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Refresh Cannon Bot

Jordan Eldredge — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:13:56 +0000

The awesome nerd over at Geoff’s Boring Programming Stuff gave me the biggest compliment a programmer could recieve. He wrote a program to use my program! As he points out in his post, it seems pretty clear that he is not the only one. If there is anything more rewarding than that, I can’t think what it would be. Thanks Geoff.

Edit: (May 18th, 2009)

Apparently my brother’s room mate took at shot a writting a bot of his own. You can see his progress here and his wins here.

Refresh Cannon Returns

Jordan Eldredge — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:03:01 +0000

My simple Refresh Cannon game got picked up by several high traffic websites. Unfortunately the large volume of traffic brought my simple server to it’s knees, so I had to take the link to the image down. Now that the bulk of the traffic seems to have passed, I am reposting the link. You can find it at the original post.

Refresh Cannon

Jordan Eldredge — Tue, 05 May 2009 16:35:06 +0000

EDIT: Due to an excess of traffic, I have had to take Refresh Cannon off of this page. Please try again later. I am so sorry folks. Feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed. I will post it again when things cool down.

And… were back.

Inspired by the popularity of Refresh Hero, I am continuing in my exploration of the limits of avatar images. Of course the main challenge is developing ways for the user to have meaningful interaction with only their refresh button. The previous game used the element of time in binary fashion: either you got it right, or not. This new game uses time to allow you to adjust two different variables.

Avatar Cannon is the basic trajectory game of angle and velocity. The amount of time you wait before refreshing allows you to adjust these variable and attempt to hit the target. Each time you hit the target a new terrain is generated. The avatar also displays your standing against all other users. A full live high score list is also available.

Finally, if you would prefer to have your score listed next to your nick name, instead of your IP address, you can register here.

Refresh Hero Avatar Game

Jordan Eldredge — Fri, 01 May 2009 06:57:22 +0000

For a while now I have been interested in trying to create games that can be played in avatar images. People generally think of images as either static or animated, and I enjoy opening peoples eyes to the fact that images can be dynamically generated based on your interactions with it.

Refresh Hero is a play on Guitar Hero. You are asked to refresh the image after a specific number of seconds. The more accurate your timing, the more points you collect. If you miss the time mark wildly, you lose all your point. However, if you need to take a break, gaps longer than 20 seconds between refreshes will be interpreted as pausing the game. Hitting more than one in a row builds your chain, and you can collect chain bonuses for large chains.

To add to the fun, a high score leader-board is displayed at the bottom of the image so you can see your competition. If you want your name to be displayed on the leader-board instead of your ip address, you can simply enter your name (or nick) at the registration page.

So go ahead, refresh the page and clime the high score list!

Edit: I have added a top 50 high score list.

Play the card game “War” in my avatar

Jordan Eldredge — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 03:49:45 +0000

Since my previous avatar DDOSed my router, today I wrote a less popular avatar game. The only game I could think of that has no need for actual user input was the card game war. So I implemented it in my avatar. You can play too, by simply refreshing this image:

Features:

Proper handeling of running out of cards during a “war”
War cards are show (with appropriate cards face up or down)
Independent games for each ip address playing
Deck state stored in database between refreshes
Special WIN/LOSE screens

How I DDOSed myself with an avatar

Jordan Eldredge — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 02:21:48 +0000

Building on my previous avatar hack, I set out to design an avatar that was also an interactive game. The game I eventually settled on was one where you compete with the other users to see who can load the avatar the most times. The image you are served shows your ranking as compared to the other users. It looked like this:

And true to its word, every time you refreshed it, your number went up, and you could climb to the top. I thought it would be fun, and a person or two might even refresh it a few times to get to the top. So, before I went to bed, I set it as my avatar on a forum I frequent. When I woke up the next morning I checked to see if anyone had taken an interest. It turns out that there was so much interest that a thread I had started about Facebook ads had been renamed by the mods to “The refresh game” where people could discuss techniques for getting high scores. I had already recieved 100,000 requests for the image by this time.

The forum ranged from people discussing using Firefox tabs:

I did something similar [opening several tabs in Firefox], except I opened it in 126 tabs, mass bookmarked them, opened a few windows, loaded all the tabs into each window, and THEN refreshed all the tabs in all the windows. Unfortunately Firefox could barely handle it so I quit after getting to like 12th or so.

To more automated methods:

I’ll put my seedbox on a wget loop muahahahaahha

One user found a clever way to stay in the lead. Take first, save the image and save it as your avatar:

I have a new avatar so i’m done

However the most amusing method was this:

I put a screwdriver on my F5 key while I walked away for a while at work, leaned it up against the laptop screen. Got me to 7th Place with 8613 refreshes. I tried “ReloadEvery” for Firefox.

The screwdriver was faster!

By that evening, our interet had slowed to a stop (due to our router not being able to deal with large numbers of connections) and I was forced to remove the image. By this time, barely 12 hours later, the image had been requested 260,964 times with nearly 60 people having had requested it more than 100 times. The take-down was greeted with instant complaints, including suggestions to rehost it on a real server. So, to appease the nerds, I sent to code to another member of the community who has just recently reposted it. So, ~~here is a working copy if you want to compete (go ahead and refresh!)~~ (The reposted version has been ddosed too.)

Update:

New quotes form in the forum in reference to the avatar that the other guy is hosting:

when i started piecing together a pc out of spare parts, deciding which linux live cd to use, and looking for an ethernet cable to directly connect to my modem, i realized i was about to waste too much time on this competition. i think i will stop playing now.

People are now writing C, PHP, BASH, and Java programs to get high scores. Aparently Java just came out of no where and stole the lead by a huge margin by managing 40 requests per scound.

aha I found out someone is using a java program with 1000 threads, no wonder <_< [I showed this to other people on IRC as well - they're all bragging ]

Looks like the 1st place person is taking a break, time to catch up!
I’ve noticed that people’s #s have been getting too big for the image, I made a quick top20 here: http://facepwn.com/avatarstats.php It wont increase your score when you refresh though

PHP: Avatar Hack

Jordan Eldredge — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 19:04:39 +0000

I am a member of a web forum which allows you to use an Avatar image of your choice. You simply give them the url of the image. The ability of php to generate images lead me to try to come up with ways to take advantage of this system.

My first attempt at a dynamically generated avatar was thwarted by the sites form verification. It rejected my avatar because it pointed to a .php file instead of an image file. To get around this, I created a directory called:

/avatar.jpg

that contained an index.php file. Therefore when a user requests:

http://www.classicalcode.com/avatar.jpg

the server resolves that to:

http://www.classicalcode.com/avatar.jpg/index.php

and that script generates an image which it then returns with .jpg headers.

Now that the image is dynamically generated, the question is: what can the script do? Currently it logs ip addresses, browsers and operating systems, does a google image search, finds a random image for a search term, and displays that image along with the users ip and the total times that the avatar has been requested. The source code can be found here: avatar_source.txt

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