Lab

Hi, I'm CyberShadow, and welcome to the lab. Since you're here, allow me to bore you with a short history of this website.

I like to think that people should be able to enjoy offline games however they want. So, one of my favourite past times was making cheats for games. Not the kind of cheats you could use to ruin someone's day, though... mostly harmless stuff. It was fun and challenging. Playing with the game was often more fun for me than playing the game.

After I've written a Bejeweled Blitz bot (for the challenge, of course – it was an interesting algorithmical problem), I stumbled upon a Bejeweled Blitz cheat which enabled a hidden debug mode left over by the game's developers. The cheat was a Visual Basic application which embedded an Internet Explorer control just so it would be able to change a SWF parameter. I was disgusted, and decided to write a UserScript to do the same thing.

The Internet exploded with it. It was posted on blogs all over. I guess I was happy with the popularity at that time, but nowadays I wouldn't appreciate all of its effects and consequences.

Not long afterwards, PopCap released a major update to their game, Bejeweled Blitz 3. Needless to say, the UserScript worked no longer, and I started getting a flood of e-mails of people asking and begging me to update my cheat. Some had heart-breaking stories about the cheat making the game playable for elderly people with bad vision, or disabled loved ones with impaired motor skills.

So I did.

PopCap and I even had a short game of ladders, where they tried to improve their security to block the cheat and I kept nullifying their efforts. I won, but even though it was a techologically impressive accomplishment, I'm not very proud of the moral aspects of it today.

As I've moved on to more serious projects, the burden of maintaining this website grew heavier. So, as of October 2011, I've signed off the main part of this website to a few friends who are more interested in maintaining it than me.

As for this lab? Well, we'll just have to see...