| >(a) How could you reliably track this if the user always keeps their Kindle on airplane mode? I wouldn't let users always in airplane mode participate in the program. Actually, I'm pretty sure they already can't, as they need to connect to get books from KU. >(b) How could you track this accurately if the user reads a few hundred pages in the subway, where there's no Internet service? By using this magic thing called computer storage, and syncing later... >(c) How could you distinguish that between someone who hopped around a book in that same time period? By observing how much time they spend in each page (with some allowances for different reading speeds, skipping, speed reading etc) and making sure they've legitimately read a good portion of the book. Even if they haven't actually read it, but only mimicked the above, this constraint just made the fraudsters' process much much slower to complete. >(d) If Kindles don't already track page views this way, how do you update the software on all Kindles to start tracking this way? You simply require users to update their software to continue participating in KU, and give them a deadline. Users need to connect to browse/get new books anyway. >When do you switch your billing script to track purchases like that? After the deadline, only people with updated KU software will be there, so no problem, you just switch it. In between, you could always switch it on an account basis (like you already have KU and non-KU account and other tiers) -- those who already updated get the new behavior, etc. >(e) If you're QAing a Kindle and you spot this loophole, how do you do all these fixes? How long are you willing to keep the software from shipping? How certain are you that your theoretical solution is better than what's already shipped? It's not like this things are rocket science. Companies do such QA an keep back BS products for a few months all the time. Even companies losing billions from doing so, like Apple. For Amazon, which barely breaks even and lots of offerings are loss leaders that's even easier. >Product development is hard, and it makes me angry when people handwave it as "gross incompetence" from a position of ignorance. Hard or not, there are always lots of cases of actual, bona fide, certified, 100% legit, "gross incompetence" too... |