The kids are alright

"High school students looking for free rides on the T usually just hop the fare gates. But four students at Medford Vocational Technical High School did it the hard way.

Seniors Matty Harris, Noah Gibson, and Zack Bertocchi, and junior Scott Campbell found a way to boost the cash value of any CharlieCard without paying a dime, using either a homemade electronic “vending machine” or a custom app running on a standard Android smartphone.

“We’re able to copy cards infinitely,” said Harris.

The typical Android phone contains a chip that transmits a low-power radio signal that allows Android owners to pay for coffee, snacks, gasoline, and other goods with their phone via the Google Pay service. After two years of research, the students found they could use that same chip to rewrite the data on a CharlieCard, adding up to $300 of credit to a card purchased for just 25 cents.

*snip*

"But instead of abusing their new-found power, the students reached out to MBTA cybersecurity officials in January and told them about it. Scott Margolis, the MBTA’s chief information security officer, said that without the students’ help, the T’s systems would have been defenseless against this newly discovered attack."

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/09/01/business/charliecard-hackers-high-schoolers/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two sides

Image
  Yes, there are two sides to every question. In most cases, there is a correct side and a wrong side. In the case of Kamala Harris, the correct side is that she was born a US citizen. The wrong side is that her parents had to be citizens or permanent residents for her to be a citizen. President Trump pretended to be unsure about this, just as he pretended for five years that Barack Obama is not a citizen. In the case of the Harris noncitizen claim, it is backed by the racist C laremont Institute: "The Claremont Institute masquerades as an intellectual salon of the right, but it is really just a racist fever swamp with deep connections to the conspiratorial alt-right. It even granted a fellowship to Jack Posobiec, who helped promote the notorious Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Claremont’s resident bigots offer deranged fantasies of violently expelling Americans from their home country because of their ethnic backgrounds. Their work deserves the intellectual weight given to that of D...
Read more

Who chooses?

Over at jabberwocking.com , Kevin Drum blames pro-choice writers for failing to make the case for reproductive choice. Well, from everything I've read, a clear majority of Americans believe that Roe should still stand. Seems like the case has been made, and if we lived in a truly representative democracy, a limited national right to abortion would be preserved. But beyond that reality, I think Drum has it exactly backwards. Why does the burden of proof fall on those advocating for personal autonomy? Seems to me the null hypothesis is that women should be allowed to make decisions about their own health, and that the justification for nanny state intrusion into such decisions rests with the minority who assert state coercion. Democrats need to hammer on the right-wing GOP to explain why the government takes temporary custody of pregnant Americans. https://jabberwocking.com/liberals-really-suck-at-defending-abortion/
Read more

Black Earth

 Just finished reading “Black Earth: The Holocaust as history and warning” by Timothy Snyder. It is a detailed account of the Holocaust, as well as an effort to abstract lessons from this history for our time. Like his book “Bloodlands,” Snyder’s “Black Earth” makes for painful reading. As the grandson of a Ukrainian Jew and the son of a Jew, I would have been targeted in the Holocaust had I been in the wrong place. I had read several histories of Europe in World War II that included the Holocaust. I knew the basic story of the Holocaust and Hitler’s anti-Semitic vision. I learned a great deal by reading this book. I won’t belabor the ghoulish atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators. To summarize them here would be to trivialize the enormity of the crimes and invite pointless debate about who did what and who suffered more. You’ll have to read the book to understand Snyder’s historical insights. However, I learned many things that I did not know by reading thi...
Read more