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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."
Go to a casual local place and have a backup plan if it is busy. Restaurants with mile-long reservation lists and >$100 plates are almost universally overrated.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The reservation company specifically denies that this is happening or is possible.
TFA:
http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2013/07/25/are-automated-bots-are-making-hot-online-reservations-impossible/
This is just a html scraper. People have had the same thing going on ebay for years. Suddenly it's hacking? Give me a break.
Yeah, but modern CAPTCHAs are so convoluted that computers can solve them more easily than I can.
This is abuse of the reservation system, plain and simple. It simply is not robust enough (too informal) to handle bots. I suspect it soon will become commonplace to require tortuous captchas for reservations. Great job, lazy hacktivists! You've ruined e-life for everyone.
As for posting code for it in the wild so any script kiddy can do it. Good for you. That's called leveling the playing field. It's the proliferation of bots just to be shits to each other that rankles my ire, not the fact that everyone can now do it.
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.