Programmers....How does "SpySpace" work?
 

http://spyspace.standoffish.com

They are closed to new registrations now due to the overwhelming popularity but...basically you put a URL in your profile that loads a .SWF Flash ActionScript file everytime someone visits your site. That ActionScript file reports back to the page The Name/ID of the MySpace visitor...the referring URL (how they found your site), and the IP of the visitor.

I had fun with this for awhile but it actually made me delete my myspace account...i had girls that i know's boyfriends visiting my page on a daily basis.

Any clue on how this ActionScript might work? Decompiling it is useless...people have tried and it is protected.

How does it work?

Do you know anything about ActionScript? It obviously interacts with a database and a server side scripting language. It's really not that complicated.

If you're looking for code, it would be impossible without more info.

What kind of database? One that holds the information for 500K plus MySpace accounts? Highly doubtful.

When the user visiting your page loads the SWF file....That users MySpace ID is extracted. Since MySpace prohibits the use of JAVA...I'm not even sure if calling a JAVA script is possible.

You're right... it would be impossible to spider MySpace on a daily basis and store the results.

My bad.

is the user name encoded into the url? that's probably what it is

nope...i looked at that possibility too. otherwise it would be simply grabbing the referring URL and finding the friend ID. but the friend ID is nowhere to be found once you go to someones elses profile.

it won't last long....myspace will react to it soon...its a huge invasion of privacy. thats why they don't allow tracking as a feature.

i was just wondering too how they could have pulled this off. definately genius.

as far as "spidering myspace" goes that is also a no no. I tested it with a brand new account and it still logged my entry.