Tag: Programming

Programming

How to Win Any PC Game

Sohaib Athar

I have just discovered a quick way to beat any game that involves virtual currency – thanks to a request to me by a certain “leetkiss” on a freelancing website. I am very impressed by leetkiss’ understanding of reusable software patterns and C++ Interop and the clean code that he writes. He has written most of the software and is only missing one small piece now – one that he wants to outsource.

Even though I am too busy to take up his project, I am thinking of buying the program from him, once he gets it developed, so that I can be rich in the few MMORPGs that I play.

Here’s his complete request, please leave a comment if you can do this for him and I will get you in touch:

Hey

I want a program made, that can do the following:

The program will be called “Game Cheater” and It will make a troublesome PC GAME easier to win by helping you find the memory address where a desired quantity (like amount of money) is located so ou can change that quantity.

The program will find a hex address based on the input parameters you set and edit these addresses to my desired quantity.

Example (changing the money variable in a GAME from $50 to $999999999):

Call changeMemory(search_string, replace_String)

Call changeMemory(“$50”, “$999999999”)

It needs to be a .DLL file ( C++ )

I need to be able to use the DLL in my VB6 program. Here is ALL of the source code from my VB6:

Private Sub Command1_Click()
search_string = “$50”
replace_string = “$9999999”
changeMemory(search_string, replace_String)
End Sub

Whirled – SecondLife in 2D

Sohaib Athar

Whirled – which is an interesting mix of casual games, social networking, online role-playing and user created content by Three Rings (the people behind Puzzle Pirates) went public beta a couple of days ago. It was in closed beta for more than one year (I got an invite through my Puzzle Pirates mates pretty early). Check it out – I will update this post later.

Desktop Tower Defense – An Inspiration to Young Entrepreneurs

ReallyVirtual

DTD turned one week old recently. I used to play a lot of Desktop Tower Defense (or DTD as it is more commonly known) when it was launched and went crazily viral, thanks to a bunch of popular blogs that covered it.

Paul and Dave, the two guys behind DTD, shared the figures (100,000$) that they have earned in the first year of this small but addictive game on their blog. They also shared the story of the creation of DTD. It is a must read for the young web entrepreneurs of Pakistan (and elsewhere). This one small flash game enabled them to quit their day jobs and start their own casual game firm by the name of Casual Collective. So go read it!

Startup Insiders Lahore Videos

Sohaib Athar

I went to the Vahzay office last week to meet Athar Osama (after 4 years) on his short visit to Lahore, and had my portable hard disk with me, so Imran Zia was nice enough to copy the full Starup Insiders videos for me – and this is how I ended up with the videos for SI3 (4GB – the one I attended) and SI6 (5GB – the one I missed) on my hard disk, waiting to be sliced and uploaded to youtube or GoogleVideo. I'll probably compress/clip/upload them during some free timeslot this weekend (I still need to find a decent software to do that – I'm a youtube uploading n00b – suggestions are welcome), so stay tuned and if you missed the sessions (which were very interesting) and I will upload the videos whenever I can.

Election Commission of Pakistan “Hacker Free” Website

ReallyVirtual2 Comments

flag(Sorry about the waving flag, couldn't resist the temptation). With nothing better to do, I just visited the Election Commission of Pakistan Election Results website (yes, that's the sequel (no pun intended) to the ecp.gov.pk state-of-the-art live voter database website that I wrote about here , the one that can't find me, thereby making me a dead voter)… and was refreshing the results page every couple of minutes, when I finally managed to come across the crash that my brother had mentioned a few minutes earlier. He had also mentioned that the site is extremely slow (he is sitting in Cambridge right now) but since our mehndi.com CEO promised us servers and bandwidth not found anywhere else on the planet, so I'm pretty sure it must be the UK ISPs that are too slow for the site.

Anyway, I digress… so here are the screenshots for your forehead slapping pleasure:

It seems that an Index was out of range… take a closer look… yep, the site is still running in debug mode, and the path to the files on the server are visible. ecp-dotnet-crash

And here's another screen-shot, a 'Parser Error' this time… Oops!

ecp-dotnet-crash2

The vsite in the url probably means they have multiple applications hosted on virtual servers. If you compare the Election Results website with this asp.net website, you will probably come to the conclusion that the talented developers (read interns @ 10,000 per month or less) weren't exactly familiar with either web design or the way ASP.NET membership/roles framework works, but were rescued by Google and were able to "borrow" and copy/paste from the example to save the day.

I wouldn't be too surprised if there are a half dozen SQL injection possibilities in there, or if the website has an /admin/ folder somewhere in the URL schema (as an 'admin' section is found in 90% of websites developed by our Pakistani programmers), or if there is some left-over code from the examples that will allow anyone to register and mess with the website.

10 years ago, one message on any Pakistani IRC channel would have been enough to take this website down, but at this point in time, I can only pray that the website stays online for the next couple of days so that the mehndi.com guys get their 10 hours of crash-free fame (I think they've already had their fortune delivered to them in Canada). I also hope that they find and fix the flaws before the site gets hit by hackers, and only because I don't want the rest of the world to have one more chance to laugh at us, we can do that job ourselves.