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Comment by hiou | Hacker News Reader

When you are some kid in their parents basement and figure out ways to scam money from public transit you are rebelling as a natural part of childhood.

When you are a well skilled and very well payed employee of a high profile tech company you are essentially having fun at the expense of the public servants who work(for a lot less money) to provide essential services to the public.

Maybe those reading this can take this as a lesson in tone and tact.

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> you are essentially having fun at the expense of the public servants

The author never actually went out and fraudulently saved money by implementing his idea, so I fail to see how his actions are "at the expense of the public servants". To quote him,

> One final note before I dive in: this algorithm is essentially large scale ticket swapping, which is obviously illegal and unethical. I don’t believe that it would be ethical to use this in the real world. I value safe and smooth travel more than I value the 20-40% of my fare I could save by stealing from

> The author never actually went out and fraudulently saved money by implementing his idea

nope, it's just a big mental wank designed to show the world that the author is medium clever and knows how to write down an ILP problem, make pretty graphs, and something about NFC.

I'm not sure which I find less appealing, really.

I think he shouldn't have made the source available. Now it's really only the (apparent?) uncloneability of the Clipper cards that stops someone.

I am of the view that anyone who finds an exploit should (generally) do what they feel would have the best result. This would incentivize organisations to create payouts (prizes) for non-public exploits, and it would allow concerned citizens to force a change from generally unmovable bureaucracies.

This is just the latest justification among security people to not having acknowledge their own incompetency in things like risk management. Since when was "doing what you feel" considered a reasoned solution? Many times these things aren't even weaknesses as such, just loose tolerances in the system and exposing them under great fanfare just making the system less flexible. Which is pretty ironic if you think about it.

This is a silly objection. If you can clone clipper cards, you don't need special software to cheat the system. The software here is just an academic exercise in optimization algorithms.

The technical component of the post is really interesting and indeed it's a more general problem, but I had a similar reaction to the framing: spending time figuring out how to reduce revenue on public transportation isn't the right problem. That same time 'hacking' could have been spent thinking how to genuinely improve a public service.

It is a fun "what if" problem you might think about if you spend a lot of time on public transit and realize that the system is less than ideal. Of course, no systems are fraud proof, as doing so would usually require more resources than could be justified.

Thinking about the system at all is also a nice way of getting started with thinking about how to solve its real problems. Creative juice priming. This is why persecution of thought crimes isn't the right approach either.

Personally this is my least favorite artifact from hacker culture. Not necessarily thinking about these things, but the embellishing of it. There used to be a time where information was scares so it was hard to learn thing, today that isn't the case so one should pivot form reverse engineering the system to improving it fairly quickly. Instead people spend a lot of time formalizing how "smart" their hack was. The greater damage is of course that when a lot of people is ready to point out and celebrate inconsistencies it's hard to foster a culture of proposing improvements.

As the author said, Clipper Cards aren't cloneable, so this is impractical because it would require physically swapping BART tickets. It's just a theoretical mental exercise, not some kind of anti-government rebellion. And given the number of people I see each day simply jumping over the fare gates (very common in stations where there's no station agent booth next to all of the gates, and not uncommon even in stations where the agent is right there) this hack is hardly the biggest threat to BART revenue.

How many corporates have you seen not do something like this in some capacity but at a larger scale?

Something or the other was exploited (like natural resources, human resources) as money certainly didn't print itself.

Public transport is built at a great cost to income tax payer's money and subsequent subsidy to ensure the tax payers could afford it and prefer it. Usually, the only ones making money are the builders and manufacturers who were contracted to construct it, and other corporates and vested interests that are probably the 1%

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