Feeding Yoshi with Wireless Networks

[Darius Wey]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.yoshigame.com/' target='_blank'>http://www.yoshigame.com/</a><br /><br /></div><i>"The game makes use of the everyday infrastructure of wireless networks around a city to create a game environment. The object of the game is to locate the eponymous Yoshis, which are actually secured wireless networks, represented as small furry creatures. Each Yoshi asks the player for a particular kind of fruit. Players must then grow and retrieve these fruits from plantations, which are actually unsecured wireless networks. Upon feeding the fruit to the Yoshi, players are rewarded with points. The number of points a player receives increases exponentially with the number of different fruit offered in a single feeding. Players are encouraged to interact with each other by swapping their fruit. Players must regularly access a server web page to see how their score compares with that of their opponents. The game has recently been tested at sites in Glasgow, Nottingham and Derby."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/wey-20051130-FeedingYoshi.jpg" /><br /><br />Strange and amazingly geeky at the same time. :crazyeyes:

[geneb]

[i]"Players must then grow and retrieve these fruits from plantations, which are actually unsecured wireless networks.

What affect does this have on the unsecured wireless networks being accessed? What are these "seeds" really? What information is uploaded to the server along with the score?

This sounds like a way to get others to wardrive for the authors while they sit back and collect data from the server. I would be very concerned about security with something like this going on.

Even if this is totally harmless it opens the possiblility of someone using this method, or even hacking into this game, and causing all sorts of havok.

:devilboy: Someone had to take the negative viewpoint :devilboy:

[surur]

Sounds like brilliant social engineering. Expect this to come to a virus near you soon.

Surur

[ctmagnus]

You know who I bet is behind this? Blackwave (http://www.netstumbler.org/search.php?searchid=525612), that's who. ;)

At one point, the guy had over 50% of all posts on the NetStumbler.com forums, and I'd bet that he had logged well over that percentage of all APs that were submitted to various sites around the net.

Now he's getting other people to do his dirty work for him. But that's just my opinion. ymmv. ;)

[indiekiduk]

What affect does this have on the unsecured wireless networks being accessed? What are these "seeds" really? What information is uploaded to the server along with the score?


Unsecured networks arnt actually used to transfer data over - since that would have all the ethical and legal issues we've discussed over and over in that long thread a while ago. Feeding yoshi just scans for networks like WiFiFoFum (http://www.aspecto-software.com/WiFiFoFum), and ones that have security are Yoshis, and ones that don't are Plantations.

[fuldhim]

I did a little snooping, and Yoshi turns out to be the front-end to some research on seamless wireless networks being done at the University of Glasgow. They're studying whether asynchronous communication can function well enough that apps can be rewritten so they don't require users to have continuous Internet access while using a program.

I've emailed these folks, and they've updated the website to spell out what they're up to. (The basics are in the EULA, too, which is why noone knew. :wink: