jonluca

Most of my articles aren't opinion pieces or tutorials - they're explorations of topics and events I found interesting. I'll work through my logic and steps to discovering something new, or reverse engineer something that someone smarter than I did.

Some of my favorite posts:

https://blog.jldc.me/posts/illegal-streams?ref=about - Illegal streams, decrypting m3u8’s, and building a better stream experience - An article on exploring illegal sports streams online, building a client to watch them, and seeing how the streamers are piggybacking real services.

https://blog.jldc.me/posts/deobfuscating-amex-scammer?ref=ab... - Obfuscated javascript, scam emails, and American Express - An article on reversing and decompiling obfuscated javascript, tracking spam emails, and finding the root command and control server for a scam campaign.

https://blog.jldc.me/posts/ryan-air?ref=about - Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights - An article on how I routed my European vacation, writing an NP hard problem solver, and releasing a tool to help you do the same.

Added an mp3 version, should work across browsers now.

The code is fairly trivial though - Cytoscape does most of the heavy lifting https://github.com/jonluca/blog/blob/master/js/ryanair-graph...

Full text:

What’s changing?

From upfront price to estimated price range You will now see a price range rather than a set price before you request any non-Pool ride, which is our best estimate of what the trip will cost you. The final price will be calculated at the end of your trip, based on the actual time and distance traveled. You can see the final price on your receipt or in the app.

Schedule rides with your favorite drivers After you give a driver a 5-star rating, you can now add them as a Favorite Driver. Next time you request a scheduled ride, your favorite drivers will have the opportunity to accept your reservation. If you give a driver a 1-star rating, you won’t be matched on future rides.

Changes to Uber Rewards benefits We unfortunately have to discontinue some Uber Rewards benefits, like price protection on a route and flexible cancellations, for trips in California. To learn more, see the Rewards hub in your Uber app. We’re actively working on new benefits for California riders, so stay tuned for future announcements.

I'll do some research, thanks for pointing it out.

Update: added a fallback to images using:

``` const iOS = /iPad|iPhone|iPod/.test(navigator.userAgent) && !window.MSStream;

// iOS doesn't load google sheets embeds for some reason :/ if(iOS){ const toReplace = document.querySelectorAll('.aa-image'); for(const image of toReplace){ const imageUrl = image.id; image.outerHTML = `{% include image.html file="${imageUrl}" alt="${imageUrl}" %}` } } ```

With the transition to wifi entertainment that seems to have been lost, but would be pretty interesting to make a timelapse or be able to create a personalized dashboard from the raw data.

The mental effort of going to the site at all was what I was trying to circumvent - now I don't even need to think about it (the clearer abstraction is that going from "2 to 1" is a much less drastic jump than going from "1 to 0" - completely removing the overhead is what makes this worthwhile, IMO, not the actual speed of the actions)

Interesting way to compare this auto script to adblocking.

If I was more worried about Safeway catching on I'd probably do something as you suggested (at the very least I'd add user agent headers and the other cookies expected from a real session, as right now it's trivial to detect my requests).

Sneaker bots do this exceedingly well - it's a constant cat and mouse game to make the requests look as human as possible, very interesting space right now.

Once all is said and done (all stock accounted for and distributed on a weekly basis rather than on the vesting cycle) and the expenses above are taken out, there's ~11k left over a month. This is post tax.

Might make more sense to change it to FLAAG

I wonder if they'll bake the bonus in. Getting those $100k signing bonuses are pretty nice, especially since some companies give 25% or 50% before you start, which allows you to do a trip. Plus $100k added into a 4 year vesting schedule is a pretty large opportunity cost (assuming you could grow at 7% a year, which is admittedly aggressive, is leaving ~$30k on the table).

It reenables the following functionality on sites that disable it:

* Ability to paste content * Ability to copy content * Ability to cut content * Ability to right click content * Ability to autocomplete certain inputs * Ability to select text * Ability to drag and drop text to/from inputs

If a website does not allow you to copy and paste simply click the icon and try again.

Source code here: https://github.com/jonluca/PasteEnabler

Let me know if you see any sites where it does not work or that do more complicated JavaScript limits - it's very rewarding finding ways to break their "security" implementations.

says "Remove Trace finder as it is the same as BestFirstFinder"

There's no security breach, or even unauthorized network request - their service is requesting this data to your machine, from within their client. I think they just aren't thinking about potential repercussions in their testing names.

https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/ryan-air and https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/uber-stats are two blog posts of mine that follow a very similar path.