12 comments

[ 13.5 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] thread
Eh, who didn't do this in Animal Crossing?
Anyone who didn't want weeds and actually cared ;(

(sly little plug to my time-based animal crossing wild world bug/fish checklist because this is the best place to plug it that I may ever find on HN http://wild-world-clock.googlecode.com )

...with 1 weird trick!

Seriously, what's going on with this title?

Congrats to the girl for giving a presentation at age 10, but in all honesty this is nothing new. I'm positive that this is pretty much common knowledge to anyone who has ever played a time based game. Also, calling it an "exploit" makes it seem like it's some sort of security risk; when in reality it's about on par with turning off a device before saving to erase unwanted actions.
She's 10, and she figured it out on her own. Let her have her 5 minutes.
Not to seem rude, but I was probably at a similar age when I figured it out myself. While it does deserve some level of praise, it's not exactly news worthy.
The more people hacking, the better IMO. It's something that should be praised.
Remove "10 year-old" and "girl" and you have another content-less fluff piece.

This is not something new or interesting.

Edit:

"The exploit is to do with the clock used on devices running the two mobile operating systems, and just as importantly how games use it to aid in gameplay progression. Many of these farm-style games rely on the clock to grow crops the player plants or by signifying general time progression. "

Oh christ, this article is just pure silliness. Ignore the below. And the article itself.

If the hacker and intelligent human being happened to have a penis wouldn't the title be one word shorter?

//this// is an actual real reason why people without Y chromosomes aren't as into tech or the engineering industry; because as soon as they get in, they are pushed into this subset of "girl hackers", "girl geeks".

I understand that it isn't "on-topic" and posts here aren't supposed to be motivated by emotion (especially not anger), but I really expect more from sites getting to the front page here.

To be honest, the whole title is silly. Apparently a kid needs to be "bored" to do that. It's obviously an important information. "Zero-day exploit" is also an amazing way to call "changing the hour to make the crops grow faster".

The whole title is a click bait, as we expect some kind of hacker kid prodigy (after all, he was "bored", not actively hacking) who would have found a severe exploit in iOS and Android.

The article can be summed up by "a young kid changes the hour on her device to make the crops grow faster in the game".

(heck, I was changing the date to make my sharewares work longer at the same age and nobody wrote about me)

The inevitability in the movie Idiocracy is manifesting itself by having "set the clock forward" being considered an incredibly devious hacking technique and labeled as a 0day :P It's good to see that even when everyone born these days are morons that there are still going to be a small subset of people who are more creative and intelligent than the rest.
Let's not exaggerate. Just because the article is silly and obviously trying to make something bigger than it actually is doesn't mean that "everyone born these days are morons".

Also, http://xkcd.com/603/