BeeJive IM for iPhone, a popular instant messaging application, saw an update this week which added Facebook support to its corral of services. In the hours after the release, reports began to trickle in that something wasn’t quite right. For what seemed like a random group of people, the screen would suddenly read “PC LOAD LETTER” whenever the user tried to establish a connection to any IM service, then quickly switch to a Youtube clip from the movie Office Space.
What had happened? Had Beejive been hacked? Was it an easter egg gone awry? Turns out, it was completely intentional: it’s an anti-piracy measure.
This evening, we’ve received an official statement from Beejive on the matter :
We have recently implemented new anti-piracy measures in BeejiveIM for iPhone. We have tried to keep our approach fun with an error message and a video. But we hope our message is clear: please respect the work of developers.
A quick Google search for “Beejive” and “PC Load letter” turns up only a few dozen results, a number of which are people complaining that they’ve been banned unfairly. We have been unable to confirm any of these reports. Some are theorizing that Beejive is simply banning any jailbroken iPhone they detect. We’ve got (at least) one jailbroken iPhone floating around the office running a legitimate copy of Beejive, and it’s still fully functional. Other reports indicate that deleting the pirated app and purchasing a legitimate copy does not immediately fix the issue. This leads us to believe they are detecting if the user is running a modified version of the application (likely the info.plist file, which requires a specific line to be added during the application cracking process), adding any user flagged as using a modified copy of the application to a blacklist by way of their handset’s unique device ID. If this is the case, banned users may stay banned indefinitely.
Beejive nearly always makes references to the movie Office Space in their promotional iPhone screenshots, generally using character names as screen name placeholders. The “PC Load Letter” message continues this tradition – it’s the error message that the office printer displays up until it meets its end at the business end of a baseball bat.
Screenshot of the error:
Excellent! Good on them.
Good post!!
Excellent…… ? What are you smoking…
http://health.okguru.com
I didn’t link it in the story because of crazy NSFW language (consider that a warning), but here’s the Office Space clip that they forward people to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0hpMHCrSPY
This looks like people are walking into traps while trying to get show-off points by pirating stuff.
Does Beejive have the rights to use the Office Space clip?
“Does Beejive have the rights to use the Office Space clip?”
Now that is a very good question. Using a pirated clip perhaps?
Hmmmmm
They aren’t using the clip, just linking to it…
Not sure how I feel about this. If they are banning only the users with a modified or pirated copy of the app then that is fine. But if they are also targetting users with jailbroken phones who have spent 16 bucks in the app store I do not agree. Beejive is my most used app and I will be real upset if I see this message and get banned from using the app.
if you go to setting on your iphone
then to beejive scroll to the buttom
there is a blank space that has nothing in server
if you change the server from beejive then the app works like a charm
change the server from beejive to what???
thanks
hey, is this work? I have the same question, what do you change the serve from beejve to?
Thanks.
Beejive is only targeting it’s cracked application, people who purchased the app and use it on a jailbroken device are not being affected. If you purchased the app after having a cracked version installed, you will need to delete the cracked app and install the purchased app. Some users will have to do a restore to get the app to work, depending on their jailbreak configuration.
Well after Meebo comes with its native APP, nobody will ever use this Beejive IM.
Good for Beejive!
Dosn’t any one find it funny that beejive sends you to a copy-written movie clip on youtube to perpetuate thier office space joke. I mean there kinda committing infringement while trying to protect there own product. I guess in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king.
hahaha, Beejive developers are a bunch of fucking idiots, there alreay exist cracked copies of the app online that circumvents their stupid device ID blacklist, hahahaha.