Two Men Arrested for Hacking the Taxi Dispatch System at JFK Airport | Hacker News Reader

Two Men Arrested for Hacking the Taxi Dispatch System at JFK Airport

justice.gov

16 pointsjsm38612 comments

Ultimately messing around with the order so some guys get more fares is a pretty petty crime for the suggestive "Russian national" headline it is given.

What will those pesky RUSSIAN HACKERS get up to next!?!?

It is nuts though that this can scale to $10k/day... There must be a LOT of cabs waiting in line.

Tens of millions of people fly into JFK a year; millions leave the airport by cab (thanks to miserable public transport options near the airport). The current flat rate into Manhattan for yellowcabs is $52, and it's even more for other boroughs due to non-fixed metering (my part of Brooklyn is around $70). There's a lot of money floating around there!

Oh for sure... I'm used to waiting forever for a cab sometimes at JFK, which kind of suggests there's not a whole pool of cabs waiting to pick someone up. I guess I'm surprised that given these volumes cabs have to wait as long as travelers do. Seems like they need a whole foods style queue with multiple lines.

Ride sharing apps have decimated the taxi industry. I find that I must wait longer for a cab than in the past, presumably because there are fewer of them operating.

But this press release suggests otherwise! Apparently there are so many cabs that it's worth it for them to pay money to skip to the front of the line.

Perhaps at that airport it's still lucrative enough to operate a taxi, but the reason for the long wait for a fare is likely the availability of alternative ride-sharing services.

> miserable public transport

JFK has the AirTrain which takes you right to LIRR trains or subway connections. The Jamaica subway station needs a serious cleaning, but otherwise public transport there is far better than most other US airports.

I am intimately familiar with the AirTrain :-)

"Far better than nonexistent" is not glowing praise! Most other countries I've been to have public transport that takes you from the terminal entrance to city center in under 25 minutes. It's never taken me less than 1.5 hours to go from JFK to anywhere in Manhattan by train or bus.

What's incredible is some cabbies wait multiple hours for a fare, which will generally be less than $55

It's normal for the AG's press releases to contain "X National" when the subjects of investigation are foreign nationals. Compare, for example, this recent press release about a Malaysian National[1].

Edit: Or this one about Mexican Nationals[2].

[1]: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/us-attorney-announces-e...

[2]: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/six-mexican-nationals-s...

> conspired with Russian

Tell me your indictment is a bunch of lies without telling me your indictment is a bunch of lies. "Russian hackers did it!" is getting really old, when it's obvious now that Russia couldn't hack its way out of a wet paper bag.

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