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London Hacked Its Own Traffic Lights To Make Sure It Got the Olympics
bmsleight writes "Does it count as a hack if you change your own system? Vanity Fair report that during the bidding process for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the London Streets Traffic Control Center followed each vehicle using CCTV, 'and when they came up to traffic lights,' [bid committee CEO Keith] Mills said, 'we turned them green.'"
Every Olympic bid since Sydney's bid for the 2000 games has done the same. This isn't anything new.
using CCTV to change traffic lights (apart from showing just how widespread the coverage in London is) is almost minor compared to some of the other bid stunts - they took the motorcade through the (at that time, not yet opened) railway tunnels from St Pancras to Stratford, as if to demonstrate how easy it was to get to the Olympic site - provided you didn't see any of that "get in the way" stuff. Like the city...
"She's furniture with a pulse"
It was really difficult to find which cars they allowed through in Vanity Fair for those who don't feel like reading the rest of the article about the most boring subjects on the planet: olympic sports, and London
"Near the end of the application process, an I.O.C. evaluation committee was permitted to visit London. Bid-committee officials knew that London’s transportation system was a weak spot on the city’s application. “Our nightmare was it would take forever to get to the venues,” Mills recalled. A bid-committee team planned the routes that I.O.C. members would travel around the city, and G.P.S. transmitters were planted in all of the I.O.C. members’ vehicles so they could be tracked. From the London Traffic Control Center, near Victoria Station, where hundreds of monitors display live feeds from London’s comprehensive CCTV surveillance system, each vehicle was followed, from camera to camera, “and when they came up to traffic lights,” Mills said, “we turned them green.”
You'd be surprised how much hardware and software have back doors built into them, much of it legally.
GOOGLE: Cisco routers back doors
and you'll find hours of reading material alone just for one company.
WIKILEAKS: published information on dozens of companies making spyware for hardware and software and selling it to governments.
When is the last time you checked the firmware on your PCI devices and network card?
Your router?
Dumped and checksummed/debugged your BIOS lately?
Why aren't the anti-malware companies like Symantec and others climbing over each other in an effort to invent the technology and utilize it via the cloud to create GIANT databases of checksums for legit firmware for hardware in the fight against the most serious of root kits? Are they in bed with big bro?
How many so called remote exploits were patched this week in Windows? This month? This year? Since its release? Start from the beginning of the Windows version release and count all of the remote exploits up to present day and compare that to OpenBSD for example.
##
U.S. govâ(TM)t wiretapping laws and your network
â" https://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/012307-us-govt-wiretapping-laws-and.html
âoeActivists have long grumbled about the privacy implications of the legal âoebackdoorsâ that networking companies like Cisco build into their equipmentâ"functions that let law enforcement quietly track the Internet activities of criminal suspects. Now an IBM researcher has revealed a more serious problem with those backdoors: They donâ(TM)t have particularly strong locks, and consumers are at risk.â
â" http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/03/hackers-networking-equipment-technology-security-cisco.html
1. Giving IOC Observers the lights didn't "Make Sure" that London got the Olympics. A major overstatement to be sure. /.ers. Not only do we do it with packets, we already to it on roads. Vehicles with sirens and lights have first priority, and at least in tUSA we give funeral parades second priority. Third priority goes to buses which have TSP [traffic signal prioritization] systems, thereby holding a light green or turning it green when a bus approaches. Last priority: us regular users. Giving a higher priority to IOC Observers might not be a great use of taxpayer dollars or appropriate for fairness, but that's a local political decision and certainly not a novel application of technology.
2. While London may have used CCTV, it surely wasn't necessary. A few motorcyclists or taxi drivers with mobile phones and headsets could have just as easily kept tabs on the IOC Observers [so could GPS, though perhaps not as accurately as humans].
3. The idea of prioritizing traffic in a network should not be novel to
But hey, the story involves CCTV, traffic lights, and sports which don't always involve a ball or a puck. Perfect fodder for a silly /. article.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
The first traffic lights in the world were on Downing St. They were gas powered and later exploded, killing a police officer.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
One of my favourite definitions of hacking : Using things in a unique way outside their intended purpose is often perceived as having hack value. (It's not me who posted this on WP).
They did is a hack with their CCTV+green-lights.
It's certainly not ethical, and could be argued as fraud since you're not demonstrating the normal operation of the traffic grid.
Given the amount of special treatment they've given to Olympic transport (e.g. their own special lanes), this was probably quite representative of what they could expect. Frankly, when they found out the car they were being driven around in wasn't made by one of the officially-permitted Olympic sponsors, the guide probably agreed to have it set on fire and a new £250,000 replacement delivered from the nearest appropriate dealership pronto.
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