Zero-Second Cheat
On April 4th, 2015, developer Benedikt Allendorf posted screenshots on Google+ showing a Glyph Hack with a speed bonus of 214748% which produced over 2,000 items.[4]
Allendorf later explained that he had modified the Ingress Scanner app to tell Niantic's servers that he completed the Hack in -20 seconds.
Niantic's servers converted this to a ratio of -1.0. It then cast the negative 32-bit floating-point number into an unsigned 32-bit integer. Because the twos complement representation of a negative number has each bit set to 1, this returned a speed bonus of the maximum 32-bit unsigned integer value of 2,147,483,647. The server divided this by 1,000 to convert from milliseconds and used it to calculate the item drops.
The bug was quickly patched, and the cheat is no longer possible.
On April 4th, 2015, developer Benedikt Allendorf posted screenshots on Google+ showing a Glyph Hack with a speed bonus of 214748% which produced over 2,000 items.[4]
Allendorf later explained that he had modified the Ingress Scanner app to tell Niantic's servers that he completed the Hack in -20 seconds.
Niantic's servers converted this to a ratio of -1.0. It then cast the negative 32-bit floating-point number into an unsigned 32-bit integer. Because the twos complement representation of a negative number has each bit set to 1, this returned a speed bonus of the maximum 32-bit unsigned integer value of 2,147,483,647. The server divided this by 1,000 to convert from milliseconds and used it to calculate the item drops.
The bug was quickly patched, and the cheat is no longer possible.