Congratulations to Joe Bauser on winning the OpenStack obfuscated code competition!

Luc Perkins

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dr-luc-perkins/22/7b3/a08

First place: Joe Bauser (code)

Runner-up: Anthony Castle (code)

As many of you know, we held a contest along with our friends at Rackspace last week for the second birthday of OpenStack. The goal: to give away a MacBook Pro 15” with retina display to the person who can deploy an app on AppFog that does nothing but display the words “Happy Birthday OpenStack” but do so using the most obfuscated code possible.

Our reaction to the entries ranged from mightily impressed to absolutely astonished. The contest unleashed an absolute torrent of creativity. We knew the hackers out there were smart, but dang. Kudos to all of you on your hard work.

This weekend, AppFog CTO John Purrier, noted Linux hacker Brandon Philips, and self-proclaimed anarcho-geek Rabble put their heads together and decided that Joe Bauser (aka Coder Joe) is the rightful champion and winner of the new MacBook Pro. We think they chose very wisely. The app is here (no surprises as to the displayed content), and you can see the code for yourself here.

Joe chose to use Sinatra, a lightweight Ruby web development framework. What’s amazing is that Sinatra doesn’t make it all that easy to write obfuscated code. A while back, I wrote a post on Sinatra in which I showed that I was able to put together a simple yet functional app in 18 lines of code in a single Ruby file. But what Joe has done is both aesthetically sleek (which is quite a feat in itself) and maddeningly obfuscated. Notice the extensive use of base 16, a Swiss Army Knife of Ruby array methods, and an almost preternatural knack for ASCII art.

Really impressive stuff.

The judges decided that the runner-up prize (an iPad 3 with retina display) should go to the entry that simply made them laugh the most. This prize will go to Anthony Castle (aka @MachineEpsilon). Again, great choice by the judges.

Anthony wrote his hilarious entry in PHP and sprinkled in variables like $appfog_owns, $john_purrier_rocks (which is true), and a few others that are fairly NSFW. But beyond being funny, Anthony made some very intelligent use of array maps and ASCII art. He was even kind enough to comment extensively on his code, with comments like “PHP gives me real ultimate power!” We can neither confirm nor disconfirm this claim, but PHP has indeed given Mr. Castle a new iPad, and that’s not too shabby at all.

To both winners and to all of those who submitted such impressive entries, we (AppFog, Rackspace and OpenStack) say thank you. Honestly, we ended up learning a lot about coding during the contest (if occasionally by way of negative example).

We encourage all of you to keep your apps online and show your friends the code. We guarantee they’ll be impressed, too.

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Other amazing entries from the OpenStack contest »

http://www.twitter.com/JeremyCMorgan Jeremy Morgan

Congratulations guys! I knew I wouldn’t win it, as I only had about 4 hours to put into it, but I definitely had fun doing it, and discovered appfog in the process so this contest was an overall positive for me personally.

I can see why you picked the winners… very impressive work!
tamsler

Congratulations! Very creative indeed.
Damien Goujard

Very creative !
gustavo

OMG, my code couldn’t stand a chance… I never thought a solution based on ascii art. Very impressive. Congratulations!

And what about the 2GB RAM extra space?
http://happyday.aws.af.cm/src Arous

Here was my approach to solve achieve the same, no fancy hearts or ascii
art, but a new type of obfuscation, that I am afraid it was obfuscated
in a way that judges skipped and thought it was a joke.

http://happyday.aws.af.cm/src

If any one reads this and is sceptic about the code, please just copy/paste it and run it, and see the magic…

I admire Joe’s approach, but still it is something traditional, it’s cute and cool, but not that creative (tech-wise).

Congrats to the winners, though.
http://twitter.com/cardmagic Lucas Carlson

Your account already has the 2GB free space allocated to it!
http://dongilbert.net/ Don Gilbert

Apparently my brainfuck ASCII birthday cake wasn’t good enough.

http://happybirthdayopenstack.ap01.aws.af.cm/src
http://www.twitter.com/JeremyCMorgan Jeremy Morgan

Since we’re all sharing our stuff,

http://reversecodegolf.aws.af.cm/src/index.txt

With my entry I decided to obfuscate the method as well as the code. Basically it’s a huge string (75k) full of lorem ipsum text without spaces and punctuation. The app then uses a slightly modified fibonacci sequence to grab each of the characters, so there is a character at 1, 3, 5, 8, etc. After plucking those out of the string it assembles them and does a rot13 and assembles each character into a string and displays it. I also decided to be a jerk and remove all the line breaks and make it a single line of code. I had a bunch of other ideas I wanted to do including mixing up some eval magic and other stuff, but I just didn’t allocate enough time. Again great contest! That was fun and worth doing.
Michael

Cool!

Me as simple as fuck!

Anyway echo(“Happy birthday openstack!”);
R.

Congratulations!

It’s funny that the winner chose the same language, the same tools, a comparably trivial obfuscation (base64 vs. binary) than me , and also did some ASCII art. But in contrary to my solution he didn’t obfuscate the inclusion of the sinatra library, needs more readable as well as encrypted code over all, doesn’t use the more elegant heredoc and has some characters left that didn’t fit into the far larger ASCII art. That’s a slap in the face! Anyway, I feel less stupid now that a totally non-cryptographic solution just like mine won.

But, erm, I don’t understand why the article states that Sinatra would be hard to obfuscate. My Sinatra app is four lines of Ruby code to output the required text plus the source and as you can see it’s completely hidden with an eval.
http://nutfile.com Razique Mahroua

Great work guys
R.

Oops, I just learned that links in angle brackets don’t work.

http://os-birthday.eu01.aws.af.cm/src
Anne Gentle

Wow, wow, and uh, wow. Creative – congrats all around for contestants and contestees (made that up) alike.

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