Comment Become major of a place on foursquare (Score 5, Interesting) 145
I don't use foursquare, but a friend was bragging about being mayor at a couple places. I commented that I could be mayor in a month or two. He ended up betting me I couldn't. I warned him that it was super easy and he would be stupid for making that bet, but he still did it. That night, shortly after a few drunken minutes trying to type my password, the first cron job started running...
#!/usr/bin/perl
# call it from cron with:
# perl foursquare_checkin <location_id> <latitude> <longitude> <your_login_email> <password>
# Ex: perl foursquare_checkin 2021944 40.676141 -73.983452 foo@bar.baz 12345
my ($user,$pass) = @ARGV[3,4];
my $auth = MIME::Base64::encode("$user:$pass",'');
use MIME::Base64;
use IO::Socket;
sleep(rand()*600); # so checkins are slightly random
my $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr=>'api.foursquare.com', PeerPort=>80,
Proto =>'tcp', Type=>SOCK_STREAM) or die;
$ARGV[1] += rand() * 0.0001 - 0.00005; # wobble location
$ARGV[2] += rand() * 0.0001 - 0.00005;
my $str = "vid=$ARGV[0]&private=0&geolat=$ARGV[1]&geolong=$ARGV[2]";
print $sock "POST
my $res = <$sock>;
And yes, I know that's ugly, and there's easier and cleaner ways, but it got the job done well enough to get me mayor of a few places and really pissed off the gambler before I turned it off for good. I have no idea if this still works (ie. lack of any form of message authenticity or handshake etc), but it wouldn't surprise me if it did... feel free becoming mayor of anywhere you want (you can even checkin to places across the country and back on a regular basis and they didn't catch it). But if it no longer works, don't ask me.
