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Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

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Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#141
post #57

Back in the day (1960s?) two relatives of mine had a prank battle going on. One of them posted an add in the local newspaper offering to buy old Christmas trees, at the address of their adversary. Half the city showed up, were told trees were not in fact being bought, and everybody dumped the trees at their door.

It reminds me of a newspaper ad I saw 20 years ago which read "Free monkey and 10 pounds of monkey food. call 555-555-5555". Well the gentleman that answered did not have a monkey for sale, and was quite rude about it.

That number shouldn't work, right?

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that. The sap in it will collect in the chimney and then cause a chimney fire. You really don't want to burn that stuff in a fireplace.

I'd say that is a symtom of bad combustion (too little air). Not what kind of wood you use. Sap burns just fine.

It's both too low temperature burning leaving resiude in the chimney that can catch fire later, AND pine/spruce having way too much sap to burn alone. You should absolutley mix it with other wood when you burn it, same as oak.

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#143
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminds me of a newspaper ad I saw 20 years ago which read "Free monkey and 10 pounds of monkey food. call 555-555-5555". Well the gentleman that answered did not have a monkey for sale, and was quite rude about it.

That number shouldn't work, right?

I am assuming OP is using 555 as a stand-in for whatever number was there at the time, however long ago.

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better question is, will they be able to outlaw t-shirts with 20km/h speed limit signs on the back or people walking on the sidewalk wearing them.

Pfft. I’ve already got my collection of t shirts ready: -1km/h NULL km/h false km/h alert() km/h

    ; DROP table traffic_signs;

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that is a symtom of bad combustion (too little air). Not what kind of wood you use. Sap burns just fine.

It's both too low temperature burning leaving resiude in the chimney that can catch fire later, AND pine/spruce having way too much sap to burn alone. You should absolutley mix it with other wood when you burn it, same as oak.

Fair enough. Feels like you have more (possibly hard-earned) experience than me on this issue.

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#146
post #138

The title is kind of misleading. Yandex has thousands of cars here in Moscow. There were around 60 in this jam on the prospect. So most likely not "ordered all avaiable", but "the order was forwareded for all available in the radius" or something like that. Surely you can't order a car in Yadex Taxi much less order all of them or even a car from another part of the city.

This video shows at least 45 cabs, so dare say there was a lot more than 60:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/x3neh...

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#147
post #61
post #6

This is what happens when optimists win and the realists are cut out of the conversation. As a taxi service, I believe I would want to know if I'm about to have a shortage of taxis in any one area of town, and I'd better only have a concentration in one area of town for an event the entire world is talking about, like a reunion tour or a championship game. Even with the hack, the moment all of the taxis started conve…

In most areas taxi-companies use a zone-based system where cars will flag what zone they're in (rarely automatically using GPS and more often via button presses) this is an effort by the cab company to keep their vacant vehicles well distributed to keep a high response rate and increase customer turnover. It also happens to have the side benefit that an operator watching the flagged zones would be able to see this ki…

Maybe that was the case 10 years ago. Or 15.

Nowadays it's all automatic, there are no predefined zones - only past statistics and about zero operators.

edit: srsly, that's what Uber is all about. and YTaxi is one of Moscow Ubers.

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#149
post #57

Back in the day (1960s?) two relatives of mine had a prank battle going on. One of them posted an add in the local newspaper offering to buy old Christmas trees, at the address of their adversary. Half the city showed up, were told trees were not in fact being bought, and everybody dumped the trees at their door.

Back in the Depression, my grandfather and a friend posted an ad. It claimed to be a medical laboratory who needed cats for an experiment, and offering $0.25 per cat if people would bring their cats to the local train station at whatever time.

Of course there were no lab representatives waiting at the appointed time, so lots of people just dumped their cats (or perhaps they were feral cats that they rounded up?) at the train station. The neighborhood was infested with them for some time after that.

Unusually for gramps, he actually proved that this particular story was true. He actually had a newspaper clipping that told the story.

Re: Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

#150
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more of what happens when you do the least effort to build a product to make a buck. They're probably optimized for the average happy path, however flooding isn't a concern until someone gets upset.

Not necessarily. Despite us armchair critics, it is also very easy to miss an attack vector when building your software. We find stuff after years that we can't believe we missed like a missing auth check. Not that unusual at all when you are talking about 10s of 1000s of lines of code written by different people over the span of about 8 years.

That’s why I favored detection at the top. I’ve worked on complex code signing apps that the blockchain people would recognize. Shit is hard. You can’t stop many things and still make money. But if you figure out what the boundaries are of the nominally running system, you can chart or earn when you start to lose the plot.

I prefer charts over alerts, because as the company grows we keep forgetting to update the alerts. But then you need people who look at the charts between other tasks or you won’t catch anything and have to go back to alerts.

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