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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.'"
...except without all the crashes and explosions and mini-coopers with gold bricks in them.
Every Olympic bid since Sydney's bid for the 2000 games has done the same. This isn't anything new.
Last thing any sane person would want is being constantly followed. Now we know the Brits are willing to do this if they think they can get something out of it. So far for privacy. Oh and next time you're in the car with your pregnant wife trying to get to an hospital but can't because the lights are red... Well, the police chief is probably on his way home and needed the lights to be green...
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's "Potemkin village".
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
closing down the whole street for the convoy.
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.”
Nevada is mulling the concept of paying to drive over the limit.
While I think thats immoral, I can see legislators drooling over the possibility of allowing drivers to pay to get more green lights.
I am not surprised that London had to resort to CCTV to achieve that. (The movie Brazil comes to mind).
Help eliminate speeding tickets
I consider this fair play.
fact, this is one of the capabilities that the Olympic Committee should specifically look for. The ability of a city to dynamically change its traffic lights and alter traffic flow to deal with a special situation is an important one in a city hosting an major event like this. It means that if they manage it properly, they can reduce congestion around the site, get atheletes and fans in and out quicker and have a better chance of having everything go on schedule. It's also a safety issue. If there are emergencies (and there always are when you have that many people in one place) you can get emergency vehicles in and out quickly.
London can probably do this better than most cities in the world because of its Big Brother system of pervasive security cameras. The cameras can be used for good, too, if they use them to reduce traffic congestion, detect that the crowd is starting to leave the event so they can begin adapting the traffic flow before people even leave the parking lot, etc.
Cancel it, it sucks.
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.
It's not hacking...it's optimization.
250 miles of (arguably) the most congested roads in the world being zoned off for use of executives of BMW and McDonalds could finally trigger mass civil disobedience on a scale that's simply too big to suppress. CCTV might ensure that all 'crimes' are detected, but whether they can be punished is another question.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The little people get to wait for the important people -- like the Olympic committee, or in the future perhaps anyone with enough money -- when the city changes its traffic patterns for them. After all, it is not really equality if the important people have to wait for red lights just like everyone else, right?
As for emergency vehicles, I live in a small city right now that manages to give them green lights without a special CCTV system. Each traffic light has a sensor that detects sirens/flashers and changes the light appropriately; it may sound surprising, but this is actually a reliable, well-engineered system.
We have big events here too -- the college football team's games draw big crowds from neighboring towns. CCTV is not needed for that either; police can simply disable traffic lights at appropriate locations and direct traffic as needed. Perhaps this is more than London could be expected to do, given how large of a city they are, but somehow I doubt it -- they have a much larger police force than we have.
Really, the benefit of the CCTV system for traffic control is overstated here. What London is really showing the world is that when important people are in their city, they can give those people priority as if they were an emergency vehicle, and they can do so discretely. People might complain if police officers started waving through businessmen and politicians, but nobody can complain about the light changing, and there is no need for rich people to attach flashers to their cars.
Palm trees and 8
Putting thousands of factories off line to turn the sky back to blue. Talk about false advertising!
Transparent attempts to win people over are filtered by the cognitive part of the brain through the motive filter. Seemingly random positive results may bypass this critical filter to heighten mood and induce pleasure rather seductively.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Who said they couldn't do both?
Traffic Signals can be designed this way - it is called priority "Hurry Call" in the UK.
However, it is counter-initiative in that a crash change to the approach where the Emergency vehicle is heading may (for example) cause the middle of the junction to not clear - making it harder/long for the Blue light vehicle to get through and cause more congestion for subsequent emergency vehicles.
technically Transport for London..
Absolute rubbish. Change the "green lights", behind the jam/incident will slow the flow into the congested area. Making it easier to get relieve the congestion. This with the use of VMS, encourages people to take alternative routes. Also upstream from the incident long green times will help traffic get away from the congestion.
Guess what - it is complex, but computer system and good algorithm can handle complexity.
Since nobody's yet posted the comment (or it's below my viewing threshold):
Premise: The International Olympic Committee's job/duty during the selection process is (at least officially) to make sure a place will be decent for those going to see the Olympics to stay and travel in. Also, it's supposed to check for logistical concerns relative to safety, access to venues, etc. A place that's not suitable is to be rejected, and a more/the most suitable place chosen.
Premise: Allowing bidders to "rig" a showing in such a way as hinders the IOC from properly assessing the above factors is problematic in fulfilling the purpose of the above selection requirements, and is therefore so undesirable as to preclude decent selection, short of basically random chance.
Premise: Bribery, "cheating," and other unethical acts are considered highly undesirable for any worthwhile organization to espouse or allow. An organization that systematically accepts and encourages such acts is not, in its present form, a worthwhile organization.
Premise: Britain has just admitted to such unethical acts as above, and the IOC isn't doing anything about it. It's also noted that the IOC's contract includes many terms and practices that are unethical and/or illegal under international law, and the laws of many nations, individually (including requirements about printing currency; forcing applicants to sign a binding contract to do a ton of expensive stuff before they're actually given anything; etc.).
Conclusion: The IOC is not a worthwhile organization (in its present form), and it does not fulfill at least some of the important (presumed official) purposes of that organization.
Conclusion: The continuation of this organization (in its current form) results from something entirely separate from its utility at fulfilling the sensible goals mentioned above, and almost certainly has something to do with the unethical practices being espoused.
Have I missed anything?
They must have been driving BMWs, they always have green lights - or their driver behaves like they had.
Do you have any sources that are not fox news to back that up?
Sources that aren't fox news made Obama into their candidate. Why would they report that?
A: Traffic system can be hacked (from inside but these days how hard could it be?)
B: CCTV can be used to track cars and most likely people
C: CCTV solves and/or prevents almost 0 crime (See Wiki)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-circuit_television
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/united-kingdom/090328/living-under-the-cctv-gaze
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
So? Its a simple fact that politics across the globe is so fucked up that you can't get anywhere without being corrupt and in the pocket of some well funded group.
Every person who takes that office will end up screwing you so pointing out "look hes the same as everyone else" is just a waste of time. Why blame the pieces when the rules of the game are broken?
Changing traffic lights is small fry. To even be permitted bid, potential host countries must enact laws to protect the commercial interests of the Olympics. I find it quite distasteful that we are paying billions (which could be much better used, especially in the current economic climate) to host their little jamboree and we bent over the barrel and let us dictate tweaks to part of our legal system.
Big companies like Apple and Google can do similar things of course: governments all over the world tweak employment and tax policies in order to make themselves more attractive ares to invest in, but the difference there is that (IMO at least) the benefits (employment and commercial investment momentum) are likely to hang around for a far longer term.
the London Streets Traffic Control Center followed each vehicle using CCTV
"Each vehicle" in this case refers to the vehicles carrying the IOC members, not just "each vehicle" that happened to on the road at the time.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
That word definitely lost all its meaning... since when does manually intervening in an automated process (and that through interfaces there by design for this purpose) can be thought of as "hacking". From all editors in the world, those on Slashdot should know better.
The goal of this action has nothing to do with whether you can call it hacking or not. In this case, I believe "fraud" would be more appropriate. This is a textbook case of it.
Samaranch killed them. Please shut them down for good.
The IOC and their behaviour are disgusting and should be illegal. (no taxes, influencing and hampering the national sovereignty, monopoly, frivolous law suits, bribery, etc, etc, etc.)
I hate the "new" IOC (post-Samaranch) and the stupid olympic games. It is completely contrary to the original olympic idea.
Actually that doesn't follow. In any system of reasonable complexity, (using this example) sometimes a long wait for one car at one stop will optimize the overall performance of the system - even if there is apparently nothing going on in the opposite direction. You can't look at the problem solely as a static, one-intersection problem. It's akin to n-dimensional queuing models, where n is the number of intersections and the number of possible interactions is n! Or see neural networks.
Not say that their system is smart - I have no idea of how their system works.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Because emphasizing specific individual pieces allows one to feel like the flaw doesn't go down to the core of the system. They can then feel better about interacting with it; they feel their participation is worthwhile. They feel like they have some control. It is an emotional defense of sorts.
This clearly constitutes fraud. They weren't just kissing the IOC's asses by letting them breeze through traffic, they were letting them think it is easier to get around London, and that you can travel around it faster than is actually possible. That means the city they evaluated (London with hacked traffic lights) does not exist (for everyone dumb enough to visit that benighted shithole).
Consequently, they should revoke their granting the "games" to London, and give it to someone else who wasn't committing fraud to try to win the games by sneaky underhanded tricks.
By the way, I don't give a rats ass about the Olympics, I just think that fraud should be punished.
This has nothing to do with hacking. I'm a bit surprised that they used CCTV for monitoring and as it seems manual commands to traffic light controllers based on what they see, but still had GPS in place. Modern traffic control systems do this automatically based on vehicle identification, location data and/or using other priority requests messages. Maybe London needs to upgrade their system to something more up to date?
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.
In any system of reasonable complexity, (using this example) sometimes a long wait for one car at one stop will optimize the overall performance of the system - even if there is apparently nothing going on in the opposite direction.
Uh, you can both be right. We've all sat there waiting for long periods while lights cycled for no reason. With more intelligence in the system you WOULD have less of these wait periods. It's expensive to put more intelligence in there, though; adding a sensor ain't cheap, and they don't necessarily last forever either. We're more likely to get good traffic management when drones become commonplace :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We did it, any city running for The Games who doesnt show off to the judging pannel has rocks in its head. they make this look like its a bad thing.
and some of those silly Americans want Mitt to be President
I don't particularly want Mitt to be president.
I just want they guy who took a ton of money from BP and Goldman Sachs to NOT be president.
Did Mitt bribe anyone to get the olympics? Possibly. But child's play next to the things Obama has done with funds going to "green" energy companies run by large Democratc donors that were doomed to go bankrupt in the end... not to mention Obama using all our money now and in the future to bail out his pals at Goldman.
You may complain about Mitt's naive political corruption, but you are ignoring the elephant sitting on your face to do so - forgive us if your complaints seem a bit muffled.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
which unused bus lanes? the ones in Hackney have buses in them. Which ones do you mean?