52 replies to this topic

[scowl]

And as you can see, it's very well designed to fool people into thinking it's doing something.

[Biff Wellington]

I've had this app before & it's utter garbage. I've also had one that was voice recorder that toned down background noise so you could record EVPs. & go figure, I got one the first time that clear as day, above all the background noise (that's not toned down at all) saying, "Die". Now of course when I used my normal sound recorder apps aren't picking anything. Imagine that...

Edited by Biff Wellington, 30 November 2012 - 01:12 AM.

[Erikguswriter]

Shoot I am a newbie at the whole investigating thing and I got Ghost Radar for my iPad. It has given me the creeps and goosebumps a few times, but now it just makes me sad knowing for sure it's as fake a Ouija board.  On to discover some more real equipment to use...

[CakeOrDeath]

What would you expect?  How can someone write an app, that will digitally detect beings that have not even been proven to exist?  It's insanity that anyone would consider a ghost-radar application a real and viable form of tracking the paranormal.  Even for fanatical believers that's a new low.

Edited by CakeOrDeath, 15 January 2013 - 10:06 PM.

[scowl]

Ghost Radar uses two common flaws in human perception: ignoring negative results and focusing on positive results, and our ability to find connections between unconnected things.

I've gotten a couple of words from Ghost Radar that would have blown my mind away if they hadn't been between about a hundred words that made no sense. The posts I've read from people who have been amazed by Ghost Radar show they've done a lot of work to find meaning in series of meaningless words.

[Sean Austin]

LOL well let not forget the "otherside" of the spectrum where humans who use only the negative aspects of such a possibility of such a thing actually working looking for a reason it doesnt work..i know you gave a whole weekend of using ghost radar but you have to remember #1 ghost radar is limited to its vocabulary so a spirit theoretically can only learn and then say thru that device what is listed in its database..and #2 a spirit would actually want to speak to you..to me most spirits dont want to be a circus side show and entertain everyone around especially if you are just in your home..what are your chances of getting spirits that want to talk to you let alone are you in your home?? go to a bunch of "known" haunted places and use this device and i will assure you its your best chance of seeing that his app does friggen work..i know it works..i suggest using another app with ghost radar in the background but its only available on droid which is called "ghost speaker" it has almost double the amount of words and you can compare the words with both apps on at the sametime on droids..on iphones there is now "ghost radar connect" which i personally gave the creator the idea of having the user be able to add words infinitely to its database..this way it has the ability to speak the words that are most relevant to each persons surroundings cause AGAIN its limited to its vocabulary..and if you want to test out ghost radar or any other app that is potentially legit that does the samething..is to do a EVP session while using it like i have done and to me even more proof that it works here is my video for this one...https://www.youtube....h?v=LS7lHFlInC4

[*Frank*]

Surely ghosts could just use those text-to-speech functions on word processors. If ghost radar works by spirits manipulating wifi signals etc then that should work too. That way they wouldn't be limited to words like "die", "kill", "shoot", etc. By the way, do ghosts use the b/g standards of wifi or are they 802.11n?

[Archimedes]

How does "Ghost Radar" actually work?

It's a computer program.  As such it has an algorithm that produces output from some sort of input (or random generator of some sort).

Is it reading from the devices sensors (camera, microphone, accelerometer, etc.) and translating that into words or what?

What is the logic in the app that produces any given word to be output?  How did the app writers develop and test the code?

Did they simply introduce a random number generator that translates to various words in the hope that ghosts could manipulate the electronics to produce the wanted output (in which case you don't need an app, a smartphone with an open text editor should be able to produce input from ghosts spontaneously)?  If not there must be some sort of input that the app takes to produce output? What is that input and how does the app translate it to a given output and how did the app writers figure this out?

[scowl]

 Archimedes, on 17 January 2013 - 06:14 AM, said:

What is the logic in the app that produces any given word to be output?  How did the app writers develop and test the code?

That's the big secret! All we do know about the code is that is has a set number of words it can display. No one has bothered to step through the code to see what it's doing if anything.

Another question is why the author is constantly releasing updates. Are ghosts complaining that it's not accurately communicating with them?

[reverser]

So, the main reason no one has reversed this is because the EULA explicitly says you're not allowed to, which should be a red flag right off the bat. I'm a pretty awesome person, so I reversed it anyway. Considering the downloads are currently 1,000,000 - 5,000,000, it's probably about time. I'm not modifying, redistributing, or profiting off of it, so whatever.

I usually post here under a different name, for what it's worth.

I aquired the apk from the google market here and used some common tools unpack the dalvik bytecode. I normally do stuff like this for work, and it's pretty rare that my hobbies overlap, so I was excited. Apks can actually be unpacked just like a zip file, so I encourage anyone to go take a looksy themselves. Check out dex2jar if you want some Java to look at.

Anyways, the permissions of the app are another red flag. There's nothing special, just ordinary advertising perms, and the fact that this app runs on tablets that lack typical smartphone sensors is odd. Guess it's not analyzing too many magnetic fields or passive audio, eh? On top of this, it needs access to your "device status and identity." Keep that in mind if you think the ghosts know who you are.

In the apk, the res/values/strings.xml file contains the wordlist that the program uses to randomly select its words. There are 2130 words that you can read here: http://pastebin.com/SL0L3b7i.

The app includes the following software packages:
-amazon (ads)
-google (ads and text2speech)
-pocketchange (shopping and rewards)
-revmob (ads)
-spudpickles (the app itself) (lol @ the name)

So, let's take a gander at spudpickles. The main activity is RadarActivity, which initilizes ads, pipes out random "coordinates" around the screen, makes the radar animation, and gets a GRCApp class. GRCApp handles most of the functionality.

In GRCApp, populateWords() picks your words the "ghost" says using:

Random random = new Random();
int l = random.nextInt(2130);
activeWordsIndices[l];

Yep, just random numbers. The amount of ghosts that are tracked is decided from your sensitivity settings:

maxGhosts = (int)appDelegate.sensitivitySettings.getUseValueFor(4);
ghostList = new ArrayList();
int i = 0;
while(i < maxGhosts) {
	Ghost ghost = new Ghost(appDelegate);
	ghostList.add(ghost);
	i++;
}

Yup, that's seriously it. Wish I was making it up. Afterwards, we repeatedly step through the ghosts and see if we should show 'em or hide 'em:

while(true) {
	if(!iterator.hasNext()) {...}
	((Ghost)iterator.next()).checkForActivity();
}

checkForActivity() checks current time minus last time moved, and shows the ghost if it's greater than the sensitivity settings:

public void checkForActivity(){
	long l = (long)(1000F * SensitivitySettings.getSingletonObject().getUseValueFor(3));
	if(System.currentTimeMillis() - dateLastMoved > l)
		hidden = true;
}

How does the ghost move around?

numberStream = new Random();
public void run(){
	move(numberStream.nextFloat(), numberStream.nextFloat(), numberStream.nextFloat());
}

At scheduled intervals, random numbers are picked, then passed to a move method, which just takes the numbers and puts a blip somewhere in the radar circle. For those curious, check out the Movement class's move(float f1, float f2, float f3) method.

That's the meat of it. A bunch of math is also done to make polar coordinates, and calculate blip and word frequencies.

TL;DR version:
At scheduled intervals, random numbers are generated to pick a ghost's coordinates, whether or not they appear, and the words that are displayed. The amount of ghost objects created is literally your sensitivity settings. No sensor input is read to determin any of this.

Mirrored here.

[scowl]

 reverser, on 28 January 2013 - 02:38 AM, said:

In GRCApp, populateWords() picks your words the "ghost" says using:

Random random = new Random();
int l = random.nextInt(2130);
activeWordsIndices[l];

"Bwah bwah bwah bwaaaaah!" (<- also known as the "sad trombone").

[DingoLingo]

Is now curious to see what Sean has to say about this now

will he admit he was fooled and sucked in..

probably not..

[reverser]

Apparently I fail at using pastebin, so you can find the wordlist here, too.

[Timonthy]

 reverser, on 29 January 2013 - 12:48 AM, said:

Apparently I fail at using pastebin, so you can find the wordlist here, too.

Thanks so much for your post!!! I was too lazy to look into the code myself, but now we can point any ghost app believers to this thread!

Cheers!

[Archimedes]

So it's essentially a random number generator that produces random output based upon a pre-generated list of words.

Surprise, surprise...

Excellent technical forensic work BTW.