Category Archives: noncomputer hacks

Hacking the “Bike Angels” System for Moving Bikeshares

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I always like a good hack. And this story delivers. Basically, the New York City bikeshare program has a system to reward people who move bicycles from full stations to empty ones. By deliberately moving bikes to create artificial problems, and exploiting exactly how the system calculates rewards, some people are making a lot of money.

At 10 a.m. on a Tuesday last month, seven Bike Angels descended on the docking station at Broadway and 53rd Street, across from the Ed Sullivan Theater. Each rider used his own special blue key -­- a reward from Citi Bike—­ to unlock a bike. He rode it one block east, to Seventh Avenue. He docked, ran back to Broadway, unlocked another bike and made the trip again…

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The Hacking of Culture and the Creation of Socio-Technical Debt

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Culture is increasingly mediated through algorithms. These algorithms have splintered the organization of culture, a result of states and tech companies vying for influence over mass audiences. One byproduct of this splintering is a shift from imperfect but broad cultural narratives to a proliferation of niche groups, who are defined by ideology or aesthetics instead of nationality or geography. This change reflects a material shift in the relationship between collective identity and power, and illustrates how states no longer have exclusive domain over either. Today, both power and culture are increasingly corporate…

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LLMs’ Data-Control Path Insecurity

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Back in the 1960s, if you played a 2,600Hz tone into an AT&T pay phone, you could make calls without paying. A phone hacker named John Draper noticed that the plastic whistle that came free in a box of Captain Crunch cereal worked to make the right sound. That became his hacker name, and everyone who knew the trick made free pay-phone calls.

There were all sorts of related hacks, such as faking the tones that signaled coins dropping into a pay phone and faking tones used by repair equipment. AT&T could sometimes change the signaling tones, make them more complicated, or try to keep them secret. But the general class of exploit was impossible to fix because the problem was general: Data and control used the same channel. That is, the commands that told the phone switch what to do were sent along the same path as voices…

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Using AI-Generated Legislative Amendments as a Delaying Technique

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Canadian legislators proposed 19,600 amendments—almost certainly AI-generated—to a bill in an attempt to delay its adoption.
I wrote about many different legislative delaying tactics in A Hacker’s Mind, but this is a new one.
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Online Retail Hack

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Selling miniature replicas to unsuspecting shoppers:

Online marketplaces sell tiny pink cowboy hats. They also sell miniature pencil sharpeners, palm-size kitchen utensils, scaled-down books and camping chairs so small they evoke the Stonehenge scene in “This Is Spinal Tap.” Many of the minuscule objects aren’t clearly advertised.

[…]

But there is no doubt some online sellers deliberately trick customers into buying smaller and often cheaper-to-produce items, Witcher said. Common tactics include displaying products against a white background rather than in room sets or on models, or photographing items with a perspective that makes them appear bigger than they really are. Dimensions can be hidden deep in the product description, or not included at all…

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Hacking Scandinavian Alcohol Tax

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The islands of Åland are an important tax hack:

Although Åland is part of the Republic of Finland, it has its own autonomous parliament. In areas where Åland has its own legislation, the group of islands essentially operates as an independent nation.

This allows Scandinavians to avoid the notoriously high alcohol taxes:

Åland is a member of the EU and its currency is the euro, but Åland’s relationship with the EU is regulated by way of a special protocol. In order to maintain the important sale of duty-free goods on ferries operating between Finland and Sweden, Åland is not part of the EU’s VAT area…

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