Hackathon Team Builds Blockchain Anti-Cheat Layer for Open-Source Among Us Clone

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At MLH's Midnight Hackathon in July, a four-person team developed Shadow Protocol, a cryptographic anti-cheat system layered onto an open-source Among Us clone built with pygame. The project addresses a core fairness problem: in many multiplayer games, role assignment like impostor selection can be manipulated or faked without players knowing. Shadow Protocol uses on-chain commitments to make role deals provable, meaning a player's role is cryptographically locked before the game begins and can be verified afterward. The system tracks six game events — deal, kill, vote, ejection, winner, and audit — and rejects actions like kills or saboteur claims that cannot be proven against prior commitments. The team deliberately scoped the build tightly, cutting features like extra roles and a web client to ensure all six core events were fully implemented and verifiable by game end.

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Developer Releases LocalMind, a Free AI Agent Framework That Runs Entirely Offline

A developer has released LocalMind, an open-source AI agent framework designed to run entirely on a user's local machine without requiring any cloud API keys or subscriptions. The project was motivated by frustration over recurring API costs and concerns about sending personal data to third-party servers. LocalMind supports local language models via Ollama — including Llama 3.2, Mistral, and DeepSeek — and can also run inference directly in the browser using WebGPU. The framework features a ReAct reasoning loop, custom tool calling, real-time token streaming, and conversation memory with snapshot and restore capabilities. The project is publicly available on GitHub and can be installed via npm.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Why Your API Passes curl Tests but Fails in the Browser: CORS Explained

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is a browser security mechanism that blocks web pages from making requests to a different origin — such as a different port — than the one that served them. Unlike curl, which sends requests without any concept of origin, browsers enforce this policy to prevent malicious sites from exploiting stored user credentials on third-party services. When an API call involves methods like POST or DELETE, or includes headers such as Authorization, the browser first sends a preflight OPTIONS request to verify the server permits cross-origin access. The server must respond with the appropriate access-control headers; if it does not, the actual request is never made, which explains why server logs may show a 200 status while the browser console reports an error. A lightweight Go middleware using only the standard library can handle CORS correctly by checking allowed origins, setting the required headers, and short-circuiting preflight requests before they reach route handlers.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

From Napster to Chord: How Peer-to-Peer Systems Solved the File Lookup Problem

Peer-to-peer file sharing distributes storage across participants, but the harder challenge has always been answering which peer holds a given file at any moment. Napster addressed this with a centralized directory that tracked file locations without hosting the files themselves, making searches fast but creating a single point of failure. Gnutella later attempted to fix this by flooding search queries across the network, eliminating central control but generating unsustainable traffic as the network scaled. Structured overlay networks and distributed hash tables, including Chord, eventually offered a more elegant solution by routing lookups in logarithmic steps rather than querying every peer. This evolution illustrates how decentralizing data is straightforward, but decentralizing the knowledge of where that data lives remains the genuinely difficult engineering problem.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Why PMOs Are Losing Relevance in the Age of Agile Delivery

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