FreeRice continued

Hey guys, it's the FreeRice story again.

Another Ruby developer, Dave Troy, sent his computer on the quest of feeding more people, by creating a multi-threaded bot that sends 50 requests simultaneously.

I, on the other hand, was trying to make my bot behave ;) Another feature was added - adclicking. Now you can configure the bot to play nice by setting click to true in freerice.properties. At the moment the bot can only 'click' the sponsor ads. The Google ads were kinda complicated - blame Google for that - so I'll leave them untouched for now :P

Another cool feature is the FreeRice Assistant. Now users who don't like botting can still use this little utility
to lookup words to improve their results and donate more rice. Kinda cool huh? :)


If you like the new features, just come and get the bot from here.

Wikipedia

Hey guys,

Today while browsing the articles at wikipedia, I did a quick search for our favourite game - wargames, hacker games, computer-based challenges, or whatever it is called, and noticed that there's still no article for it.

I remember discussing with other challengers about it a few years ago on our favourite IRC channel. While many agreed with the idea, no work has been done so far. Only until recently, the game has been added as an open link:

A game of computer security, popularized by Hackerslab.org and the DEF_CON hacker convention. See Wargames (Computer Security).

So guys, what are you waiting for? Let's start filling it with an article about our favourite game :)

Any idea? Join our discussion at TBS forum.

Steganabara project page

Hey guys,

Finally I defeated my laziness and created a project page for Steganabara. It is located here.

There you can find a brief view of the key features, watch and download the latest versions.

Time to finish those evil bara's challenges now. And if you have any idea for improving the tool, feel free to contact me :)

FreeRice IRC Bot

I just added another bot to the project - an IRC bot.

Let this bot run on your IRC channel, play with it, and help donate rice to poor people.

Grab a copy of the bot from here.

FreeRice

If you have been a regular visitor to irc.idlemonkeys.net, probably you have heard about FreeRice, a website that donates rice to poor people in the world.

The rule is simple: for each word you get right, 10 grains of rice is donated to help end world hunger.

During the conversation on #hackquest, some of the geeks showed the desire to save humanity by creating a learning bot (to be exact, a memorizing bot) that plays the game and helps donate the rice. SilentNutcracker and alt3rn4tiv3 started the first implementation of the game. It is built on top of php, curl and mysql.

As a super botter, I could not let them enjoy the fun alone. So I created a similar bot, written in Java. You can grab a copy from my website.

Unlike their version, my bot uses serialized data, without any need for a DBMS. So you only need JRE 5 to get the bot up and running :)

However, I've always been wondering, does botting really help donating rice? I guess that's only true to a certain extend. If too many people launch the bot, it'll be no different from a DDOS attack, and the FreeRice people surely won't like it. So you might want to adjust some settings in freerice.properties to make sure that the bot won't hurt the server too much :P