I was on a ~20 hour ferry ship from Italy to Greece once. They had paid wifi using sattelite internet, which I did not want to pay. But for payments to work, they allowed access to stripe. Turns out, everything on stripe.com was accessible, even dev docs etc. So I started to waste their bandwidth by downloading gigabytes of images from the stripe website over and over again.
But that's quite unproductive. As it turned out, in order for stripe to work, it needs access to fastly CDN. And then I remembered that reddit also uses fastly. By connecting to stripe and changing the Host HTTP header to reddit.com, I could browse reddit! Images didn't work though (i.redd.it is not on fastly). I could edit my /etc/hosts and associate old.reddit.com with stripe's fastly IP address. After ignoring scary TLS errors, I could even log in.
Guys who love capitalism: I hate paying for services, so I downloaded gigabytes of data to spite them and hurt the paying customers!
Uh ok.
Sometimes when I'm on a satellite or limited connection and its super slow I wonder how many people are pulling shenanigans like this. You're just hurting honest working class people trying to do work, email/call their kids, manage things like doctors appointments, check on an elder they are responsible for caring for, relax and download a good book to read on a boring flight, etc. There's something really sad that the cohort of people able and willing to learn 'hacking' skills overlaps with the venn circle of anti-social personality types.
tldr; You should care about other people. I don't know how to explain that to you.
Isn't that exactly what a homo economicus should do? Remember that we are each in constant competition between each other, trying to satisfy our unlimited wants and trying to get others from satisfying theirs.
What selfish purpose is there to download GBs of images from Stripe docs?
Even if we're purely selfish, wasting resources just to stick it to others is not really a productive use of our time.
yes, lets stare at the water for 20 hours instead
There are more than two options for a 20 hour wait, and I don't think that lashing out maliciously and staring at water are in my top 100. How about conversation, making friends, reading a book, writing emails, letters, or journals?
I think it depends on just how much harm your target causing. Sometimes taking them down is the right thing. Doesn't feel justified in this case though.
If you think that living life requires you to constantly put down others, I just feel sad for both you and all the people who have to be around you.
I don't, but our economic system is based on and rewards that. It does feel sad.
I dont think it rewards it at all. Things like this are just negative sum activities lashing out.
It's interesting that you can't see that what capitalism does is push everyone to contribute in doing something useful for others.
Genuinely curious where you get that impression.
Who in their right mind wants to stop others from getting what they want for it's own sake, or sees the quest for happiness as a competition?
Spending time to cost a company a few hundred bucks doesn’t seem rational. There are higher EV ways to spend your time to try to satisfy wants.
Unless your mindset is one of “it’s not enough that I succeed; others must fail by my hand”.
That said I could easily imagine doing some stuff like this as a teenager for giggles. There’s some small joy in being a minor troublemaker in a way nobody would actually care about. It’s not something I’d brag about though.
Homo economicus is motivated by maximizing their own benefit, not by spite. Trying to stop others from satisfying their own wants may be a useful strategy in many cases, but I don't see how it would be useful here.
Clearly the solution is to just make Wi-Fi free by default. Once this is done, it becomes uninteresting to download gigabytes of crap to "hurt" people. Win-win for everyone. Just saying.
Except there's 2,500 people on that ship and the satellite bandwidth is 15mbps. Now making it free doesnt work because the resources aren't there.
If you want free wifi, that's great but the private sector isn't going to do it for you. How many of these public nuisance hackers are advocating for large socialized programs to make wifi a human right on all manner of transport? Usually the hacker demographic is right-wing libertarian and would never advocate for socialism.
So you dont want socialism but you want socialized services? Curious.
If this person's story ended with "Then I started a website to advocate for regulations and pricing for better transport wifi," then that would be great! Instead he just drowned out the internet connection of paying customers who are now making angry calls at some poor tech support person making minimum wage in a poor country. He did nothing but hurt people out of his own immaturity and cheapness.
These are paying customers, discouraging them from coming back is a net loss. Suppose your cabin includes a shower but you need to pay every day to actually use it. Nobody would think that’s reasonable, but because internet used to be difficult companies are still tacking on insane fees even though the actual costs are minimal.
With Starlink you’re looking at a lot more than 15mbps. We’re at the point where some cruise lines offer free Wi-Fi and people still see multi megabit connections anyway.
Reasonable is determined if you already paid for the shower, and then are denied it. Where does this sense of entitlement come from?
Commerce includes many unspoken agreements. Order a meal at a restaurant and expect to pay list prices +taxes etc, you don’t expect to be charged to use the bathroom, using the salt on the table, or the price of a doggy bag etc.
Is there some demographic data that shows that "public nuisance hackers" are mostly right-wing libertarian?
You should go to Greece and start a new monk-like existence installing networking equipment on ferries for free as well as raising from donations for backhaul
I would disagree. Here in my corner of EU, public buses have a limited 30min - 1hour free wifi access. What most everyone does immediately getting in the bus is connect to the free wifi and start mindless scrolling on TikTok, Facebook or Instagram. Around 20-30% of the people are super obnoxious and play all the videos over loudspeaker or start calling their friends and speaking loudly as if they are in their home or something, until someone else yells at them. So far, I have only seen two person this month appearing to do something valuable(one was writing an email and another was checking local news).
Unless you have a personal history with this user, you are making a lot of unfounded assumptions and sweeping generalizations about them.
How? The guy told everyone straight-up that he wasted bandwidth for no reason.
It made others worse off, rising his relative status and competitive advantage. That's exactly how rational economic agents should behave.
Rational agents in the real world should realize that conspiring with others to make the world better gives them more benefits than being a greedy shit.
It is only in academic exercises where collaboration is made impossible that sociopathic behavior is optimal.
Maybe the economy should be structured for the real-world behavior then?
It is.
Right, so they can do all that important stuff on technology that was invented by nerds and hackers over the decades, while they were being demonized by society, bullied, put down, and shoved aside by the so-called sociable class.
Yeah, I’ll continue not shedding tears over Joe Sixpack’s inability to check his football scores for a few minutes.
This is such an incredibly bizarre victimhood mindset that I feel like I must be misunderstanding it. Degrading a utility for everyone else is fine because of some perceived wrong by society done to your in group?
If you piss in the punch bowl at a party attended by your in group and perceived out group, you’re going to be justifiably hated by both.
And probably not get invited to more parties.
It is a strange form of entitlement, not unlike incels.
Somehow people get in their mind that they are owed X, then spiral into bitterness and jealousy when they dont get it, and then lash out arbitrarily.
The part that I dont get is where the sense of entitlement comes from? Imagine such a deep sense of entitlement to free wifi on a boat that you feel the need to take revenge on innocents.
Why do you put this on people who love capitalism? It seems like inserting a tangential pet issue.
If anything, I would guess they are anti-capitalists because they are so indignant about someone offering a paid service.
I presume the only people you're hurting by downloading gigabytes of docs are the people on the plain that paid for the service. Maybe the company providing the service because those people experiencing the slow connection might never buy again. You're probably a also costing stripe for their upload bandwidth.
And here I am, avoiding downloading things on cell service because it might negatively impact other people around me.
You paid for that service, they should be able to provide it to you. If it negatively impacts other users, that's the provider's fault.
I think the same whenever I turn on my gardening watering system at 7am and the whole 250 person street group chat starts complaining about lower water pressure and the fact nobody can have a shower.
But, I'm not selfish so I just water the garden at 4am now.
As a firefighter...
If your neighborhood's water pressure is affected by you running a garden watering system that most likely maxes out at 15 gallons/minute, then you have a serious problem, god help you if there's a structure fire in the neighborhood.
Seriously though, if you're not just exaggerating to make an example, contact your town/city/whatever Department of Works, something is seriously wrong.
London (UK) has deliberately low water pressures because the pipe network has a lot of leaks, and the lower the pressure the less water leaks out.
It's low enough that some appliances like dishwashers and washing machines give 'water supply' errors unless you run them overnight. Some houses use pressure boosting pumps to get water to the top floor.
Apparently fixing the leaks is expensive and it's free to just lower the pressure and pass the problem onto householders.
A kinda rule of thumb is that municipal water systems lose 10% of their water through various small leaks. Water is generally cheap and your bill is more for maintaining the capital cost itself rather than gathering/processing the water.
I also use this analogy for smuggling and the resources spent trying to stop it: if 10% gets lost/intercepted/“leaked”, the smugglers just produce and send 11% more and demand is met. You can change the numbers but it doesn’t change the result.
He DIDN'T pay.
But did you give? You gotta give? See, it’s completely user funded!
Me and my wife merged our facebook accounts to not take up space in facebook
idid2
I'm literally just posting this to add another row to a database.
unethical!
This is a noble activity and I salute you for it, but I'm pretty sure that towers have traffic shaping that manage QoS and fairness for you.
I think it’s misguided. If the cell carrier can’t deliver its service to normal people doing normal things without inconveniencing other customers, it’s the carrier’s fault, not the users’. No way am I going to treat the service I paid for with kid gloves to make Verizon’s job easier.
(Not talking about edge cases like BitTorrent or such. But if a carrier advertises watching streaming video on my phone, I don’t feel guilty downloading an app update. If their tower couldn’t handle that, it’s on them, not me.)
Why is BitTorrent an edge case? I paid for the bandwidth, if I want to host a... Linux ISO, why shouldn't I? What if I pay for, and download 30 movies for offline use onto my phone because I know I'm going somewhere that there is no service? Why is that wrong? What if I backup my entire phone to two separate backup services in the cloud?
ISPs have done a great job shaming people who use their service for what it is supposed to be. It's 2024, and we should all have fiber to the home by now. But no, they're only working on deploying more shitty wireless connections to everybody and letting all the land-based services rot. Fuck them.
Those bidirectional video streams where neither party is looking at the phone while talking about nothing use way more bandwidth than an audio stream or text message. There's no way for me to tell if it's causing slowness for me, but it certainly can't be helping.
There's no chance the carrier can give every phone in a cell full bandwidth at the same time, they rely on only a handful of people using their connection at any given moment.
Agreed. I applaud the initiative of figuring out they could access reddit via the CDN that Stripe uses - but downloading gigabytes of images for the sole purpose of "wasting their bandwidth"? Why??
If someone’s first instinct is the need to get on Reddit, maybe I’m not so surprised.
So much of what comes out of that site are mob attacks from impish activities like taking over a poll or comments section on a news site way back in the day, destroying innocent lives in mob hunts, to manipulating stocks.
Honestly this person probably felt they were truly sticking it to the big guy because how dare they charge for internet.
I get the vibe, though I agree this was an unproductive way to pursue it.
I strongly suspect the fee for access is not at all related to the cost to provide service; they’re leveraging the temporary monopoly on connectivity they have to get consumers to pay absurd prices. Cruise ships are similar; I think it was double digits per day for internet.
I don’t think it’s productive to metaphorically “take the ball and go home”, but that instinct would probably be much lower if the fees for access were something reasonable.
Why was your first instinct to abuse or degrade functionality for a service you didn't want to pay for?
And then bragging about it. Wild.
I think it may be more of an emotional than rational response, given he would be stuck on the ferry for 20 hours
Next, I left the water running in the hotel to teach them a lesson for daring to offer me a paid service.
If hotels tried charging $20 to turn the tap on and I found an infinite water glitch, you bet I'd be leaving it on.
What, exactly, do you get out of doing something like that? As an intellectual exercise I understand probing to see what exactly is accessible on a “blocked” connection, but intentionally wasting bandwidth seems the virtual equivalent of leaving the taps running in a public restroom to waste water, or perhaps clogging the toilet and overflowing it.
It reminds me of working on campus IT, and the sort of person who, at the end of the semester realize there are pages remaining in their "free print" allotment, print out every page completely covered in black ink to waste as much as possible.
...why? Trying to hack it for your own use I can understand, but why would you actively try to worsen the performance for everyone else paying, or try to run up the company's bill if it's metered?
sign o' the times
That's called domain fronting [0] and is disabled by all big CDNs now.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting
No, proper fronting is when you mismatch Host: header and SNI. It takes a bit more than just editing /etc/hosts, which results in TLS error (as grandparent mentioned), but editing /etc/hosts cannot be disabled by CDN.