Gaming Foursquare With 9 Lines of Perl

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.

Comments

no need for srand;

[Danny Rathjens]

"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. :)

Re:Luckily

[naz404]

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