Forem: Allen Joseph

EthIndia 2.0: My first Hackathon experience🙌

Allen Joseph — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 12:00:37 +0000

Discover my hacker experience during the 36 hours of the EthINDIA 2.0 Although this event was a month ago. I would like to share my experience and some details of this type of event.

Asia’s biggest Ethereum Hackathon

The MLR Convention Centre, JP Nagar, Bangalore(India’s ‘Silicon Valley’) hosted 100 teams from two to three people during a weekend to work 36 consecutive hours at EthIndia. The objective? Innovate ideas using Ethereum dApps. To get it, each team should overcome the challenge of thinking, developing and presenting a technological solution that would provide a good user experience using Ethereum to the Administration. The prizes of $11,000 in bounty prizes were awaiting winners.

With fellow developers I found through the official IRC Channel, we had the initiative to participate in the EthIndia 2019. I found it an interesting challenge and I accepted the hackathon. Participating in these kinds of events puts our skills to the test. In addition, the competition offered me a threefold motivation: to offer solutions to problems of citizenship, to develop and to implement them.

I teamed up with the following developers: Ushana Bandyopadhyay & Anoop Krishnan.

We only had two working days to devise the EthINDIA project and the instructions were very clear: 36 hours to define a technological solution related to Ethereum.

The stopwatch started. The first step of the team was to decide how we’re gonna present project. We bet for dApp against cyber-bullying. The reason? We were aware that this is a trendy topic and that gave us points. But, we also knew the technicalities in finishing this project.

One of the curiosities of the EthIndia that caught my attention was the existing competitiveness, which increased with the passage of the hours.
The night came. That point was the hardest part of the EthINDIA. Changing my usual schedule did not let me rest and this fact was a real psychological struggle against myself. Fortunately, coinciding with the sunrise, we managed to partially complete the project. I just had to prepare the presentation to complete the whole project.

After working for 36 hours it is hard to explain all your work in just 3–4 minutes. Without a doubt, a new challenge. After the 100 participating teams completed their presentations, I waited for deliberations …

Unfortunately, we were not the winners. Of course, I realised that the real competition had been against me: struggling against time, disorganisation and technological difficulties. And undoubtedly, I won this competition.

Without a doubt it is an unforgettable experience from all points of view. Something that I would recommend that everyone live it. Basically you put to the limit your resolutive capacity, analysis, solve problems, as well as your mind since with the passage of the hours the fatigue takes over, but the feeling of making a simple idea become a reality is the motor that will force us to continue.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

Thank you for reading and time!
Allen Joseph AJ,
Google Code-In Finalist
InCTF finalist
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allenjosephaj/
Github: https://github.com/AllenAJ
Website: https://allenaj.github.io/AllenAJ/

Bonus: Special Mentions😇

I would like to thank these people for making my first hackathon a wonderful experience.

Athul Cyriac Ajay- A fellow mallu i met at the event. He was so supportive and friendly to me at the hackathon. He was one of my fav person whom I met at the hackathon. To my amazement, he’s also a Github Campus expert :) .

Anoop Krishnan- Another mallu i met at the event. He was my teammate at the hackathon. He was working at a firm in the cyber field. He helped me to get started with linux🐧❤.

Ushana Bandyopadhyay- My third and final teammate who was a girl (How often do you see a girl who code?🙀). She was honestly one of the very few girls at the event. She gave me company at the event.

EXTRA:

I am planning to do swaaag giveaways at my instagram @allen.codes

Lets create our first HelloWorld dApp 🔥

Allen Joseph — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 11:54:32 +0000

Ethereum — a Decentralised Consensus Network

To most developers, learning to use a new platform, language, or framework will be a familiar task repeated dozens of times during their career. Altogether more novel is learning to develop for a completely different paradigm. The decentralised consensus network, the blockchain, and its most well known implementation ‘bitcoin’ are not well understood even amongst the tech community and the subtleties of how this technology is fundamentally different from what we have used before is certainly lost on most of the general public.

With that in mind before we proceed with building our first decentralised apps I will outline a few of the libraries that are required to proceed with this tutorial.

Node Package Manager(NPM)- The first dependency we need is Node Package Manager, or NPM, which comes with Node.js. You can see if you have node already installed by going to your terminal and typing.
$ node -v
Truffle- A world class development environment, testing framework and asset pipeline for blockchains using the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), aiming to make life as a developer easier.
$ npm install -g truffle
Ganache-CLI- Quickly fire up a personal Ethereum blockchain which you can use to run tests, execute commands, and inspect state while controlling how the chain operates.
$ npm install -g ganache-cli
Metamask- The next dependency is the Metamask extension for Google Chrome. In order to use the blockchain, we must connect to it (remember, I said the block chain is a network). We'll have to install a special browser extension in order to use the Ethereum block chain. That's where metamask comes in. We'll be able to connect to our local Ethereum blockchain with our personal account, and interact with our smart contract.
Ethereum-dApp-Basekit ( I created this base-kit myself :). Hopefully you guys would leave a 🌟 on Github.)- An Ethereum dApp starter-kit to speed dApp development using React.

LETS GET STARTED!!!

Lets start by cloning the Ethereum dApp Base-kit into a folder named HelloWorld.
$ git clone https://github.com/AllenAJ/Ethereum-dApp-Basekit project HelloWorld

🎉 Awesome! You've just set up your project instantly:

You can go ahead and install your dependencies like this:
$ npm install

Now that we've seen the project structure, let's begin writing our smart contract by creating a new file in the contracts directory:
$ touch src/contracts/Helloworld.sol

Inside this file, let's begin writing our smart contract Solidity programming language:
pragma solidity ^0.5.0; contract Helloworld { }

First, we start by declaring the version of the Solidity programming language that we want to use. Next, we declare our smart contract Helloworld. We'll add all of the smart contract code inside of the curly braces. Let's do this:

pragma solidity ^0.5.0; contract Helloworld { string public name; }

This code creates a "state variable", whose value will be stored on the blockchain. We'll call the variable name because we'll use it to store the name for the smart contract (just for testing purposes). Since Solidity is a statically typed programming language, we must declare the string datatype before declaring the variable. Finally, we declare the state variable public so that we can read its value outside of the smart contract, which we will do momentarily.

Next, let's set the value of this variable like this:
pragma solidity ^0.5.0; contract Helloworld { string public name; constructor() public { name = "Helloworld"; } }

We assign the value of name inside the constructor function. This is a special function that gets called whenever the smart contract is created for the first time, i.e., deployed to the blockchain. Whenever it's deployed, it will set the value of name to the string we specified here.

Now let's compile the smart contract to make sure that everything worked:
$ sudo truffle compile

The output in your terminal will show you where the compiled smart contracts are located!
Next, let's deploy the mart contract to our Ganache personal blockhain. To do this, create a new migration file like this:
$ touch migrations/2_deploy_contracts.js

This file tells Truffle to to deploy our smart contract to the blockchain. It's kind of like a migration file for a traditional database if you're familiar with that. Also, note that the migration files are numbered so that Truffle knows which order to run them in.

Enter this code into your newly created migration:
const Helloworld = artifacts.require("Helloworld"); module.exports = function(deployer) { deployer.deploy(Helloworld); };

Now before we migrate, we need to run our local Ganache server like this:
$ ganache-cli -p 7545

Now migrate run the migrations like this:
$ truffle migrate

Now we can check our smart contract from the Truffle console. You can launch the Truffle console from the command line like this:
$ truffle console

Now we can get a deployed copy of the smart contract inside the console with JavaScript like this:
>helloworld = await Helloworld.deployed()

You obtain the address of the smart contract on the blockchain like this:
>helloworld.address

Next, let's read the name:
>name = await helloworld.name()

Then:
>name

Yay! 🎉 You've successfully set up your project and deployed a basic smart contract to the blockchain & interacted with it!

Loved the tutorial?

🌟my ETH Base-kit repo on Github > https://github.com/AllenAJ/Ethereum-dApp-Basekit

EA’s Deprecated GAMES LIST

Allen Joseph — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 11:42:55 +0000

Electronic Arts Inc. is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. It is the second-largest gaming company in the Americas and Europe by revenue and market capitalization after Activision Blizzard and ahead of Take-Two Interactive and Ubisoft as of March 2018.

EA’s Deprecated GAMES LIST

The Sims Social- was a Facebook addition to the Sims series of video games. It was announced during the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2011 press conference. As with the original Sims games, The Sims Social lets the user create their own customizable character. In this version, however, the player uses their character to interact with those of their Facebook friends. The characters can develop likes or dislikes for other Sims, creating relationships that can be publicized on the user’s Facebook page.

Wild Ones- Most of you have probably heard of Facebook,Myspaceand Google+ Well you might have also heard that Facebook and Myspace have multiplayer games. Wild ones was one of them. Wild Ones was a multiplayer turn based shooting game which was based on ‘Worms’. You will start the game with a dog and as you continue throughout the game you have the option to get a rabbit, panda, monkey, cat, armadillo, chameleon, bat, hamster and many other Pets. There were also the 10 maps to play on and a bunch of weapons to use.

Pet Society- was a social-network game developed by Playfish that could be played on Facebook. The game ranked as one of the most popular Facebook applications. Players could design their pets by choosing genders, names, colors and altering appearances.

How much did these game make?

Pet Society- The game was launched August 8, 2008 by Playfish and at its “peak had 50 million monthly players, 5 million daily players and made as much as $100,000 a day by selling in-game items.
The Sims Social-”peak had 64 million monthly players, 6.4 million daily players and made as much as $190,000 a day by selling in-game items..
The Sims Social-”peak had 30 million monthly players, 3 million daily players and made as much as $80,000 a day by selling in-game items..

THAT IS $370,000(2,62,81,359.00 Indian Rupee) a day!!!!!

EA shuts down “older” Facebook games

EA has announced its intention to shut down Facebook games The Sims Social, SimCity Social and Pet Society.

EA said it took the “difficult decision” to “retire” what it described as its “older” Facebook games after witnessing the number of players and amount of activity for each title decrease. “For people who have seen other recent shutdowns of social games, perhaps this is not surprising,” EA said in a statement.

These games, all made by the EA-owned social developer PlayFish, will go offline on 14th June. In the case of SimCity Social, it won’t make it to a year online — that game launched on 25th June 2012. The Sims Social released on 9th August 2011. Pet Society launched on 8th August 2008.

EA offered more detailed statements on each title — they’re all the same, but with the name of the game in question swapped in.
On The Sims Social, it said: “We had to make the difficult decision to close down The Sims Social so we can reallocate development resources to other titles that we hope you’ll have just as much fun playing. We hope you have gotten many hours of enjoyment out of the games and we thank you for everything you’ve added to the community.”

The Sims Social hit the headlines last year when EA accused The Ville, run by bitter social game rival Zynga, of ripping it off. The two companies eventually settled the dispute out of court.

Players of these games have reacted to the news in anger. Naomi Szwed, from Australia, wrote on Facebook of SimCity Social’s closure: “I only play ONE game on Facebook. and this is it! It is the ONLY GAME I PLAY. You really know how to make customers happy. I will boycott anything EA if you remove this. Sorry.”

Reacting to the closure of The Sims Social, “patty.switzer.1” wrote on the Playfish forum: “As of now I will not be playing Sims anymore. I would like to be reimbursed for the remaining 92 Sims Cash. My reasons for leaving now is I will not put anymore money, time or effort into playing a game that is ending.”

EA said it will continue to deliver popular titles for Facebook, and pointed to PopCap games Bejeweled Blitz, Solitaire Blitz and Plants vs. Zombies Adventures.

It vowed to make a special offer to introduce those who have played the games being taken offline to PopCap games. “You’re a valued fan and we want to make sure you get a smooth transition to PopCap,” EA said.

1-based vs 0-based array indexing

Allen Joseph — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 11:39:54 +0000

How many 0-based indexing languages do you know? C,C++,C#….. I’m sure you can name a lot of languages which offer 0-based indexing.
Now if I rephrase the question and ask the same, How many 1-based indexing languages do you know?. I’m sure that you can’t name a lot of them.

“ FORTRAN arrays are 1-primarily based in contrast to many other programming languages.. ”

There are relative merits between 0-based and 1-based indexing of arrays.

1-based indexing is actual indexing like in arithmetic.
0-based “indexing” isn’t indexing in any respect however pointer arithmetic.

1-based is intuitive and saves your intellectual ability.
0-based indexing is one in every of many mistakes of programming.

For any experienced developer, 0-based programming must not be an issue where as for a novice programmer 0-based indexing might be a big issue.

People have different opinion on which type of indexing is better.
For instance Dijkstra in his article “Why numbering need to start at 0“, argues zero ≤ i < N is a “nicer” variety than 1 ≤ i < N+1 and doesn’t actually care for 1 ≤ i ≤ N. This certainly doesn’t make an awful lot feel — there are not any aesthetic traits associated with conditional statements.
People’s Opinion?
Link

Conclusion

So you must be wondering which one is better?
Well, some people like 0-based indexing while others like 1-based indexing. There might not be a right answer to this question.
Both types of indexing are done to get the same outputs regardless of the type of indexing.

How I reverse engineered a $10M facebook canvas game

Allen Joseph — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 11:36:23 +0000

You might be wondering that I would have used a huge setup like the one given above to reverse engineer Facebooks best canvas game of 2013.
Well, no!.
My setup was more of like……

Why I did that:

I was a 15-year-old boy who was playing around with Adobe’s Flash software and well to be really honest I was bored.
Reverse Engineering the game allowed me to improve my understanding of client side connections and server-side connections.

About the game:

Stick Run is a free jump’n’run game that has been playable on the social network Facebook since August 2010 . The game was developed and published by the then 14-year-old German Marc-Emanuel Otto . [2] It reaches a total of 43 million users. [3] Furthermore, it has been available free of charge for the Android operating system since 2013. [4]Marc-Emanuel Otto was even noticed in the American press among the game developers there. The game regularly ranked among the top 10 games on facebook in various areas. As a result, TigMar GmbH was founded, which made it possible in 2013 for Nekki [5] to participate in Stick Run by porting the game software embedded in Facebook to Android and Apple smartphones in cooperation.

I have to be honest that it was a lot of fun :)

Finding the right track:

To reverse engineer any game the first thing we need to look for was the file but in the case of a flash game, what I needed was it’s source .swf file which would be embedded in any website with the flash plugin.
Finding the .swf file would be a piece of cake considering Google chromes element inspector with a lil bit of HTML knowledge.

The next step was to decompile the swf file but for that we need an external software. I used Sothink Swf Decompiler( my personal fav!) to decompile and view the entire code of the game.

In the below link you can find the code dumped.
https://pastr.io/view/1nrSZuI0Oci

After analysing the code I reached onto line 3349 with a public function ‘connectOAuth’.

In the above code, I came to realise that Stick Run stores its data onto a BIGDB database online known as “Player.IO” and every database over there has a private key (stick-run-mdvkubomx0eisctikvcha) to connect with it but…. there’s an obvious flaw with this system.

What if……

What if someone like me would connect to the database through my custom made flash file and send requests to the server?. There’s no real way to prevent this except to put all the main digital asset code in the server-side code.

Looking into the data:

After managing to get the private key from the above code, the first thing I did was importing the private key and making another flash file with some very quick and dirty API requests to the server to cross-check for any verification.

I made some item requests and some coins hack from the swf file. I hacked the coins to somewhere around 999999999 but they had an build-in ban system hence somehow they managed to ban me. xD.
But guess what?. I managed to unban myself with the same API requests.

Conclusions:

Yes, even the top notch games can be hacked. Security is obviously a myth.
Maybe if the developer is’nt lazy, he could try to fit the client-side code’s important asset handling in the server-side itself. :]

Forem: Allen Joseph

EthIndia 2.0: My first Hackathon experience🙌

Asia’s biggest Ethereum Hackathon

Bonus: Special Mentions😇

EXTRA:

Lets create our first HelloWorld dApp 🔥

Ethereum — a Decentralised Consensus Network

LETS GET STARTED!!!

Loved the tutorial?

EA’s Deprecated GAMES LIST

EA’s Deprecated GAMES LIST

How much did these game make?

EA shuts down “older” Facebook games

1-based vs 0-based array indexing

Conclusion

How I reverse engineered a $10M facebook canvas game

Why I did that:

About the game:

I have to be honest that it was a lot of fun :)

Finding the right track:

What if……

Looking into the data:

Conclusions:

Thank you for reading!