from Hacker News

Hacking the Dropbox Space Race

by josh_blum on 10/21/12, 4:10 PM with 40 comments

• by dorianj on 10/21/12, 4:47 PM

  I don't have serious problem with this... but ballot stuffing and fake account registration seems the domain of SEO/blackhats or Anon. This isn't a 'cute hack' worthy of praise -- it's just abuse of MIT and Dropbox systems for no great reason other than perhaps pride.

• by w1ntermute on 10/21/12, 4:40 PM

  > Dropbox’s founder and MIT Alum, Drew Houston, tried to lessen our emotional damage by creating a “United States Leaderboard” where we still held the #1 position

  It's pretty funny how butthurt the MIT people are that the Singaporeans and Taiwanese managed to beat them. If you look at the leaderboard[0], Houston even put the "United States Leaderboard" above the "Global Leaderboard" so that people would think that MIT was in first place.

  0: https://www.dropbox.com/spacerace

• by minimaxir on 10/21/12, 4:48 PM

  It's worth noting that MIT did get "punished" for cheating: the required number of points for the extra 25GB space was relatively much, much higher: http://i.imgur.com/QLJP5.jpg

  It doesn't matter when you can create unlimited e-mail addresses, though.

• by justjimmy on 10/21/12, 4:59 PM

  I wouldn't say it's cheating per say. When you open this kind of event to the the world, you're definitely attracting going to attract alot of people who are good at tech stuff - and throw that in with human tendencies, creativity and competitiveness sets in.

  Maybe it's because I play quite a bit of online games (so I don't find it too troubling. Since there's no real stakes in play in this DB Race) but most gamers are always looking to calculate (or exploit), pushing the boundaries and efficiency of their playing experience. The only difference is the various levels each party takes it to.

  To me (as a outside audience), the boring way is to get real students to sign up. Creatives and non conformers (trying to win) will be the ones to watch for. Whether it's auto email generation and sign ups, poking at DB servers to do w/e, or even posing as another university and massively signing up and crashing the servers and getting them disqualified. Imagination and how far/risk you're willing to go is the limit.

  (And this is even more common and evident in competitions, like cute Dog photos, where most likes/votes win something - and you get people generating fakes and voting. Kinda expected more 'action' with all these tech schools involved.)

  And those crying foul at the US Leaderboard being at the top - I'm pretty sure it depends on your position/location cause I'm seeing Canada leaderboard. So let's all calm down :D

• by thomasbk on 10/21/12, 4:51 PM

  I would characterize this as cheating/fraud, not as hacking. The technical details are interesting nonetheless.

• by alt_f4 on 10/21/12, 5:15 PM

  What if I told you... this could have been prevented by using captchas?

• by prezjordan on 10/21/12, 7:23 PM

  "MIT students aren’t ones to brag" pretty good one :)

• by Xcelerate on 10/21/12, 5:14 PM

  It's interesting how the US Dropbox leaderboard (https://www.dropbox.com/spacerace) kind of reads like the US News engineering university rankings (http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...).

  Although, I was really hoping Georgia Tech would beat MIT for once in something...

  (I was tempted to write a script to do something similar to what those guys did, but I can't afford losing my campus internet access if caught.)

• by rctay89 on 10/21/12, 4:32 PM

  Where's the glory in winning if you cheat?

• by c16 on 10/21/12, 6:17 PM

  "It’s left one of us without access to MIT’s network." - I'd be interested to hear what happened.

• by darkhorn on 10/21/12, 5:57 PM

  Why MIT is at first place while they have 14,939 racers and Singaporeans have 17,497 racers?

• by cywiz on 10/21/12, 5:20 PM

  :)