Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Gaming Foursquare With 9 Lines of Perl

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-can-name-that-bar-in-8-lines dept.

caffeinemessiah writes "With the recent launch of Facebook Places, the rise to prominence of Foursquare and GoWalla, and articles in the New York Times about the increasing popularity of 'checking in' to locations using GPS-enabled mobile phones, a number of businesses are wondering how to reward frequent patrons. But exactly how susceptible are these 'location based services' to being abused? A researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago shows how easily Foursquare can be gamed in 9 Perl statements, and invites readers to submit more succinct versions of the code to game the system." An anonymous reader contributes a link to a similar article about spoofing Facebook Places to create an alibi.

9 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. no need for srand; by Danny+Rathjens · · Score: 4, Informative

    "If srand() is not called explicitly, it is called implicitly at the first use of the "rand" operator." -- perldoc -f rand

    So there is a wasted line right there. This whole thing is quite silly, though. perlgolf can be a lot more challenging and fun than making a simple http post. :)

    1. Re:no need for srand; by pyrrhonist · · Score: 2, Informative

      Perl itself calls srand() if it hasn't been called (regardless of what platform it's running on). You don't need to do it explicitly.

      --
      Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
  2. Re:Luckily by naz404 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Sure it is! It is a revolutionary app indispensable for burglars everywhere!

    --
    http://www.object404.com
  3. What is foursquare? - The missing description. by gnalle · · Score: 3, Informative

    Foursquare is a mobile application that makes cities easier to use and more interesting to explore. It is a friend-finder, a social city guide and a game that challenges users to experience new things, and rewards them for doing so. Foursquare lets users "check in" to a place when they're there, tell friends where they are and track the history of where they've been and who they've been there with. For more information on how foursquare works, see our searchable FAQ. http://foursquare.com/about

  4. Faking geolocation in Firefox by BerkeleyDude · · Score: 3, Informative

    Firefox allows you to fake your geolocation: http://pugio.net/2009/07/fake-your-geolocation-in-firef.html

    1. Re:Faking geolocation in Firefox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Apparently I was the first person on Facebook to check in at the NSA headquarters.

  5. 9 lines of perl? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    You can do that with 1 line of shell + wget/curl

  6. Re:So wait... by francium+de+neobie · · Score: 3, Informative

    Well, unfortunately, that plain text thing isn't limited to the hack. I intercepted the traffic coming from their iPhone app and it sends your passwords in plain text too.

  7. to make it portable use \015\012 instead of \r\n by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    cause \r\n isn't \015\012 on every platform