Mad Apple patent: Cloneware to convince trackers you don't like porn

Evil Clones?

What if somebody gets information on these data clones, and uses it to create evil clones. Y'know "oh look, its one of those basket weaving clones"

*hack*

"oh look, now its googling kiddy porn, mwah hah hah"

Seriously, I can see this happening.

Stupid and irresponsible beyond belief.

If you run a web site, you'll know that you've got data caps. Not only that, but some, including me, use page hits to determine areas of interest and beef up posting on those topics. You might even use hit fingerprints to determine what web technologies people are using and then design your site templates accordingly.

I had a few words to say to the UK library that wanted to archive the internet a while ago, along the lines of, I've got to pay for my bandwidth and if you start slurping all my content on a regular basis, you're going to cost me a small fortune and drive my statistics over a cliff. I'm not going to know who from what.

I feel very sorry for that basket weaving site. They're going to have a hard time sorting out the needle in the straw.

This is yet another corporation designing and doing things without thought to the innocent people they're affecting. If Apple do go forward with this and I start seeing shed loads of Safari hits on my sites then I'll be having a few words with them.

How is this different from running a TOR exit node?

With a TOR exit node you've got plausible deniability. Running cloneware software explicitly designed to clobber an investigation smacks of intent.

And after this is deployed, the entire internet grinds to a halt, swamped by clones arguing about basket weaving techniques, and the real people have to go back to telephones and paper mail.

Stop me if I'm wrong, but...

Granted, my degree is in graphic design, but i've used computers and networks extensively for over 25 years, and based on my own experience and my regular reading of The Reg, it looks to me as if Apple is basically trying to patent the Man In The Middle Attack.

So, stop me if I'm wrong, but... injecting code that hijacks a user's profile and personal info and uses it to create bogus profiles and make purchases in the user's name -- isn't that what most of your more insidious malware does?

This really creeps the hell out of me -- and I've been using Macs exclusively for over 25 years which, I guess, makes me a "fanboi" around here, but this is really nasty, creepy-assed shit... not to mention that I'm quite capable of polluting my own profile to monkeywrench trackers, thank you very much.

Mind you, as I said, I'm not an IT professional, so I could be wrong, but, still... patented MITM attack? Am I right... or, not...?