Reverse Engineering OKCupid
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Reverse Engineering OKCupid
1–10 of 24 posts
Re: Reverse Engineering OKCupid
#2About two years ago, some clever techies used the OkCupid subreddit to "hack" the OkCupid frontend. If I remember correctly, they used Javascript to display the number of messages someone received per day and how many they replied to (among other things). Eventually OkCupid came across the info and started putting everything server-side.
Re: Reverse Engineering OKCupid
#3About two years ago, some clever techies used the OkCupid subreddit to "hack" the OkCupid frontend. If I remember correctly, they used Javascript to display the number of messages someone received per day and how many they replied to (among other things). Eventually OkCupid came across the info and started putting everything server-side.
What information were they getting from the subreddit? Just usernames or . . . ?
Re: Reverse Engineering OKCupid
#4[deleted]
Re: Reverse Engineering OKCupid
#5About two years ago, some clever techies used the OkCupid subreddit to "hack" the OkCupid frontend. If I remember correctly, they used Javascript to display the number of messages someone received per day and how many they replied to (among other things). Eventually OkCupid came across the info and started putting everything server-side.
What information were they getting from the subreddit? Just usernames or . . . ?
The stoplight indicator and a few other things were done via client side js with non obvious variables names. Once that Greasemonkey script came out it was quickly moved to the server side since there was no reason not to do it there. I believe it was just on the client side due to ease of development when it was being built.
Re: Reverse Engineering OKCupid
#6About two years ago, some clever techies used the OkCupid subreddit to "hack" the OkCupid frontend. If I remember correctly, they used Javascript to display the number of messages someone received per day and how many they replied to (among other things). Eventually OkCupid came across the info and started putting everything server-side.
What information were they getting from the subreddit? Just usernames or . . . ?
There's an OkCupid subreddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/okcupid) where people ask for advice and exchange funny stories about dates. When more data was stored on the frontend, people would make scripts so you could search for people based on attractiveness and other parameters. For example: http://www.reddit.com/r/OkCupid/comments/qi8iw/understanding...
Re: Reverse Engineering OKCupid
#7This method is well known and there are ways of making this more difficult. For example, servers add a hidden request cookie which is a random number embedded in the page that the user is coming from. This forces you to actually parse the page. Then they can move it to javascript making it even more difficult.
Re: Reverse Engineering OKCupid
#8This method is well known and there are ways of making this more difficult. For example, servers add a hidden request cookie which is a random number embedded in the page that the user is coming from. This forces you to actually parse the page. Then they can move it to javascript making it even more difficult.
I would just like to point out that not all sites do the following (and I'm unsure if OKC does), but watch out for tripwires as chacham15 said. Some sites that I've had the misfortune of "getting to know" use insignificant or blank inputs as a form of detecting unauthorized access.
One rule I follow is to: Retrieve, Analyse and Regurgitate Everything.
Re: Reverse Engineering OKCupid
#9In terms of the backend, OKC have their own webserver, OKWS[0]. It's been discussed on HN before[1].
It's a clever and IMNSHO insufficiently copied architecture with interesting performance and security characteristics.
[0] https://github.com/okws/okws [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2077484
Re: Reverse Engineering OKCupid
#10About two years ago, some clever techies used the OkCupid subreddit to "hack" the OkCupid frontend. If I remember correctly, they used Javascript to display the number of messages someone received per day and how many they replied to (among other things). Eventually OkCupid came across the info and started putting everything server-side.
What information were they getting from the subreddit? Just usernames or . . . ?
You could see how long ago the person recieved their last message, how many messages they were getting on average and also I think some scale thing which could extrapolate how frequently they wrote back to messages. It was a long time ago but incredibly interesting / invasive.