Samsung Shipping Spyware?

Some dude came out and accused Samsung of shipping laptops with spyware installed. He used a program that detected Starlogger installed on his laptop. So he deduced that the culprit must be the manufacturer. This guy founded a consulting company. Maybe this is him doing a good dead by spreading the info. Or maybe he is looking for some free publicity.

Samsung has since come out and refuted the guy's claims. He says they do not install any such spyware. In fact, they determined that the dude was using a program that thinks it detects Starlogger, but is in error. Well this made for a sensational headline anyway.

Starlogger is a $23 piece of shareware that will secretly record all the keystrokes on a computer. It is supposed to be "undetectable". Starlogger can then email you data it collects. By the way, it can also take screen shots at given intervals to see what the user is doing.

Coin Dozer Hack

I finally finished coding my roguelike game JSRL. Now let's get back to hacking. I have been addicted to this iPhone game called Coin Dozer. It looks like a real arcade game where you put coins in and try to make coins fall out in front.

You start out with 40 coins. There are many ways to get new coins. You slowly gain them as time goes on. You can install other apps on your phone to get some coins. Some of those apps cost money. You can also pay real cash for coins.

My goal is to not have to pay for apps or coins. So how do you do this? There are many techniques to do well in the game. But there is one hack that is very handy. You can always exit the game, and restart it. When you do this, the gold coins get restored back to the original position. This can help you out a lot.

I found the optimal game play is to do two sets of three coins each. That ensures a bunch of coins get pushed out the end for you. Then exit and restart the game. Repeat. This can keep me playing indefinitely with a lot of coins. Yeah it is just a game. But I play this game all the time. This little "feature" is keeping me stocked full of a lot of coins. Good luck in your coin dozing.

Out of Commission

I have been a bit busy lately. My college cancelled a class I wanted to take in JavaScript. I decided to take matters into my own hands and learn the programming language myself. I bought the college textbook on Amazon and started to learn. I find the best way to learn is to actually code in the language. I do all the exercises at the end of each chapter.

So far I have gone through about 10 chapters. At first I did not like JavaScript much. But I am learning to appreciate some things. JavaScript is an interpreted language. When there is an error, the browser knows exactly which line has the error. But let's get back to the beginning. What the heck is JavaScript?

JavaScript is a language invented by the now defunct Netscape. It is a scripting style language that runs in the web browser. The goal of the language was to add the ability to do dynamic operations on web pages. Note that JavaScript is unrelated to Java, which is a general purpose programming language. JavaScript is now starting to be used on servers as well. But that is a story for another post.

Next week I plan to enter a game writing contest to generate a game like Angband. And I am going to code the darn thing in JavaScript if at all possible. I did the same exercise in the past when I was learning the Java programming language. After I get JavaScript out of my system, expect more posts on hacking material.