How to Investigate Leaks

Hi there, I don't know much about animal jam, but I love combatting misinformation, so here we go! Also, necessary to include at the beginning, in no way is this post meant to be disrespectful or otherwise hateful. No attempt was made to target this individual. I am only making this post based on a number of contents on a publicly accessible thread.

Recently, I saw some posts about potential upcoming game updates and in the comments, the redditor went into how they data-mined for this information. Though, they of course could not share their methods. So here's how to data mine.

1. Don't Data Mine - We'll start here, for the vast majority of you, please don't play around with random stuff on your computer. I understand that this sub has a larger crowd of younger people, so to those: data mining / apk mining is a great gateway into learning about computers / computer science. But always be extremely cautious when perusing online.

2. Download Animal Jam APK - Here's the first bit of disinformation, you don't actually data mine games. Data mining would be collecting and interpreting large amounts of data from real world sources. APK mining is when you scrape the contents of a game or application to learn about its contents. The animal jam APK can be procured through a variety of ways, although I will not be linking them directly, browse safely, download only from trusted websites. Once you have the animal jam APK, you are good to continue.

3. Decode the APK - Android APK's are converted into HEX when interpreted by the computer. HEX is a machine language, meaning that its instructions can be converted into binary (1's and 0's), but it can also be converted to ASCII, aka, plain english. This can be done in a variety of ways, if you trust your scripting you can write a simple .sh script, most of us though will use a website. Same rules apply from step 2.

4. The Difficult Part - In this step, you will have to sort through a large amount of data. The raw converted text from any APK is going to be filled with an insane amount of junk. This is how I unfortunately was able to identify that this other person was entirely making up their story about data mining. To identify useful/not useful information from a decoded APK would require a level of Computer Science understanding that simply warrants a higher level of understanding than this person was able to demonstrate. The best way to navigate through this step, is consume some related information about APK mining on youtube, or buddy up with your favorite generative AI platform.

5. Replace and Read - This step involved a lot of CTRL + F. In this step, you will be sifting through the text from step 4, replacing expressions with human readable text. In you converted file, you will have a lot of things that look like ".command" and "this_is_a_string". These are bits of code, and variables respectively. This is where you will uncover any information you are going to find.

Here's the thing though, and why I made this post. Computer science is cool, its my job, and it can be a really interesting topic. What is not cool are individuals with enough knowledge to gatekeep, but not enough to educate. APK mining is cool, but 99% of the time will return nothing to the user except known code. Game developers often do not push vast amounts of "update" or "collab" content until it is ready. I believe this person saw a leak, made other leaks in the past, and claimed responsibility for something they weren't sure how to explain. It's lot easier to pretend to be educated, than to actually be educated, but don't be that guy caught up in a lie!