Hackers Using Bots, Scripts To Lock Down Restaurant Reservations 214
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."
On the other hand (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [sfgate.com]
Re:On the other hand (Score:5, Informative)
The important part, which I failed to quote:
Update, 1:20pm: Urbanspoon has released a statement that reaffirms its earlier denial, and also refutes duplicate reservations and reservation fraud (though neither of those issues are technically in dispute):
"Urbanspoon’s data on State Bird Provisions’ reservations do not support the findings reported in Diogo Mónica’s post. While we will not disclose data about specific customers, we currently have processes in place to prevent duplicate reservations and combat reservation fraud. Urbanspoon’s goal is to give real diners the opportunity to make reservations. We’ve noticed that many diners will stop at nothing to get a table at the hottest restaurants in town, like State Bird Provisions , so we are constantly working on improving the overall reservations process to give all diners an opportunity to secure a table."
Re:On the other hand (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Cold Pizza (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I guess they never heard of CAPTCHA (Score:4, Informative)
Citations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA [wikipedia.org]
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/11/wiseguys-plead-guilty/ [wired.com]
Re:This is why we can't have nice things (Score:4, Informative)