us, left his home at the infamous Hackulo.us forum, and moved to his own forum at Install0us.com. This move caused a bit of a split in the community, with some people moving to join Puy0 at Install0us.

Although it may have appeared otherwise, in common with a web browser viewing a torrent index, Installous and Install0us only ever showed web pages which in turn provided just links to copyright works, but even this providing this functionality was enough to give Puy0 legal concerns.

Puy0 has now revealed that for some time he has been searching for a specialist copyright lawyer to find out what the legal position is with Install0us. After a three month search he finally found a good one and entered into a discussion – the outcome wasn’t good.

The conclusion is that if it came to court, it would be very difficult for Puy0 to defend his position and that of Install0us. With this in mind, the decision has been taken to discontinue the Install0us project. The forums will close along with the repositories used to access the software and everything will be deleted.

“The bad news is, however, Install0us 3 will not and cannot ever be released. It all must end here. This is extremely disappointing for all of us, considering the time and energy we have spent on it,” explains Puy0.

“Call me a coward, but as I said, hiding under covers is not a life for me. Moreover, these days in my country piracy is a hot subject among politicians… I do not want to be flamed in a trial for something that I do as a hobby, and I do not want to involve any people with me in this. I am sincerely sorry to the people who followed me thinking we were legit, my honest mistake,” he concludes.

Sites like that carry links to the downloadable apps will still be viewable through existing versions of Install0us, at least for now.

The longest-established and famous Appulous index, which runs on a single server, is maintained by an individual who hasn’t been active in the community in over 6 months due to an extremely busy personal life. This means that those who maintain the index have had no idea how long the project would continue for and have been living month to month.

iPhone app cracker most_uniQue told TorrentFreak that the solution was found with the creation of a new project. Launched just one week ago, Apptrackr.org has the same layout and features as Appulous, but operates on multiple servers with active admins. Apptrackr also acquired the database from Appulous, so it carries links to all the same apps as Appulous.

Of course, the community is super-resourceful and replacements for lost projects are never usually far away. TorrentFreak can exclusively reveal that the admins at Hackulous have confirmed that a replacement for Install0us is currently under development.

“Installr” will be released in the near future.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

This system hasn’t had much serious competition but all that changed recently when a new service/app appeared. Known as ‘Mega’, this application/system currently offers direct downloads of a staggering number of App Store apps, over 4000 at last count – a full list is available here.

However, while Installous operates on a donation basis and doesn’t host any copyright infringing content itself, Mega offers its services via paid subscription – $9.99 for 1 month, $23.99 for 3 months and $41.99 for 6 months – which at least in part probably reflects the large costs associated with Mega hosting the content themselves.

It’s also alleged that Mega ‘borrowed’ some code previously developed for Installous and this along with the ‘pay for warez’ issue seemed to really motivate the Installous crew, and they set about ruining this money maker.

“If you’re forced to spend money to use a service, you should be spending it on the actual apps you get, not making some greedy pirate rich,” said coder Kyek. And with this Kyek created a new application known as ‘Grabulous’. Once downloaded from the Hackulo.us repo on Cydia, this software allows iPhone users to instantly download any of the 4000+ apps from Mega’s servers – free of charge. Grabulous was a command line app, but a GUI is now available.

The stated aim of Grabulous is to give iPhone users the Mega service for free, or alternatively crash the Mega servers through being overloaded by non-paying users. “Both options are cool with us,” says Kyek.

TorrentFreak spoke with Murda, founder of iPhone hack site FSMdotCOM who explained he had no time for Mega. “Grabulous should be saluted and applauded by consumers AND devs. This is common sense, it’s not cracking , it’s not hacking. Paying for cracked apps is a crime against common sense.”

“To be honest I think Mega tried it and thought they could outsmart everyone. But unfortunately (for them) the iphone/touch community proves itself to be a fantastic one once again,” Murda told TorrentFreak. “Mega had a major ‘uppercut’ from Hackulous when they released Grabulous but everybody smelled the fish right away, and we are not shy to send a message out to the people, and warn them. That is why we are here.”

Of course, the release of Grabulous didn’t go unnoticed by the people over at Mega and this ignited a round of technical cat and mouse as Mega tried to block Grabulous, with at least some initial success. Kyek promised a new version of Grabulous to get around these measures but at this point in time it looks as if Mega has taken the hint that charging subscriptions for access to warez is unacceptable to some.

In a statement, Mega has advised that they will no longer require monthly subscriptions but will instead ask for donations while supporting this revenue stream with advertising. Due to this new system, users will be limited on the number of apps they can download each day, dependent on server load.

“They should have done this since the very beginning,” noted Murda.

The Appulo.us service itself has been down for a week after they outgrew their hardware – and their budget. On the first day of taking donations Appulo.us received $1700 but said they wouldn’t return until they had received enough money to rent 3 servers (up from 1) for 6 months. The service is back in operation today.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.