Susan called me yesterday and posed an interesting challenge. Susan had found a local online phonebook that listed contact information for local businesses, but the website limited you to viewing one category at a time. You could click the word “Automobile Repair” and it would show all the entries in that category, and you could click the word “Dentist” and it would show all the dentistry-related entries, but the website was lacking a button that would display the entire list all at once.<\/p>\n

Her question was simple enough: “How do I see the entire list?” With that, the two of us went to work.<\/p>\n

The site’s URL made it pretty clear how the query worked. You had the link to the website followed by two variables: town=TOWNNAME and CATEGORY=”X”. “X” changed depending on the category, so obviously by manually changing “X” in the URL you could hit all the different categories. By glancing at the menu it looked like there were about 130 different categories and I really wasn’t in the mood to cut\/paste that URL 130 times and copy and paste the results into a big text file.<\/p>\n

After trying all the basics (CATEGORY=ALL, CATEGORY=*, CATEGORY=%, etc) and not getting anywhere I opted for a different approach. In about two minutes I whipped out a quick VB script that would hit the URL in question 200 times, incrementing X by one each time. Each time the page loaded it would dump the contents into a text file. It worked, and I had the complete list in about five minutes. <\/p>\n

(I should note that there is nothing illegal about this — I did not obtain any information from their web server that they do not freely offer to the public. All I did was automate the process, saving myself 200 mouse clicks.)<\/p>\n

The best part of this story however was the ride home with Susan. We compared notes and I was both surprised and impressed by the things she had tried. She too had tried the “CATEGORY=ALL” idea, but from there our paths split. While I took a more technical route, Susan figured out the software the website was running and then Googled for other places running the same software. After finding some she went to those sites and looked at their queries. Some of them had additional parameters, which actually worked on the site we were poking around on. She had a couple of other novel ideas too; none of which panned out, but great ideas nonetheless.<\/p>\n

While we talked on the way home, I was reminded of my generation’s hacker craze, spawned by WarGames (1983). Shortly after that movie, kids began running around asking that elusive question: “how do I become a hacker?” So many of us had so many people ask us that question that it became a joke. <\/p>\n

Hacking has never been about any specific program or technique. It’s always — ALWAYS — been about just trying to figure out how stuff works. (And sometimes inadvertently breaking it in the process.) Yes, there are bad guys, script kiddies, misguided youths and foreign spies all out there tearing up virtual worlds in the name of “hacking,” but when you really get down to the spirit of hacking, that’s what it was (and should still be) all about — a natural curiosity about how stuff works. And how do you teach that? In short, you don’t. “Teach me to be curious.” Sorry, I can’t. <\/p>\n

Anyhoo, congrats to Susan for finding her inner-hacker — we’ll make a nerd out of her yet!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Susan called me yesterday and posed an interesting challenge. Susan had found a local online phonebook that listed contact information for local businesses, but the website limited you to viewing one category at a time. You could click the word “Automobile Repair” and it would show all the entries in that category, and you could click the word “Dentist” and it would show all the dentistry-related entries, but the website was lacking a button that would display the entire list all at once. Her question was simple enough: “How do I see the entire list?” With that, the two of… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}