Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

For those who weren't or haven't, it was a geofenced, anonymous message board app targeted to college students that became fairly popular over the first two years of its existence before gradually fading into obscurity and finally being shut down in 2017 (but as of 2021 was rebooted with pseudonymous accounts, IIRC). Users could see any messages within a certain radius (0.5 miles or so, I think) and messages could be upvoted and downvoted, and were sorted by their vote score. Messages with a score of -5 disappeared forever, and I think also eventually aged out.

Being a chaotic sophomore with some Android experience, I decided it would be fun to decompile the app and see how it worked. I discovered that each device was assigned an ID based on a timestamp, IMEI, and a few other pieces of information that could be easily spoofed, by calling a fixed HTTP endpoint to generate as many new IDs as I liked.

I generated ~500 or so IDs using some Java code, hardcoded them into a .class file, and added some hooks to intercept existing calls to set up the Android UI and add my own event listeners. From there I added a button to the app's menu bar with a radiation hazard icon that would use the generated IDs to nuke every message in range of the user, downvoting them all to -5 and causing them all to disappear instantly. I also added the ability to long-press the upvote and downvote buttons, which would bring up a dialog with a slider allowing the user to upvote or downvote any post up to 500 times, sending it to the top of the list (or downvoting it to oblivion). Finally, I rebuilt the app with my added .class file patch.

Needless to say, this was a source of great fun and mischief for my friends and I. The most entertaining event was attending a hackathon at our (much larger) rival university's campus, where we nuked every local post a few times a day for 72 hours and voted our own posts up 500 times.

It was fun to mess with for a few months or so. We never distributed the patched app, for obvious reasons, and we never used it for anything truly malicious beyond being a mild local nuisance denial-of-service.

Two things I did that were very fun:

1. School blocked a lot of popular flash game websites. My friends and I downloaded a bunch of flash games and threw together a website that we hosted on our chromebooks using '200 OK - Webserver for Chrome' or something. It was just a bunch of janky HTML and CSS, but we got it working. The school didn't block it because it was on the local network. We handed out slips of paper to our friends with the local IP address of my laptop. At one point someone made a Google Site with a link to the local address. It was a hack, but playing RUN 2 on your chromebook during social studies in 5th grade... man, those were the days.

2. Around that time one of my friends stumbled across crouton, a way to run Linux on a chromebook in parallel with ChromeOS. After a lot of trial and error (didn't know what bash was at the time), we were able to get Ubuntu installed. I remember downloading Blender and trying to do a fluid sim, which was super slow. I was able to render the first 20 frames of a domino and fluid animation using Cycles, which frames I still have sitting on my hard-drive somewhere to this day.

Some of my first hacks, older me is surprised how much younger me was able to get done given how much younger me didn't know.