First off, I’m not responsible for how you use this information. I have already notified souq.com of this leak, and they are ‘working on it’. As for why I informed them, go figure. While it might be convenient to just buy everything at reserve price, what about sellers? There is probably a small window of a few days from the time I inform souq.com to when they fix it, so you can play to your heart’s content.
As for viewing the reserve price, just find an auction with one. I have used one of my own (inactive) auctions for the following example:
Next, open the page source. This example is for Firefox. Internet Explorer users have a similar option in the ‘View’ menu called ‘Source’. If you’re on a mac using Safari and don’t know how to view source, you’re a trendwhore. GTFO.
When you click it, the source window shows up. The reserve price is easy to locate, like so:
That’s it! Happy Bidding! And remember, until souq.com fixes this leak, you are not liable for anything. This is not hacking or reverse engineering. They are legally releasing this information (the reserve price) over the internet, just not displaying it. If you use this ‘trick’ to obtain reserve prices and bid accordingly, you aren’t breaking any rules or laws. You are just working with whatever souq.com gives you for download on an auction page.
Also, the closest souq.com comes to mentioning anything related to hacking is article 1.2.7 of their terms and conditions, quoted here:
1.2.7. shall not contain any viruses, Trojan horses, worms, time bombs,
cancelbots, Easter eggs or other computer programming routines that may
damage, detrimentally interfere with, surreptitiously intercept or expropriate
any system, data or personal information;
The trick I have posted here involves none of that.
About time souq.com woke up and ditched their bad programming practices. They don’t even have SSL, for one. And they haven’t really moved to XHTML yet. A lot of scripts are client side. Really pathetic.
I bet a souq.com admin is reading this, racking his brains trying to figure out how to view source on his new macbook pro.
