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Hackers Using Bots, Scripts To Lock Down Restaurant Reservations
Nerval's Lobster writes "Forget about hacking an app or database: for a small cadre of hackers in San Francisco, it's all about writing code that can score them a great table at a hot restaurant. According to the BBC, these developers and programmers have designed bots that scan restaurant Websites for open tables and reserve them. Diogo Mónica, a security engineer with e-commerce firm Square, is one of those programmers. A self-described foodie, he decided to get around his inability to score a table at the ultra-popular State Bird Provisions by writing a script that sent out an email every time the restaurant's reservation page changed. 'Once a reservation got canceled I would get an email and could quickly get it for myself,' he wrote in a blog posting. But soon he noticed something peculiar: 'As soon as reservations became available on the website (at 4am), all the good times were immediately taken and were gone by 4:01am.' He suspected it was automated 'reservation bots at work,' built by other programmers with a hankering for fine cuisine. 'After a while even cancellations started being taken immediately from under me,' he wrote. 'It started being common receiving an email alerting of a change, seeing an available time, and it being gone by the time the website loaded.' His solution was to build his own reservation bot, using Ruby, and post the code in the wild."
Kids today. In my day programmers ate cold pizza and they liked it! Bonus points for pepperoni or sausage - there's nothing like cold congealed grease.
A DDoS to ensure no one gets reservations?
That place is so popular, nobody goes there anymore.
- Yogi
Have gnu, will travel.
Are there foodies who are NOT self-described?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Please, we're talking about fancy restaurants here. It's not just plain marketing bullshit. It's Lobster Thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce, garnished with truffle pâté, brandy and a fried egg on top and bullshit.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Pfff, my soon-to-be-released Assembly program will put his slow ruby ass to shame, thus starting HFR (high frequency reservation) era and trading in reservation futures.
One of the perks of dating a geek is that we are now the only ones who are ever going to take you to the hottest restaurant in town.
Jocks need not apply.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.