Hacking the nike plus

I just read a very informative blog…have I told you how much I LOVE the internet…not that way…but I do love it, I’m a run leader with the Nike lounge in Toronto and I’ve lost literally hundreds of KM over the years due to various reasons, forgetting my chip and or sensor, grabbing the wrong shoes, nano not working, chip or sensor not working, connecting my ipod to the computer at the lounge and it automatically sending my information to someone else’s plus account, dual mystery plus accounts on nike.com lost at least 700KM there alone(if you check my account now I have about 175KM…WTF. My latest loss was a mystery I finished running and heard that beautiful voice tell me my stats and summary but when I connected my nano to upload the latest run to Nike plus, my blog and twiike.com there was nothing there [shrugs shoulders]. Well being a geek the first time this happened I thought to myself that there had to be a way to hack i mean investigate a way to add my runs to my account. The first thing I did was a Google search ‘hacking nike plus’, and the results came as they always do. I picked through my findings and came across this article http://www.walkjogrun.net/blog/index.cfm/2006/9/6/Hacking-the-Sport-Kit Right now in Toronto its 23:14 and I just got back from the gym and a 5KM run and I have to meet with a client tomorrow so I want to get to bed so I will try “earnshavian” lil trick tomorrow when I get home and post my results on my blog www.gregkeane.com. As for the 700KM plus I’ve contacted Nike and they said they are on the case, yeah right, this is the second time I’ve contacted them about this, well maybe this time they’ll do something for me.Anyway here is are the instructions on hacking the plus files.
I wasn’t so much looking for accuracy, just to be able to capture the fact that I ran 5.15 miles. I have my iPod setup to act as a hard disk so I have access to the files on it. I also have my windows explorer setup to show hidden files, which the iPod files are listed as. A quick dig around the files on my Nano while it was connected shows that there are two key folders for tracking your runs. There is a directory for your historical runs: {ipoddrive}:\iPod_Control\Device\Trainer\Workouts\Empeds\{personal pedometer id}\synched\ and another for your latest runs which haven’t been synched yet: {ipoddrive}:\iPod_Control\Device\Trainer\Workouts\Empeds\{personal pedometer id}\latest\ My synched directory contained a run from September 3rd over the same distance and roughly the same time. I copied the file from my iPod to my desktop and then opened it using WordPad to see the contents. It seems that the iPod tracks key events:
• power song
• pace check
• mile split
• km split
• pause workout
• resume workout
• stop workout
and it also keeps a list of distances taken every 10 seconds. Not wanting to fudz anything up, I found two parts of the file which refered to the date and time of the run so I updated it to show today at 6.29am in both places and saved the file. I noticed that the naming convention for the files was consistent so I followed the convention, renaming my new file “2006-09-06 07;39;54.xml”. I copied it onto my iPod under the “latest” folder and ejected my iPod. When I looked at my workout history once disconnected from my computer, sure enough, I now have a 9/6/06 workout in place. The next and scariest step was to connect my Nano again while connected to the internet and visit the site to see what happened to my running history. Sure enough, my run was correctly added to my running history and happiness rained all around.
Use this information for good and not for any evil you may be considering but I am delighted this little hack worked! Of course, in an ideal world, this kind of hack wouldn’t be necessary and the Nike+ site would allow you to add workouts you didn’t do with your sport kit connected with some limitations like 1 per week or something to avoid people cheating themselves.
Thanks again:earnshavian