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FOURSQUARE Not fair and square: Jim Bumgardner found a hack for the Foursquare net- working site, then confessed online to amassing multiple unlikely mayorships. Foursquare is the successor to Dodge- ball, which Dennis Crowley started in 2004 and sold a year later to Google. Google killed the service. So Crowley kicked off a new effort, Foursquare, with business partner Naveen Selvadu- rai last March during South by South- west, the annual technology and musi- cal festival. You earn for checking into venues.

One of the chief goals of Four- square is to become of a par- ticular location. The better the location, the greater the bragging rights. So it was only a matter of time before players started bending the rules. Bum- gardner, 47, who is also a part-time teacher, author and musician, may have been the first to blog about it. He has been interested in social media since the mid-1990s andhas been using Foursquare since January.

He says it took a few weeks for him to warm up to the service, which he initially thought was definitely gets more appealing when you start earning badges and mayor- he said. He started cheating on Feb. 7. I thought it would be funny if I could add the to my list of mayorships, and I started to wonder how to pull it he said by e-mail. I got started on that project, I re- alized how ridiculous the Foursquare security was.

I tried to imagine a variety of different ways that someone more malicious than I could exploit the Four- square service, and I tried a few of them out, one-by-one. My goal was to even- tually reveal my findings, so Four- square would be motivated to tighten their security. But obviously I was hav- ing a bit of fun during my land grab. realized I could not only grab the North Pole, but possess most of the ma- jor world landmarks the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Taj Ma- hal, la Dr. Evil by writing a script to check into them every day.

imagined a scam in which someone could a celebrity by creating fake accounts and having them check into seedy venues, so I tried my hand at that. I realized that any visitor to the Martha Stewart show, or her office building, who was also a Foursquare user, would encounter the fake account I had created for her, and discover that had been visiting pawn shops, and 99-cent stores. Similarly, any visi- tor to the Kodak theater would discover my fake account. I thought it was important to demonstrate this scam, so that Foursquare would even- tually take steps to prevent it. realized the security was so poor, that I could probably take over every single Starbucks as ubiquitous as they are.

So I created a set of bots that grabbed about 120 in a single week. If I had made a few more of them, and left them turned on, I would have even- tually grabbed every single Starbucks. This exploit could be used by rival busi- nesses to the venues of their competitors, or used as a platform for malicious advertising. the end of the week, I had about 10 scripts, each operating different ac- counts, running in the background on my laptop, each one checking into a dif- ferent venue every 20 minutes or so. Af- ter a week of this kind of stuff, I discovered the simple hack, and started giving people boats (you add the tag to an airport, and every Foursquare user who checks into the airport gets the on a badge).

On Feb. 15, while eating breakfast with his wife at the same diner where he con- ceived the North Pole idea, he realized his job was done. He went home to share with the world what he had learned. Crowley responded in a comment. As Foursquare closes in on 500,000 users, he said, cheating has increased.

Foursquare, I think we still have some thinking to do on this. We do see a lot of fake check-ins (yes, we log and flag them I think of total check-ins were last time we checked) and there are a few bad apples that like to steal mayorships from their couch. been punting on address- ing this because it requires removing some of the magic from Foursquare (mayors, points, badges) for users with non-GPS phones. We often wonder why people when really noth- ing to win not like giving away trips to Hawaii or Ford Fiestas over here. But I guess the combo of mayorships, local recognition and, hey, maybe a free slice of pizza, is a little too much for some people to live with- It all began when Burbank software engineer Jim Bumgardner decided he wanted to be mayor of the North Pole.

Bumgard- ner, who was checking in to the Hill Street Cafe in Burbank, was a new recruit to fast-growing Four- square, one of the major players in a new social networking space that lets users and alert friends to their current location. BY JESSICA GUYNN KEVIN BJORKE Mr. Mayor 3.3.10 THISISBRANDX.COM 10 TECHNOLOGY CMYK.