Part of the excitement and the hype of Pokemon GO is the fact that you have to go out and look for these digital creatures to catch them. That excitement and hype is now put in very real danger with a map hack – a server exploit that comes up with an easy-to-use map that shows you where every Pokemon is in your vicinity.
It’s a pretty complicated hack – if you read the Pokemon GO subreddit from where this information comes from – but it is doable, and some people are committed to doing it. The developers for this hack reverse engineered an API using the data sent and received by the Pokemon GO servers. What they have been able to do is parse the server responses sent by the game. From there, an installation of Python scripting on your PC can convert the data on into a Google Maps picture of where the Pokemon are in your area.
Pretty smart, but in our opinion, the game stands to lose its excitement when the usage of this hack becomes widespread. That will happen when the developers finally are able to make this hack in app form. From there, the app will spread like wildfire, and before you know it, people will no longer “search” and “hunt” for Pokemon, they will just go to specific areas where there are a lot of them.
The hack makes it easier for Pokemon GO trainers, yes. But in the end, it’s still “cheating” the system that Niantic put in place. Hopefully, the augmented reality game outfit can start securing their server signals and stop this hack from happening.
SOURCE: Reddit
Unfortunately they can’t really stop it entirely. DRM of that kind isn’t possible to make perfectly. There’s literally mathematical proofs of it.
After all, even just GPS spoofing + screenshots of Pokémon appearing on the map in-game + referencing the identified locations against a map could be used to replicate this exact same data.
And that could never be reliably detected.
Yes but that is not the same as what they are doing here. Your method still requires someone have been there and even then not totally accurate because of that person’s level and time of day. This method shows you what the server’s knows based on you and time and that makes it 100℅ accurate 100℅ of the time.
I would not trust a manual map but would this and with that I hope they start encrypting it soon.
Waiting for the next hack where you can collect all of them without moving from your sofa:-)
This is not a “hack”. Niantic made the API available to the public so 3rd part developers could create things just like this to help trainers out. PokeVision has been out in web browser form for about a week and does the same thing as this. Always remember Niantic started off with Google with ingress, if they didn’t want people to be able to build this web app they would just stop it.