Like I said:
Not sure what the emoji for smug face is. Don’t like the smirky one.
I wonder which regions?
You forgot your /s tag
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Holaala… Imagine the crazy ideas that keeps going in our mind. or the heights of discovery, invention or amusement, that one wants to check within their exploration.
Google map engineers, sitting around in development thinking “Yeah but what if some drunk college sophomore harvests a bunch of phones and creates a fake traffic jam somewhere”. One replies “Who would be so dumb and bored to waste time doing that, inconveniencing a whole bunch of people for nothing”? Asked and answered. Sigh… once again tasked with fixing stupid.
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Are you a bot?
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Ain’t we all?
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Because this guy is an amazing software QA tester.
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but if this is based off the traffic mapping tech that an Israeli company developed about 10 years ago, then it’s not just who shares their location with Google. Best of my knowledge, this has something to do with the number of signals cell phone towers are picking up.
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It’s not for nothing. Dude found and publicized an exploit, while simultaneously making us focus attention on how an action in the meat world as innocuous as using a wagon created a change in the digital world, which then was amplified in strength to effect the lives of perhaps thousands of others back in meat world.
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While people above think about heist movies, I think about William Gibson reading the story and nodding sagely.
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Complex technical systems tend to be somewhat brittle.
Style points for the hand-cart.
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If they had time for Easter Eggs, they have time to handle the unlikely.
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Between people on the sidelines and people using their phones with their fitness trackers, the Boston Marathon also shows up as terrible traffic (and actually is, in the sense that you can’t drive there). You can tell it’s not normal Boston traffic because it stretches all the way to Hopkinton.
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Waiting for someone to code an app to emulate a ton of phones into one and make everyone else avoid the path you choose to go.
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(this is the splash scene to a 21st century horror movie.)
… and if such a prank detrimentally diverts/slows down emergency vehicles… then…?
I smell ‘new law’.
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If he did it repeatedly then I’d say yes. But since he’s effectively publishing a vulnerability in the system, then I count that as adversarial testing. As Rob points out, public disclosure of exploits doesn’t create them. Attackers can find them. Publishing them allows users and developers to be aware of them, and then it’s up to the developers to patch them. If they don’t, at least the public is aware of their vulnerability.
Reading comprehension is fun-da-mental.
A zero-day exploit and a zero-day vulnerability are not the same thing. The latter is a vulnerability present from launch, not the exploitation of that vulnerability on the day of launch. Which is precisely Rob’s point. A zero-day vulnerability that’s publicly disclosed later on has usually already been previously exploited.
You roll up in here and your first post ever is an erroneous comment calling a post ignorant.
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My phone is legion.
Expect me.
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Because it’s there. Like a mountain that must be climbed.
And like @Chuckles says, bringing the vulnerability to attention in a relatively harmless way. Google’s likely to find a way to make this better. Hopefully before someone uses this for evil.
ETA: what keeps people from abusing the “Report an incident/crash/speed camera” feature of Google Maps or Waze?
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Do you think he’s disappointed in boing-boing?
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