Windows Phone 7 Marketplace Hack Demonstrated

broggyr writes "Seems it didn't take long to hack the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. Quoting WPCentral: 'For developers, the weakness in Microsoft's DRM for Windows Phone 7 applications has been well known for quite some time, and there have been calls for Microsoft to address these concerns ... Since then, a "white hat" developer has provided WPCentral with a proof-of-concept program that can successfully pull any application from the Marketplace, remove the security and deploy to an unlocked Windows Phone with literally a push of a button. Alternatively, you could just save the cracked XAP file to your hard drive. Neither the app nor the methodology is public, and it will NOT be released ... It is important to note that this was all done within six hours by one developer.'"

It's OK

[sideslash]

I have two WP7 apps in the Marketplace, and I don't see this as a disaster, for several reasons: (1) I think it will help Windows Phones get a reputation as a homebrew-capable platform, which will help it build street cred; (2) Microsoft will certainly respond to each of these hacks with counter-measures (and actually the author of this very hack suggested a technique to frustrate it); (3) if people are ripping off my apps, that must mean they really want them -- and it's a fair assumption that most people would just pay a buck and not bother to go through the hassle to pirate them. (4) ... (5) Profit!!!