Taking Advantage of AllAdvantage

by silicon kill

If you are at all in tune with any of the scams on the Internet, you are probably familiar with AllAdvantage (www.alladvantage.com).

AllAdvantage is a system that pays you to surf the Internet, or so-they boast.  "The rules have changed" is their slogan, and they sure have.

They pay you for surfing the Internet?  The first thing that crossed my mind was that it was going to entail filling out a large survey, and you would get paid like five bucks, and there must have been some other twist to it.  Well, there is.  You have to put up with a "Viewbar" (800x100 pixels, I think) that sits right above your Taskbar in Windows.  For some reason, I don't think they will be coming out with a Linux version.

The Viewbar flashes various ads and whatnot, in fairly bright colors, and becomes quite annoying.  The way it operates is that when you are surfing the Internet (either through Internet Explorer or Netscape) it activates itself and logs how much time you spend.  It then uploads your statistics to the website, where you can login and check them.  You get paid a measly $0.50 an hour and can only get around 20 bucks a month, but either way it's basically free.

The Viewbar has a little "LED" that changes to green when you are accumulating time.  When it is red, the ads simply sit there, being their annoying selves.

The first thought that came into my mind was to make a quick Visual Basic program to sit on top of the ad bar, and obstruct everything but the "LED" (so that I could tell if I was accumulating time or not).  After fooling around in VB for a bit, I realized that it only worked if the browser was active.  That day I made 86 cents.  Annoyed that I was letting myself be tormented by the ads, I came to the conclusion that there must be some better way to collect time while not having to deal with the ads.

The program times out after five minutes of inactivity.  Activity is defined by AllAdvantage as "actively surfing the web (clicking on links and typing in addresses)."  The Viewbar acts as a leech to your browser and is active when your browser is active.  I tried various different ways of trying to keep the Viewbar active but not the browser, but nothing worked.

I asked around a bit about whether there was a way to make my computer think I was clicking the mouse, even though physically I wasn't.  Maybe there is a way, but I couldn't find one.  I experimented with some LEGO designs, to try and perform the act instead of my finger.  I would wait a daunting five minutes for each of my schemes to work, but alas, the Viewbar refused to stay active.  After distressing, I realized that I had a program on my computer that performed pre-recorded macros.  Then it hit me.  I could make a webpage that linked to another webpage, then linked pack to the first one.

I would make two large graphics that could be clicked on easily and then link them.  Then, I would use the macro program to record my mouse movement of clicking the graphic, and have the program repeat it over and over.  This way, I could leave my computer idle and it would just stay there "surfing the web," according to the AllAdvantage Viewbar at least.  I could stack up to ten hours a night, and only do it once a month, since AllAdvantage limits payments to ten hours.

The ads are stored as GIFs.  There are three GIF files in the directory and they can all be edited once their read-only property is revoked.  You cannot do much because the program automatically downloads the motd.html and some other ad HTMLs.  These are also stored in the directory, but updated every five minutes or so.  The information about server updating is stored in different DLLs in the directory.  One is called HKAOL.DLL (for AOL), one called HKNS.DLL (for Netscape), and one called IEHOOK.DLL (for Internet Explorer).

I opened everything up in my hex editor, and there is some HTML in the executable, but nothing that could change the appearance of the main ad.  They really are not that big of a deal - the ads that is - if you are not watching them.

I don't see any real possibility of fixing the macro program exploit for this system.  There is no way for AllAdvantage to monitor their client's computers.  For now, just baste in the knowledge that you beat the system, however morally incorrect the act is.

The program I used for the macro customization was All-In-One Macro Utility, available at www.aimsoft.com.

I do not condone theft or any type of fraud, and this is probably illegal for the most part, so don't get caught doing it.