A source for this picture?

[runjake]

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.

[waterlooalex]

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

[valevk]

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?

[mikeash]

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.

[baq]

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.

[jader201]

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).

[pound]

plenty of captchas solved by presenting them to pron sites visitors

[flycaliguy]

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.

[MichaelGG]

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?

[dudus]

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

[mef]

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?

[thrownaway2424]

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

[smackfu]

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

[zmanian]

Amazing illustration of a Sybil attack

[pbhjpbhj]

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. [...]"

[sosuke]

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

[bhartzer]

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]

Twitter strips EXIF. Most big sites do.

[jscheel]

Fiverr's headquarters exposed.

[coralreef]

Gaming the system will always be apart of the game.

[CGamesPlay]

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_lishin]

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

[freditup]

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]

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.

[smackfu]

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

[shanemhansen]

The technical term is "growth hacking"

[wonjun]

lol

[joeyspn]

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

[Retr0spectrum]

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.

[LiweiZ]

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.

[bilalel]

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

[albedoa]

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.

[mFixman]

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

[terhechte]

Not for iOS

[downandout]

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

[rxaxm]

wouldn't they need iphones?

[GenerocUsername]

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.

[jtwebman]

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.

[joeyspn]

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

[jbigelow76]

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

[Cakez0r]

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

[benihana]

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.

[msoad]

How she operates that many phones?

[valevk]

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.

[sp332]

Just yell HEY SIRI :)