Snippet: Tweetbot Shames Pirates ☇

Nathan Ingraham reports for The Verge:

…According to Gizmodo UK, pirated copies of Tweetbot automatically insert an embarrassing admission into the app’s tweet compose field…

A quick search on Twitter shows a surprisingly high number of tweets with this default text, despite the fact that users could easily delete it and send normal tweets. It’s not clear exactly when this started, but it seems to have picked up over the last week judging by Twitter search. Many of the offending Twitter users appear to be non-English speakers (at least though who have left the offending tweet in their timeline), though a number of English-speaking users have left the tweet intact as well. As for why anyone would do that? Tapbots developer simply said “stupidity?” on Twitter in response to that question. While such a trick won’t do anything to stop app piracy, we’d imagine Tapbots gets a least a little satisfaction from outing pirates who use up the precious Twitter tokens that allow third-party apps to function.

I think this is a reasonable “reward” for people who are desperate enough to pirate a $3 app.