If you weren’t one of the 1 million Samsung smartphone owners who were treated to a free copy of Jay-Z’s new album last week, you could choose one of two options–wait for the thing to pop up on the Pirate Bay and torrent it, or, if you have an Android, get a pirated version of the app itself. You weren’t going to wait until tomorrow to get it legitimately, were you?
Some of those who chose the latter option were treated to an eyebrow-raising surprise on Thursday, July 4, the day they were supposed to get their album and a day we Americans traditionally celebrate how awesome we are. A liberty-minded hacker created an app that looked and acted exactly like Jay-Z’s, but secretly collected data every time a phone was restarted, then, on the 4th, installed the above PRISM-nodding remix of Shepard Fairey’s iconic “Hope” poster–created by our friends at Nerdcore–as the phone’s background.
No word on whether the malware actually did anything malicious with all that data it was collecting, or if it was just a helpful reminder of the kind of thing the NSA does without your consent every day.
