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CCC Mods Rent-a-Bike To Allow Free Rides
Autoversicherung writes "Germany has an activated by phone bike rental system across all major cities. At 6 cent a minute quite pricey, germanys famous Chaos Computer Club thought a free ride every now and then couldnt hurt.
Optimizing the original system in the process, modifying the blink code to be easier found and changing the logo. About 10% of Berlins bikes are patched already. A detailed description of how they did it, and how the system works."
Their website explains...To return your bike, take it to the nearest major crossing within the core area and lock it to a fixed object, e.g., a traffic sign or a bicycle stand but not, please, on a traffic light.
This would not work in America.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully..." -Wherry
6c a minute sounds pricey, until you realize it's $3.60 an hour, which doesn't sound so bad.
If the system stops making money the bikes will be removed and the service will stop. Then who benefits? The price maybe high for the service but the option is to simply not use it. Just because the apples are over priced does that give you the right to steal them. Free market means you also have the right not to buy not to steal.
Why hack something that is for the common good, such as public, non-polluting transportation?
I also think the mods don't know exactly what "redundant" really means.
(I think this was the 3rd post)
MAKE YOUR TIME
Hey, sorry but it sounds to me that they are using a hole in a digital system to allow free usage of the PHYSICAL property of somebody else. I will leave to IP philosophe whether to copy IP is stealing or not, but to use somebody else property because the lock is not strong enough is obvious STEALING and VANDALISM. How about going into somebody else flat, eating their food, sleeping in their bed, because their digital alarm system with door code can be easily hacked with the maintenance password ? What on slashdot next ? How to steal a car by bypassing ignition key system ???
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
Now, if they're really recalled over winter for a once-over, I wonder how much harder they will be to get into when the snow melts and they reappear? Will the Call-A-Bikes become more impenetrable, as Darwinian geek theory dictates they'll need for survival?
On the flip side, I must also applaud the hackers for not simply vandalising the bikes, but modifying them to return to service once the "free ride" was over. (Perhaps misguided) - theft all the same, but at least free of physical destruction.
The problem I have with that is that with how often bikes are stolen, vandalised and the initial cost of purchasing them the 6cent per minute might seem costly but appears to be closer to just covering the costs of the service. This is no Robin Hood Hackjob to have those bikes available for free, it's just a way of inching the concept closer to being abandoned by the company. And with by now 10% hacked and this ongoing without publicity for a while they can't honestly claim that it's just for pointing out a security flaw in the system.
" So if I park my own bike somewhere, I'm trying to convert this piece of city into my own private parking space?"
I agree with your point, but your analogy is silly unless you own 1700 bikes. You're expected to park your own personal bike by chaining it to the nearest lamppost.
"If this is morally defensible is your own call."
It's easy for me to say because I don't own the bikes, but it's worth noticing that they went to lengths to make sure the bikes were still usable. (Compared to all the other vandalism these bikes have apparently suffered.)
Also, notice that they didn't give out their magic code on the Internet.
It's obvious that these people are just doing this for fun, not out of a strong desire for financial gain. Heck, for all the man-hours that went into this project, they could have worked at a minimum wage job and then purchased a bicycle.
The 'witte fietsen' plan was dumb, like most of the stuff hippies thought up.
About as dumb as the average dotcom business plan, like much of the stuff thought up by the typical business fanatic.
Some people will not have respect for something they receive for free. If they can break it without consequences, they will.
A statistically small fraction of poorly socialised people, generally children, will vandalise the system. Depending on the resulting costs (as compared a so-called free market approach with costs in advertising and competitive duplication, or monopoly rent) this approach may or may not be a good idea. Judging by other posts here it is a good idea in smaller towns.
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Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.
The "someone" in this case is the city or some such municipal body, so they own the streets, so what they do with them is their business, so all your talk of "private retail space without paying anything for it" is just a complete red herring.
Regardless of that, a weak lock isn't an excuse to commit what's clearly a crime, taking something that's not yours to take without paying the proper price for it. A weak front door lock doesn't give you the right to enter someone's house, watch their TV and take a nap in their bed and a weak lock on a bike doesn't give you the right to treat it as if its your own property either.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
"Inside every British person, there is a little monarchist. Inside every German, there is a little anarchist."
Hacking for fun, yeah sure. But doing what could ultimately cause the demise of this whole concept.. thats just Wrong.
To be honest, I don't think the proprietor lost any money at all to these "hacks", as long as the same ring of people that did the hacks were the only ones that knew about the secret back-door.
Why? Notice that aside from the first bike that was, well, temporarily stolen, they probably actually RENTED (=paid money) the other 170 bikes (10% of all the cycles in Berlin) in order to install the back-door. At 6cents per minute, I'd say they probably rented each cycle atleast 10 minutes a piece, which would be 60cents x 170 cycles = 102euros. I have a hunch that the benefits they got from being able to just ride around the bicycle for free since they installed the hacks, was about the same or a bit less than the 102euros. But they got the benefit of getting kicks out of the idea, I'm sure.
It's vandalism. It's probably wrong. The ethics are slightly questionable. But it's not serious damage, really, and releasing the story isn't gonna allow a bunch of script kiddies to go out and crack the bicycles. You need to be pretty good to pull this one off. The Intellectual Property bit was not set, but it STILL took them some very impressive reverse engineering skills to figure the original program out. I'd like to see how many people here moaning (my guess is less than 1%) would be able to figure out, from the assembly code, how the original rent codes and lock cycles were coded.
All in all, it's pretty cool, really. Chill out, it's a harmless prank.
I'm willing to bet that even the "failed" the program was much more successful than most people realize since those "stolen" bikes are probably still providing transportation for people who can't afford much else. One has to adopt a mindset of abundance when evaluating programs like this. If you are stuck on "are people sharing" etc. the program will always be judged a failure as we do not live in a gift economy. "Are some of those bikes useful?" and "Do some people who could not previously afford transportation have it now?" (presumably) state the objectives much better. Unless of course the objective was to provide convenient transportation to a relatively affluent few in which case the program was doomed from the start.
It does sound like a relatively small number of overpriced (for the job) bikes were provided. In my city I can buy a hot mountain bike for $15 so why would I pay anything close for a stolen one-speed POS? If someone can only afford $5 for transportation, maybe they are just a good candidate for a free bike.
So, other than a firmware update (which I suspect may have to happen to all bikes regularly anyhow), those hackers haven't done any physical damage that can't be easily undone.
Arguably, they have caused revenue loss for the DB from the bikes that were used for free, but since there is no description on how the backdoor works or how it is advertised, I would assume that only a select group of people knows of this.
In the article itself they made some "ethical" decisions (i.e.: not able to grab a currently rented bike, not able to park a freebie without giving a regular customer the chance to phone it in), which indicates that they want to preserve the utility value for regular customers as much as possible.
All in all:
Is this legal ? No siree, definitely not...
Did the hackers do it to get free bikes, or just for the challenge of it? My guess would be the latter.
Is this a nice hack in the spirit of the hackers of the old days? Definitely: this hack required a lot of skill and creativity, for that they deserve some respect.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
[Zappa]
Perhaps some philosopher could conclude that I've really just abandoned the bikes, and rather than hacking 10% of them, CCC might have done better to hack 100%.
Ah, so without having to think about whether you're stealing from a fellow citizen, you blame it on an unspecified, undefined "philosophy". Ridiculous.
You can't compare the taking you're doing with the Dutch bicycles, because those were intended to be free - here, you're just committing robbery from your neighbor. Everybody leaves bikes locked to public property, everywhere. You just aren't willing to admit that you like being a thief, and only because your victim doesn't get to see or catch you. Because if you did, you'd start stealing from little old ladies, and you'd probably like it too. You have no shame.
Saying that bikes locked to public property are abandoned is absurd - when you park a car on a public street, and lock the doors, you must be abondoning that fine set of wheels, I guess, right? Let me know where you live, and I will come rid the street of your trash!
For the record, Witte Fietsen didn't work because nobody wanted to take responsibility for fixing or replacing broken parts, plus people like you stole the bicycles and painted them other colors.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
These people's "ethics" are laughable.
So stealing for individuals is wrong, but stealing from a big, bad company is okay? This is a great example of moral relativism.
Ha, ha! Nobody ever says Italy.
The designer of the lock says, "it can't be broken". This is like waving a red flag (or two) before a bull. Of course, now someone has to actually break it to prove a point.
Call it vandalism, call it theft, call it whatever you want. Basically, the "hackers" were responding to the challenge.
Please, lets not split hairs here. It'll leave us all bald.
That turn of phrase is quite erroneous. When playing poker, your first declaration or action stands and you cannot then alter it. Attempting to do so is called "string betting." The instant you said "see," that implied a call. At that point, a raise in the same action is not allowed. You will never hear that phrase at a poker table without two things happening: the speaker will be instantly recognized as a greenhorn, and the dealer will disallow the raise.
As for the spelling of "mis-spelt", asking google is a lousy way to go. Dictionary.com says "misspelled," or optionally "misspelt". I've always used the former.
As to the question of whether the great-grandparent misspelled or not, I guess you say poe-TAY-toh and I say poe-TAH-toh.
Don't act shocked. There is a world beyond slashdot, you know.
Computer guys prove yet again that shortsighted and selfish thinking is not exclusive to lawyers and MBAs.
Crackers are a subset of hackers.
No, because some crackers are script kiddies, not hackers. I think it's likely that *most* crackers are not hackers.
There are two sets of people: hackers and crackers, and the sets have a non-empty intersection.
The people who did this appear to members of both sets, as well as fairly responsible people. They did take a bike out of service for a few months, but they appear to have put all of the bikes back, and taken care not to disturb the system. Other than to enable a very small group of people to get occasional free rides on a small percentage of the bikes.
Not to say that I'd encourage this sort of thing, but it really falls more into the category of a mostly-harmless prank, rather than real vandalism. It's entirely possible that Die Bahn even makes money off of it, since free riders who can't find a hack-a-bike will probably end up taking a call-a-bike quite frequently. If they didn't get the free rides they might have chosen to just ride their own bike. And Die Bahn certainly got some free penetration testing.
Probably the worst part of this story is that its publication may motivate other less-skilled and less-responsible people to try their own hand at hacking bikes, which will result in broken bikes and costly vandalism.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I hate to sound the old familiar gripe, but I don't think that your free bike program would work here in the U.S. It would take about 38 minutes for someone to fall and hurt themselves on a free bike, then sue the city.
Evil is the money of root.