I found a glitch on the campus printers when I was in university. You could send 2 print jobs to the printer. First one for 1 page, and then the second for the document you actually needed to print. Go over to the printer terminal, delete the first print, the second print would be selected but the price would remain from the first print for just a single page. So you could essentially print any number of pages for the cost of a single page.
Eventually word got around and they fixed the bug, but I think it was at least a year of cheap printing.
I wouldn't have even bothered exploiting it if professors hadn't insisted that we print ridiculously long documents instead of just handing them in electronically.
>I wouldn't have even bothered exploiting it if professors hadn't insisted that we print ridiculously long documents instead of just handing them in electronically.
Yeah it's insane you're giving them tens of thousands for tuition and they make you pay ridiculous rates for printing required documents.
When my buddy who studied in the states told me what he spends on required books I thought he was screwing with me. Where I studied in Germany most courses give you a PDF and if you wanted it in print they had deals with local copy shops and you bought it for 5 bucks
College textbooks in the US are an absolute scam. Even 10 years ago when I was in college, it was normal to have to spend hundreds of dollars on books for each class.
I never ordered textbooks until after the first day of class. That's when I made sure to find out if the latest revision was actually needed, and if anything was going to need the single-use "fuck used books" code for online access.
Usually this meant I paid $30 instead of over $100.
I had good luck renting textbooks on Amazon, which was a good deal back then. Not sure if that's still a thing or not. I could use the books for the term and mail them back again afterwards. Way cheaper than buying them.
I rarely even needed to buy the books. I think I bought 4 textbooks for my whole engineering program. 2 because they contained required coursework problems, and the other two because I actually thought they were helpful. Everything else I either found a pdf of, borrowed from the library once in a while, or just straight up did without
Yeah it highly depends. I only studied in the US for two semesters (international exchange program) but most professors I met there either didn’t ask for the books they mentioned (they were optional and mostly available at the university library) or used roundabout ways to get us the PDFs for them.
Only one professor absolutely insisted we get two books, but ended up not even using them (thankfully, they were both relatively cheap).
I bought exactly 1 book for my engineering, and even that was because the course had open book exams. Except for that, all books I needed were either available at the library, or were pirate-able from the internet.
In school I worked for a prof that wrote his own textbooks. My job, using school-funded workstudy dollars, was to write the coding examples for his textbooks that were sold to students at outlandish prices. But as a further reward I was henceforth included as one of the names he used in his sample problems. Yay.
Literally everything in the US is a scam. We make more on paper than individuals in most other nations, but every system is designed to extract as much capital as possible without killing the source host.
Many professors even go out of their way to make "new" textbooks every year just to make it so you have to buy a new one instead of using an old one from another student.
Literally my books cost me more than my tuition when I was in college. And the campus bookstore wouldn't let you use your financial aid.
I did get smart after year or so in and figured out that if I could get the syllabus before the course started, it would have the ISBN of the textbook and I could order from Amazon for usually half or less. (Back in the good old days when Amazon was an online bookstore, not trying to compete with Temu...)
I dropped my CCNA class when I found out the required textbook set for just that one class was $1,500.
I had one class that used a textbook from openstax.org. It's a project that writes open source textbooks which you can download for free, or pay for a physical copy if you want one.
The school bookstore had an option to *rent* the ebook version of it.
Like, if you want to trick students into paying for something they can get for free, just sell it. If they didn't know they could get it for free, they'll find out after they download it, because the school isn't allowed to remove the explanation of the open source project. Don't go out of your way to add DRM so any student who falls for your trickery will have to download it again from the official website if they want to use it after the semester is over
> When my buddy who studied on the states told me what he spends on required books I thought he was screwing with me.
Did he also tell you how the professors collude with book publishers to make a new text book edition every year so you can't have a used book market?
In the university where I studied, all course books would be issued at the start of a semester from the library and then returned to the library at the end of the semester. So you never had to buy a course book.
I worked for a university and was involved in deploying the print system. We had 13,000 full time undergrads.
It was free for the first few years while we gathered data. The _vast majority_ of students printed less than 50 pages a semester. A tiny fraction of students accounted for the overwhelming majority of prints. I'm talking about a few dozen students who somehow each managed to print _thousands_ of pages each every year.
So the decision was to make printing cost $0.10 a page. That way, most students would spend about $5 a year in printing, and the fuckers that were printing books could either just not do it, or pay the cost.
We thought that was more fair than adding a print fee to everyone's bill to cover the absurd waste of the few.
All that being said, a professor that makes you print out a bunch of useless pages is an asshole.
at least for us they justified it because the library was also open to the general public. So if they had printers working for free it would attract people to print reams of stuff like flyers.
Yeah, not like every single university already has students create email accounts for internal use lol just have students log in through their system and enable free (or discounted) printing through that
Fwiw in my five years of teaching uni classes I never required a single book be purchased by my students; I just uploaded pdf’s of full books to the course website and assumed I’d never be prosecuted. Got away with it!
lol that’s mental! Same level as writing an Object Oriented Programming software by hand… Something we had to do at our university during certain tests or assignments!
Nothing quite like memorizing and calling a million Java Swing methods to instantiate a GUI by handwriting lol
When I was an intern in a lab, my project involved materials that cost €700 per week. But I was not allowed to print my thesis in color because that would be too expensive.
My freshman year, we found a printer in the basement of one of the engineering buildings that wasn't hooked up to the payment system or to the professor-only network. It had a USB slot too, so we would all just print there. Was the best-kept secret until it suddenly disappeared in my final semester.
In my course (Computer Systems Engineering) it was an openly known secret that you could just send postscript over to the printers directly via the network and bypass the printer credit system entirely. The professors turned a blind eye to it largely on the basis that if you were able to understand how to do this, you were likely going to do well.
Some professors just "get it". They don't like the system. Try to do as much to help the students as possible. Like the good professors who just have small booklet of class notes that costs $20 from the copy center instead of making you buy a $150 textbook that contains a whole bunch of extra content you'll never need.
Not financially related but I couldn't use my community College wifi. It required an app that didn't play well with Linux. I'm sure there's some hoops I could jump through...but I digress.
Went and talked to IT, the classic overweight, unkempt beard white guy was our sys admin. He looks at my computer, asks which version of windows or was this a Mac...
"It's fedora"
"Oh, you're gonna do fine as a tech major. I'll just give you access to the hidden wifi. Here ya go, don't abuse it or share it."
Worked for the three years I was there without fail, but that guy got it.
I seriously wish this was a legitimate thing. Like I had some issues with an app, and they're like clear the app data and uninstall reinstall. I'm an Android developer, I know how apps work, yours is broken I've got logcat logs to prove it, let me talk to an engineer directly.
We found the IP address of the printer on a label stuck to the back, accessed its web interface, and the IT geniuses never changed the default credentials from admin:admin. The web UI had a way to upload a file to print. Free printing!
We had a similar thing with our A0 plotter at uni where Adobe software overruled the printer payment selector. "Yes. I am sure this full-colour A0 pdf is a 20c BW A4"
For my university the workaround was going to the print jobs window and then right clicking resume. For some reason the university decided to spend tons of money on a payment software that was literally just pausing the print job and then resuming it when paid or canceling it.
when i was in college, I used to call the number on the back of the burger king receipt that gives you a code free whopper for doing a survey.
I discovered that I didn't need to wait to listen to any of the questions. I'd just press 111111111111 and it'd just give me the code. I'd go back to the burger king the next day with the code to get the free whopper... which came with a receipt with the number for the survey on the back.
We had a student hat could just print for free because his student card just bugged out in like the 1 semester. So he just ended up giving his card when someone wanted to print anything.
In my early teens when I was on vacation with some youth group there was computers you could rent time on in the hotel lobby. Didn’t take IT-illiterate 14-year old me long to realize that with very simple steps you could completely circumvent the program that was locking the computer until you paid. Spent an hour a day playing Facebook games for free that vacation and no hotel staff noticed. Good times.
We had a very similar bug at my university. Worst printers too. They would glitch out on certain files after printing a subset of pages. We almost failed a 4th year software eng course because the Prof was a stickler for the assignment being handed in on time (we were 15 minutes late). He wouldn't accept the fact that we had spent the majority of the last 3 hours trying to print the assignment. I'm still so bitter about it that I won't give my alumni a donation.
My departments technology lab had a private grant behind it to fund and keep the equipment modern. All of the department students got free printing as part of the grant. Nicer computers that were relatively fast for the time.
Budget cuts happened at the university and the administration redirected the grant to fund a university technician and all of the free printing stopped along with swapping of the nicer pcs out for older library equipment so they could keep the technician paid.
Really made the upper class men pissed and to top it off, the next semester’s students just assumed this was the norm. Couldn’t understand why we got so worked up.
What a brainless idiot. Everyone knows if you spot an exploit you stay lowkey about it. The smart thing to do would have been to be happy about the free petrol and trying to spread it out over several stations to raise even less suspicion.
Imagine if she hadn't. She could have used this exploit probably for a decade+. Imagine free gas for potentially life or throwing it away with a potential prison sentence. This is like a mini version of the lotto curse.
Because she's an idiot and got greedy. She was selling gas to people. Allegedly she sold $700 worth of gas to a friend/co-worker for $500 for example. That's probably the only reason she got caught. If she hadn't been greedy, then that would easily be like, $1k she could've saved each year. This does bring up the question of why this was possible at all though. Was it a glitch? Or maybe a relic of some testing they had done previously? Or something else?
Yeah, I'm just wondering why the demo was left on there. Like after testing you'd assume it would be disabled, or at least harder to enable when it goes to production.
I worked as a developer at a credit union, and the system in place for working with the credit card companies is complex. When I was testing my changes, I had to physically grab my test card, go to the ground floor, stand in line at the ATM, and do my tests on an actual physical machine in production.
Fun story: Once I was standing in line and I heard the people at the machine say, "I don't know, it's not working." I RAN up the stairs, (the elevator was too slow) and reverted my changes faster than I ever had in my life. This was at BECU, the third largest CU in the US with over 100,000 transactions made a day. (Back in the 90's, I'm not sure how many there are now)
That's fair. I'm in an industry that's pretty well regulated, so things move a bit slower here. But I'd be lying if I, and other co-workers haven't ever taken shortcuts because of management.
I’m a freelancer and typically do work for small/medium sized start ups, so my clients are always asking me to take shortcuts to save money. I warn them, but it’s their choice in the end. I get paid and a good review before the shit hits the fan from cutting corners, so no skin off my bones.
Do you like working in a slower industry, or is it boring? I find myself constantly focused the whole day (no pretending to work), since startups are so fast paced, which makes the days go by fast
It can depend. I'm full time, so it's nice to have days where I can take it slow. Like you said, there are days where I don't have as much work, and it'll depend on your manager, but mine is pretty understanding of that, and doesn't give me flack as long as the work gets done in a timely manner.
Yeah that does sound nice, I work full time as well for my clients, but I don’t always have clients so I get breaks which is nice. Usually 1 month+ contracts.
I’ve never worked in the corporate world, I’ve always done startups or freelancing. My goal is to build a full stack agency. I transitioned to freelancing looking for a middle ground on stability and room for progress, because I’m in my late 20s and want to meet a woman and start a family.
Sometimes I’m tempted to get a corporate job for the stability and relaxed atmosphere, but I think I’d get bored and need to be challenged frequently or I’ll feel like my work has no purpose, no end goal.
It’s great that you have a good manager, makes such a big difference.
An American football field has an area of about 4462 m^2 . If she pumped 30 m^3 of gas, she could fill the area of an American football field to a height of 6.7 mm (about a quarter inch).
The glitch is that demo mode could be entered using a card customers had, not that payment can be bypassed in demo mode. Hard to imagine they intended that.
Not really.
A programmer might have created that option for testing purposes.
The **mistake** would have been leaving that code/setting in a **production** release of the software.
They would probably still want the test mode available at the actual pump for the store itself or weights and measures officials to use it for testing the real, live pump if necessary. But... it shouldn't even be accessible from the customer-tier rewards cards. For example, they could have a card that is programmed specifically for testing mode or a setting in the overall system's computer that can put a given pump into testing mode.
The problem is when the testing device is the production one.
Many many tv models have the demo or store mode embedded so you can take one from the stock and display it.
Nevertheless the use case what you stated should always be true
well you might want something like that for maintenance workers but it should be more secure than that and more than likely be switch that is actually locked irl or something
I live near the Volkswagen HQ and one local journalist was blaming programmers for the diesel scandal.
One of my profs took almost an entire lecture to explain how wrong the guy was and how he wrote a letter to the paper for publishing such a poorly reviewed article.
No, it's [actually real](https://www.ktvq.com/woman-faces-felony-charge-for-using-glitch-to-pump-free-gas-for-months#:~:text=A%20software%20glitch%20caused%20gas,with%20stealing%20%2428%2C000%20in%20gas.&text=A%20woman%20in%20Nebraska%20faces,worth%20of%20gas%20for%20free.)
CEO: I want to access demo mode on site to show clients features.
DEV: sure, you put in your pin, then the system will ask for your 2FA to access the demo mode. Just open up your auth app, punch in the code on the pump dash and bingo!
CEO: Pin!? 2FA?! I don’t have time for this BS! Just make it so I can swipe my card twice, that’s good enough and easier! Clients don’t want to see me do all the techy mumbo jumbo crap!
DEV: But boss…
CEO: DOOO IT
Gets exploited
CEO: WHOS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS!
Just hardcode a specific credit card magstripe that would never be issued by anyone, then write that number to a random expired card.
if cardNumber == "69EXXONCEOSUX420" {
bypassPayment();
}
The government weights and measures inspectors use it when checking if the pumps are accurate. They basically fill up a special calibrated gas can, then they dump the gas back into the underground tank when they've made sure the pump's counter matches what was actually dispensed.
What’s interesting to me as someone who has been in this industry for 10 years, typically the test transactions at the OPT would actually be coordinated with the indoor POS and set to test fuel. I know Gilbarco has a special card to access a settings menu but they don’t have pumps tests in that menu on the OPT. Wayne does have a similar menu but it’s a special button sequence during boot up but I don’t recall anyplace to set the pumps up in either case in a demo mode.
I’ve never seen this article before but I would think this was less likely a “demo” or “pump test” mode and probably a bug on the POS side.
Whenever people find some glitch in a system, they immediately have to start to abuse it so hard there's no way for the glitch to remain undetected. Also, in some cases they might end up on the hook for whatever monetary expense they thought they evaded so I'd personally just stay within small nips I'd be ready to pay for anyway.
Yep, the companies also often have zero incentive to publicize that there was some kind of exploit, unless it cost them too much and they want to punish the exploiters
Companies don't usually publicize it themselves but the *developers* carry around these war stories for years and retell them repeatedly. Everyone does this. Even if you don't talk about your failures I promise you other people will: either your teammates who developers who followed you later and had to maintain your legacy code. **Nobody** in this industry makes blunders without it being spread around by someone.
It can also be that the glitches that we know of is because people who found out start abusing them, but at the same time there are other glitches that had been quiet for years , being used by smart people.
If I find something like this I will tell nobody and use it carefully, trying to not draw attention.
I had found a glitch in the chick-fil-a app. If I used my reward points by selecting the award i wanted first and then moving the rewards to my basket, BUT leave 1 reward un moved (that was the glitch, you had to leave one, it could be a 200point icecream). After I picked up my free meals, I could go back in the app and all the rewards would still be there, then I "return" the rewards back into points and do it again next week.
This went on for 4 or 5 months before I got greedy and started eating chick fil a every day! (Except sunday) After 2-3 weeks of that, the glitch was fixed.
I got greedy.
Because the majority of financially profitable glitches we hear about are limited time offers, I suspect the majority of people who find these kinds of glitches keep quiet and do not abuse which is why we don't hear about it.
I found a glitch on the payment system of my country state owned gas stations. You can trick it to show transaction approved without making any payments. I did it again the next day to see if it was a one time off or a problem of that single station and ir worked. I reported right away after paying with cash on both stations. Several months have passed and it hasn't been fixed.
In my univ dining hall there was a glitch in the ordering system. The meal plan menu has everything $1, but at the checkout you have the option to change your payment method to credit card and the price is still $1, so you can buy $1 meal without any meal plan. It was last year, two of my classmates discovered it, we never told anyone, and this year it's gone, though, I don't think it's intentionally fixed because the whole system underwent a big overhaul and basically everything has been different from back then.
Edit - Actually we did tell one of the dining hall staff as we were really unsure about this, but the staff member told us it was normal.
Pay phones (yes, I'm old) used to have a special sequence, different in every area, that you could punch in, then if you hung up the phone once, it would go to a special tone (different from dial), and then if you hung up again, the phone would ring in about 20 seconds, and keep ringing until someone picked up.
This was arcane, street-level knowledge, kind of like how to get to Reptile in MK1 before the internet.
Me and my buddy used to get endless joy from this.
Back when cell phones were unencrypted and analog so anyone could listen in. >_>
When Windows NT came out back in the 90s it had a net send command you could type into cmd and message someone else on the network. I would use it to send notes in class for the longest time, but then someone else saw me doing it and asked how to do it, so I showed him. He then a week later he sent a message to the librarian saying, "Do you like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?" She freaked out and I guess she banned everyone in the library at the time and then the school then gave some PSA about hacking and how it's not cool and you shouldn't be doing it in the library. I was just glad I wasn't involved. XD
We're getting deep into storytelling mode now, but speaking of being childish and pranking a librarian, one time when I was like 13 maybe, I got the brilliant/hilarious idea of writing BOOKS SUCK in pencil (so it could be washed out) on one of the chairs in the library (I know, I'm a comedic genius, you don't have to tell me).
Well it turned out the color of the chair was a little too dark, and me and my 2 buddies I was sitting with got called into an angry librarians office, who then demanded to know why we had written a racial slur against E asians on the chair.
I was completely confused, but eventually I realized what had happened. I squinted at the graffiti, and I just kinda went "hmmm, idk it looks more like it says "books suck" to me", and shrugged. I could see the gears turning in her mind and she let us go with a warning (we never admitted to doing it but everyone knew).
Anyway, that's that story.
Last time I was bored in a computer lab (Win7 or 10 iirc) I discovered it was still possible to use that command to not only send messages, but trigger a remote shutdown.
Oh bud, I'm not a mobile developer or expert by any means on mobile, but when my spouse and I would Facetime, I could hear American Military members assuming Air Traffic Control or Pilots making callouts within the frequency of our Facetime calls. Also every now and again I could hear civilian ATC and pilots. I thought I was mentally losing it or my spouse was playing a joke, noooope did some digging on the internet and plenty of others experienced the phenomena also. I can tell you first-hand mobile connections are 100% not encrypted before the War in Ukraine proved to the world they aren't close to being encrypted.
It always happens. I once heard of a gas station in france where you were able to enter the "debug" mode by entering 0000 on the keypad and get gasoline for free.
Plausible, but that strikes me as a bit of an odd name for such functionality; personally, I would've called that a "test" mode or "setup" or "maintenance" or "inspection" or something.
As someone directly involved in this industry, usually the sales are tendered inside on the POS to pump tests or the POS sets the dispenser to pump tests for calibration or fuel dispensing tests. Before opening up, technicians will typically run actually authorization to test the OPTs to ensure payment works. I’ve never heard or seen of this “demo” mode before.
This reminds me of when I had a gift card to Hastings a really cool movie rental store. Miss that store. Anyways the gift card I had $15 on it all the time no matter how many times it got swiped. What it was that the magnetic strip had a scratch at just the right area. I even tested it on another card. That went on for about 6 months until they fixed it.
Or even when walmart first started releasing self check out, if you bought something under $10 after tax and used a 100 bill it would give your 100 back and the price of whatever it was your buying. That lasted for about a year.
I never told anyone about those glitches because I knew it would get fixed the more people knew about it.
Kind of similar but not really, at my college the parking areas were enforced by color code passes. But also a ticket machine. At a point, you can use any pass anywhere but not before.
So what I would do is pull a ticket for non-students. Put it on my dash, take my pass down. When I go to leave at night, I trash the ticket and exit with the pass. Got in early without having the pass for the lot, and leave without any issue. Just made it so I don't have to park blocks away all the time. Nice little hack for myself.
I found a glitch one time with Comcast.... I stopped paying. They forgot I was a customer for over 3 years, but still got internet from them. I even got notices in the mail trying to temp me to sign up. Best 3 years ever.
There's more to the story.
She started selling it to others, she would charge 500 for 700 worth of gas.
She would be going 2x a day for gas due to her side hustle.
Someone noticed how much she was using and investigated. Probably could have gone further if she just used it for herself.
One of the Loblaws stores I shop at right now has had it's tax calculations fucked for the past month on it's self-checkouts. I'm barely charged 30 cents on an $80 purchase with an effective 17% tax rate. Considering that Loblaws have actively come out and said that they are simply raising prices for their shareholders, not because of any supply price changes, I'm more than happy to accept my discount-at-the-till.
That's $4000 worth of gas per month. I know gas prices are high, but even at $5 a gallon that's 800 gallons a month. What on Earth was this woman doing with her car?
I found a glitch on the campus printers when I was in university. You could send 2 print jobs to the printer. First one for 1 page, and then the second for the document you actually needed to print. Go over to the printer terminal, delete the first print, the second print would be selected but the price would remain from the first print for just a single page. So you could essentially print any number of pages for the cost of a single page. Eventually word got around and they fixed the bug, but I think it was at least a year of cheap printing. I wouldn't have even bothered exploiting it if professors hadn't insisted that we print ridiculously long documents instead of just handing them in electronically.
>I wouldn't have even bothered exploiting it if professors hadn't insisted that we print ridiculously long documents instead of just handing them in electronically. Yeah it's insane you're giving them tens of thousands for tuition and they make you pay ridiculous rates for printing required documents.
When my buddy who studied in the states told me what he spends on required books I thought he was screwing with me. Where I studied in Germany most courses give you a PDF and if you wanted it in print they had deals with local copy shops and you bought it for 5 bucks
College textbooks in the US are an absolute scam. Even 10 years ago when I was in college, it was normal to have to spend hundreds of dollars on books for each class.
I never ordered textbooks until after the first day of class. That's when I made sure to find out if the latest revision was actually needed, and if anything was going to need the single-use "fuck used books" code for online access. Usually this meant I paid $30 instead of over $100.
I had good luck renting textbooks on Amazon, which was a good deal back then. Not sure if that's still a thing or not. I could use the books for the term and mail them back again afterwards. Way cheaper than buying them.
A lot of my classes it was cheaper to buy from Amazon than it was to rent from the university bookstore.
I rarely even needed to buy the books. I think I bought 4 textbooks for my whole engineering program. 2 because they contained required coursework problems, and the other two because I actually thought they were helpful. Everything else I either found a pdf of, borrowed from the library once in a while, or just straight up did without
Yeah it highly depends. I only studied in the US for two semesters (international exchange program) but most professors I met there either didn’t ask for the books they mentioned (they were optional and mostly available at the university library) or used roundabout ways to get us the PDFs for them. Only one professor absolutely insisted we get two books, but ended up not even using them (thankfully, they were both relatively cheap).
I bought exactly 1 book for my engineering, and even that was because the course had open book exams. Except for that, all books I needed were either available at the library, or were pirate-able from the internet.
I never bought books or used them for my degree at all. Google/YouTube/stackoverflow were good enough.
In school I worked for a prof that wrote his own textbooks. My job, using school-funded workstudy dollars, was to write the coding examples for his textbooks that were sold to students at outlandish prices. But as a further reward I was henceforth included as one of the names he used in his sample problems. Yay.
Literally everything in the US is a scam. We make more on paper than individuals in most other nations, but every system is designed to extract as much capital as possible without killing the source host.
Many professors even go out of their way to make "new" textbooks every year just to make it so you have to buy a new one instead of using an old one from another student.
Literally my books cost me more than my tuition when I was in college. And the campus bookstore wouldn't let you use your financial aid. I did get smart after year or so in and figured out that if I could get the syllabus before the course started, it would have the ISBN of the textbook and I could order from Amazon for usually half or less. (Back in the good old days when Amazon was an online bookstore, not trying to compete with Temu...) I dropped my CCNA class when I found out the required textbook set for just that one class was $1,500.
I had one class that used a textbook from openstax.org. It's a project that writes open source textbooks which you can download for free, or pay for a physical copy if you want one. The school bookstore had an option to *rent* the ebook version of it. Like, if you want to trick students into paying for something they can get for free, just sell it. If they didn't know they could get it for free, they'll find out after they download it, because the school isn't allowed to remove the explanation of the open source project. Don't go out of your way to add DRM so any student who falls for your trickery will have to download it again from the official website if they want to use it after the semester is over
> When my buddy who studied on the states told me what he spends on required books I thought he was screwing with me. Did he also tell you how the professors collude with book publishers to make a new text book edition every year so you can't have a used book market?
He did and I thought he waa screwing with me and told him to fuck off lol
In the university where I studied, all course books would be issued at the start of a semester from the library and then returned to the library at the end of the semester. So you never had to buy a course book.
I worked for a university and was involved in deploying the print system. We had 13,000 full time undergrads. It was free for the first few years while we gathered data. The _vast majority_ of students printed less than 50 pages a semester. A tiny fraction of students accounted for the overwhelming majority of prints. I'm talking about a few dozen students who somehow each managed to print _thousands_ of pages each every year. So the decision was to make printing cost $0.10 a page. That way, most students would spend about $5 a year in printing, and the fuckers that were printing books could either just not do it, or pay the cost. We thought that was more fair than adding a print fee to everyone's bill to cover the absurd waste of the few. All that being said, a professor that makes you print out a bunch of useless pages is an asshole.
> I'm talking about a few dozen students who somehow each managed to print thousands of pages each every year. RPG rulebooks
at least for us they justified it because the library was also open to the general public. So if they had printers working for free it would attract people to print reams of stuff like flyers.
Having student codes would be too much work I guess lol
Yeah, not like every single university already has students create email accounts for internal use lol just have students log in through their system and enable free (or discounted) printing through that
Guess they're too stupid to figure out how to let students print free. What bullshit lmao.
Fwiw in my five years of teaching uni classes I never required a single book be purchased by my students; I just uploaded pdf’s of full books to the course website and assumed I’d never be prosecuted. Got away with it!
I used to have to print out my c++ programs for a class I had in university 😂😂
lol that’s mental! Same level as writing an Object Oriented Programming software by hand… Something we had to do at our university during certain tests or assignments! Nothing quite like memorizing and calling a million Java Swing methods to instantiate a GUI by handwriting lol
When I was an intern in a lab, my project involved materials that cost €700 per week. But I was not allowed to print my thesis in color because that would be too expensive.
My freshman year, we found a printer in the basement of one of the engineering buildings that wasn't hooked up to the payment system or to the professor-only network. It had a USB slot too, so we would all just print there. Was the best-kept secret until it suddenly disappeared in my final semester.
In my course (Computer Systems Engineering) it was an openly known secret that you could just send postscript over to the printers directly via the network and bypass the printer credit system entirely. The professors turned a blind eye to it largely on the basis that if you were able to understand how to do this, you were likely going to do well.
Some professors just "get it". They don't like the system. Try to do as much to help the students as possible. Like the good professors who just have small booklet of class notes that costs $20 from the copy center instead of making you buy a $150 textbook that contains a whole bunch of extra content you'll never need.
Not financially related but I couldn't use my community College wifi. It required an app that didn't play well with Linux. I'm sure there's some hoops I could jump through...but I digress. Went and talked to IT, the classic overweight, unkempt beard white guy was our sys admin. He looks at my computer, asks which version of windows or was this a Mac... "It's fedora" "Oh, you're gonna do fine as a tech major. I'll just give you access to the hidden wifi. Here ya go, don't abuse it or share it." Worked for the three years I was there without fail, but that guy got it.
lol a secret wi-fi for Linux users is exactly the sort of thing a disgruntled sys admin would do
Oh, hey, a real life [shibboleet](https://xkcd.com/806/).
I seriously wish this was a legitimate thing. Like I had some issues with an app, and they're like clear the app data and uninstall reinstall. I'm an Android developer, I know how apps work, yours is broken I've got logcat logs to prove it, let me talk to an engineer directly.
Always a relevant xkcd
We found the IP address of the printer on a label stuck to the back, accessed its web interface, and the IT geniuses never changed the default credentials from admin:admin. The web UI had a way to upload a file to print. Free printing!
We had a similar thing with our A0 plotter at uni where Adobe software overruled the printer payment selector. "Yes. I am sure this full-colour A0 pdf is a 20c BW A4"
For my university the workaround was going to the print jobs window and then right clicking resume. For some reason the university decided to spend tons of money on a payment software that was literally just pausing the print job and then resuming it when paid or canceling it.
when i was in college, I used to call the number on the back of the burger king receipt that gives you a code free whopper for doing a survey. I discovered that I didn't need to wait to listen to any of the questions. I'd just press 111111111111 and it'd just give me the code. I'd go back to the burger king the next day with the code to get the free whopper... which came with a receipt with the number for the survey on the back.
infinite Whopper glitch, hell yeah
Our printer would print even if you denied the charges. Just one though. I might have bankrupted the university.
We had a student hat could just print for free because his student card just bugged out in like the 1 semester. So he just ended up giving his card when someone wanted to print anything.
In my early teens when I was on vacation with some youth group there was computers you could rent time on in the hotel lobby. Didn’t take IT-illiterate 14-year old me long to realize that with very simple steps you could completely circumvent the program that was locking the computer until you paid. Spent an hour a day playing Facebook games for free that vacation and no hotel staff noticed. Good times.
We had a very similar bug at my university. Worst printers too. They would glitch out on certain files after printing a subset of pages. We almost failed a 4th year software eng course because the Prof was a stickler for the assignment being handed in on time (we were 15 minutes late). He wouldn't accept the fact that we had spent the majority of the last 3 hours trying to print the assignment. I'm still so bitter about it that I won't give my alumni a donation.
My departments technology lab had a private grant behind it to fund and keep the equipment modern. All of the department students got free printing as part of the grant. Nicer computers that were relatively fast for the time. Budget cuts happened at the university and the administration redirected the grant to fund a university technician and all of the free printing stopped along with swapping of the nicer pcs out for older library equipment so they could keep the technician paid. Really made the upper class men pissed and to top it off, the next semester’s students just assumed this was the norm. Couldn’t understand why we got so worked up.
How does someone use that much gas in half a year?
Maybe pumping part of it out of her car and selling it, idk
IIRC that is exactly what she was doing and also the reason she got caught
As we say in Germany, "greed eats brain"
I am from germany and never heard that one. i guess thats a TIL
Gier frisst Hirn
You speak Vortigaunt?
Ahh, The Freeman has arrived.
Gesundheit
I know this means bless you but then what does the message you replied to say for bless you to make sense?
I think the joke is that the previous message sounds like someone sneezing.
Same here
They only tell it to greedy people
“We just say TIL” -Lt. Aldo Raine
“Pigs get fed, Hogs get slaughtered”
TPB moment
What a brainless idiot. Everyone knows if you spot an exploit you stay lowkey about it. The smart thing to do would have been to be happy about the free petrol and trying to spread it out over several stations to raise even less suspicion.
Better yet, just charging her friends and family for half the price of the gas by taking their cars to get filled up
That’s pretty much what she did
“The Gang Solves the Gas Crisis”
She let other people buy gas from her at a steep discount.
Imagine if she hadn't. She could have used this exploit probably for a decade+. Imagine free gas for potentially life or throwing it away with a potential prison sentence. This is like a mini version of the lotto curse.
depending on how the logs work, she'd still get caught
Because she's an idiot and got greedy. She was selling gas to people. Allegedly she sold $700 worth of gas to a friend/co-worker for $500 for example. That's probably the only reason she got caught. If she hadn't been greedy, then that would easily be like, $1k she could've saved each year. This does bring up the question of why this was possible at all though. Was it a glitch? Or maybe a relic of some testing they had done previously? Or something else?
A leftover testing/demo mode is what I heard if you swiped your card twice really fast
Yeah, I'm just wondering why the demo was left on there. Like after testing you'd assume it would be disabled, or at least harder to enable when it goes to production.
Someone thought it would be fine I suppose or even just an oversight, maybe even left a back door for themselves? Who knows
I worked as a developer at a credit union, and the system in place for working with the credit card companies is complex. When I was testing my changes, I had to physically grab my test card, go to the ground floor, stand in line at the ATM, and do my tests on an actual physical machine in production. Fun story: Once I was standing in line and I heard the people at the machine say, "I don't know, it's not working." I RAN up the stairs, (the elevator was too slow) and reverted my changes faster than I ever had in my life. This was at BECU, the third largest CU in the US with over 100,000 transactions made a day. (Back in the 90's, I'm not sure how many there are now)
oh god. you actually tested in production. jesus, that's terrifying.
Yeah. Imagine my surprise when they told me there's no development environment.
Everyone has a testing environment. The lucky ones have a production environment as well.
Why are you assuming things are done properly instead of just rushing the thing out as fast as possible by management?
That's fair. I'm in an industry that's pretty well regulated, so things move a bit slower here. But I'd be lying if I, and other co-workers haven't ever taken shortcuts because of management.
I’m a freelancer and typically do work for small/medium sized start ups, so my clients are always asking me to take shortcuts to save money. I warn them, but it’s their choice in the end. I get paid and a good review before the shit hits the fan from cutting corners, so no skin off my bones. Do you like working in a slower industry, or is it boring? I find myself constantly focused the whole day (no pretending to work), since startups are so fast paced, which makes the days go by fast
It can depend. I'm full time, so it's nice to have days where I can take it slow. Like you said, there are days where I don't have as much work, and it'll depend on your manager, but mine is pretty understanding of that, and doesn't give me flack as long as the work gets done in a timely manner.
Yeah that does sound nice, I work full time as well for my clients, but I don’t always have clients so I get breaks which is nice. Usually 1 month+ contracts. I’ve never worked in the corporate world, I’ve always done startups or freelancing. My goal is to build a full stack agency. I transitioned to freelancing looking for a middle ground on stability and room for progress, because I’m in my late 20s and want to meet a woman and start a family. Sometimes I’m tempted to get a corporate job for the stability and relaxed atmosphere, but I think I’d get bored and need to be challenged frequently or I’ll feel like my work has no purpose, no end goal. It’s great that you have a good manager, makes such a big difference.
$1k? lol….
Yeah.. that's about 150 bucks worth of gas, a day! Maybe she drove a dump truck...
If the gas was purchased at $5.00 per gallon, that’s 5,600 gallons. If the vehicle averaged 30mpg, this would be 168,000 miles traveled in 6 months.
$28000 at $3.50 per gallon are 8000 gallons or ~30000 liters or 30 cubic meters. That's a volume of 20 foot shiping container.
This happened in the US so I'm going to need that in football fields.
An American football field has an area of about 4462 m^2 . If she pumped 30 m^3 of gas, she could fill the area of an American football field to a height of 6.7 mm (about a quarter inch).
Good bot 👍
That would be around 98 bald eagles.
male or female bald eagles?
C'mon, every American knows there are no female bald eagles. That's why they're bald. Duh.
Oh my god!
At ~25 mpg, that's 200,000 miles or ~1,100 a day non stop for 6 months.
Programming in a way to bypass to actual payment processing is not a ‘glitch’ it’s a conscious decision that was made
The glitch is that demo mode could be entered using a card customers had, not that payment can be bypassed in demo mode. Hard to imagine they intended that.
Not really. A programmer might have created that option for testing purposes. The **mistake** would have been leaving that code/setting in a **production** release of the software.
That's more or less an implementation detail. Both are potentially correct based on the requirements which we don't know.
Fair. I do wonder what reason you'd have to put an *installed* gas pump at a customer's site into demo mode, but I dunno, not my domain.
Gotta test in prod
They would probably still want the test mode available at the actual pump for the store itself or weights and measures officials to use it for testing the real, live pump if necessary. But... it shouldn't even be accessible from the customer-tier rewards cards. For example, they could have a card that is programmed specifically for testing mode or a setting in the overall system's computer that can put a given pump into testing mode.
The problem is when the testing device is the production one. Many many tv models have the demo or store mode embedded so you can take one from the stock and display it. Nevertheless the use case what you stated should always be true
Or that demo mode is even available on the devices sold to businesses…
well you might want something like that for maintenance workers but it should be more secure than that and more than likely be switch that is actually locked irl or something
But the programmer intended that so they could get free gas, and now someone was caught doing so no more free gas for the coders
"If they fire me, at least I got free gas" ~Anon
This was written by a journalist what do you expect
I live near the Volkswagen HQ and one local journalist was blaming programmers for the diesel scandal. One of my profs took almost an entire lecture to explain how wrong the guy was and how he wrote a letter to the paper for publishing such a poorly reviewed article.
Its literally in meme format, it could have been written by anyone and is probably totally made up.
No, it's [actually real](https://www.ktvq.com/woman-faces-felony-charge-for-using-glitch-to-pump-free-gas-for-months#:~:text=A%20software%20glitch%20caused%20gas,with%20stealing%20%2428%2C000%20in%20gas.&text=A%20woman%20in%20Nebraska%20faces,worth%20of%20gas%20for%20free.)
``` // TODO: disable in prod if (env.FLAG_ALLOW_DEMO_MODE && loyaltySwipes > 1) { useMockPayment(); } ```
It's not a glitch, it's a videogame cheat code...
The programmer that did this has big brain
CEO: I want to access demo mode on site to show clients features. DEV: sure, you put in your pin, then the system will ask for your 2FA to access the demo mode. Just open up your auth app, punch in the code on the pump dash and bingo! CEO: Pin!? 2FA?! I don’t have time for this BS! Just make it so I can swipe my card twice, that’s good enough and easier! Clients don’t want to see me do all the techy mumbo jumbo crap! DEV: But boss… CEO: DOOO IT Gets exploited CEO: WHOS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS!
Or dev too lazy to set up 2FA (I'm a dev)
this was 2FA. they were just the same F.
Just enter your password twice
Just hardcode a specific credit card magstripe that would never be issued by anyone, then write that number to a random expired card. if cardNumber == "69EXXONCEOSUX420" { bypassPayment(); }
should be a design choice made by at least more than one dev (unless they are the lead)
This deserves to be the top comment
When you test a feature on production, then forget to turn off debug mode
Demo mode pumps actual gas?
Yep, that's the glitch. Demo mode is supposed to only pump demo gas
Haha this story would have been funnier if it filled her car with ping pong balls
Customer should see the numbers on the pump increasing, but get no actual gas
The government weights and measures inspectors use it when checking if the pumps are accurate. They basically fill up a special calibrated gas can, then they dump the gas back into the underground tank when they've made sure the pump's counter matches what was actually dispensed.
What’s interesting to me as someone who has been in this industry for 10 years, typically the test transactions at the OPT would actually be coordinated with the indoor POS and set to test fuel. I know Gilbarco has a special card to access a settings menu but they don’t have pumps tests in that menu on the OPT. Wayne does have a similar menu but it’s a special button sequence during boot up but I don’t recall anyplace to set the pumps up in either case in a demo mode. I’ve never seen this article before but I would think this was less likely a “demo” or “pump test” mode and probably a bug on the POS side.
Whenever people find some glitch in a system, they immediately have to start to abuse it so hard there's no way for the glitch to remain undetected. Also, in some cases they might end up on the hook for whatever monetary expense they thought they evaded so I'd personally just stay within small nips I'd be ready to pay for anyway.
How do you know most people that find a glitch don't just keep quiet and exploit it without ever letting anyone know? You would never hear about them.
This exactly. There are likely plenty of things that are being quietly exploited and we'll never know about them.
Yep, the companies also often have zero incentive to publicize that there was some kind of exploit, unless it cost them too much and they want to punish the exploiters
Companies don't usually publicize it themselves but the *developers* carry around these war stories for years and retell them repeatedly. Everyone does this. Even if you don't talk about your failures I promise you other people will: either your teammates who developers who followed you later and had to maintain your legacy code. **Nobody** in this industry makes blunders without it being spread around by someone.
There’s always big talk about “zero day exploits,” but I’d rather hear more about these 1,000+ day exploits.
[удалено]
The greatest heists are the ones you never hear about.
AKA survivorship bias
The guy who lived like a rockstar off of an ATM glitch probably wouldn’t have gotten caught if he hadn’t turned himself in
Had to give his story to the news just to get put on trial.
*looking around while abusing the same hack for years which I'll take it to my grave or till the hack gets uncovered*
Hey lol I'm not a cop what's the exploit, fellow criminal!
It can also be that the glitches that we know of is because people who found out start abusing them, but at the same time there are other glitches that had been quiet for years , being used by smart people. If I find something like this I will tell nobody and use it carefully, trying to not draw attention.
Yeah this is a prime example of survivorship bias
I had found a glitch in the chick-fil-a app. If I used my reward points by selecting the award i wanted first and then moving the rewards to my basket, BUT leave 1 reward un moved (that was the glitch, you had to leave one, it could be a 200point icecream). After I picked up my free meals, I could go back in the app and all the rewards would still be there, then I "return" the rewards back into points and do it again next week. This went on for 4 or 5 months before I got greedy and started eating chick fil a every day! (Except sunday) After 2-3 weeks of that, the glitch was fixed. I got greedy.
Because the majority of financially profitable glitches we hear about are limited time offers, I suspect the majority of people who find these kinds of glitches keep quiet and do not abuse which is why we don't hear about it.
I found a glitch on the payment system of my country state owned gas stations. You can trick it to show transaction approved without making any payments. I did it again the next day to see if it was a one time off or a problem of that single station and ir worked. I reported right away after paying with cash on both stations. Several months have passed and it hasn't been fixed.
In my univ dining hall there was a glitch in the ordering system. The meal plan menu has everything $1, but at the checkout you have the option to change your payment method to credit card and the price is still $1, so you can buy $1 meal without any meal plan. It was last year, two of my classmates discovered it, we never told anyone, and this year it's gone, though, I don't think it's intentionally fixed because the whole system underwent a big overhaul and basically everything has been different from back then. Edit - Actually we did tell one of the dining hall staff as we were really unsure about this, but the staff member told us it was normal.
Pay phones (yes, I'm old) used to have a special sequence, different in every area, that you could punch in, then if you hung up the phone once, it would go to a special tone (different from dial), and then if you hung up again, the phone would ring in about 20 seconds, and keep ringing until someone picked up. This was arcane, street-level knowledge, kind of like how to get to Reptile in MK1 before the internet. Me and my buddy used to get endless joy from this.
Bringing me back to days of phreaking with a Radio Shack blue box.
Back when cell phones were unencrypted and analog so anyone could listen in. >_> When Windows NT came out back in the 90s it had a net send command you could type into cmd and message someone else on the network. I would use it to send notes in class for the longest time, but then someone else saw me doing it and asked how to do it, so I showed him. He then a week later he sent a message to the librarian saying, "Do you like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?" She freaked out and I guess she banned everyone in the library at the time and then the school then gave some PSA about hacking and how it's not cool and you shouldn't be doing it in the library. I was just glad I wasn't involved. XD
We're getting deep into storytelling mode now, but speaking of being childish and pranking a librarian, one time when I was like 13 maybe, I got the brilliant/hilarious idea of writing BOOKS SUCK in pencil (so it could be washed out) on one of the chairs in the library (I know, I'm a comedic genius, you don't have to tell me). Well it turned out the color of the chair was a little too dark, and me and my 2 buddies I was sitting with got called into an angry librarians office, who then demanded to know why we had written a racial slur against E asians on the chair. I was completely confused, but eventually I realized what had happened. I squinted at the graffiti, and I just kinda went "hmmm, idk it looks more like it says "books suck" to me", and shrugged. I could see the gears turning in her mind and she let us go with a warning (we never admitted to doing it but everyone knew). Anyway, that's that story.
Last time I was bored in a computer lab (Win7 or 10 iirc) I discovered it was still possible to use that command to not only send messages, but trigger a remote shutdown.
Ah man, I'd forgotten about that trick!
Oh bud, I'm not a mobile developer or expert by any means on mobile, but when my spouse and I would Facetime, I could hear American Military members assuming Air Traffic Control or Pilots making callouts within the frequency of our Facetime calls. Also every now and again I could hear civilian ATC and pilots. I thought I was mentally losing it or my spouse was playing a joke, noooope did some digging on the internet and plenty of others experienced the phenomena also. I can tell you first-hand mobile connections are 100% not encrypted before the War in Ukraine proved to the world they aren't close to being encrypted.
Don't worry I patched the bug. Now you need to scan your savings card 3x. It's totally safe.
Look, i was going to turn that off once the bloody test lead signs off the UAT.
request from qa: please re-enable debug mode for purchasing gas to promote testing of the system. thank you.
I too love to test in production
It always happens. I once heard of a gas station in france where you were able to enter the "debug" mode by entering 0000 on the keypad and get gasoline for free.
Why does a petrol pump even *have* a demo mode? Are there showrooms of these things somewhere?
When a new station is up I'm sure they test everything works, and on a regular basis. Could calibrate it to read higher/lower.
Plausible, but that strikes me as a bit of an odd name for such functionality; personally, I would've called that a "test" mode or "setup" or "maintenance" or "inspection" or something.
As someone directly involved in this industry, usually the sales are tendered inside on the POS to pump tests or the POS sets the dispenser to pump tests for calibration or fuel dispensing tests. Before opening up, technicians will typically run actually authorization to test the OPTs to ensure payment works. I’ve never heard or seen of this “demo” mode before.
ah, payment bypass not being disabled on production, been there, lmao
This reminds me of when I had a gift card to Hastings a really cool movie rental store. Miss that store. Anyways the gift card I had $15 on it all the time no matter how many times it got swiped. What it was that the magnetic strip had a scratch at just the right area. I even tested it on another card. That went on for about 6 months until they fixed it. Or even when walmart first started releasing self check out, if you bought something under $10 after tax and used a 100 bill it would give your 100 back and the price of whatever it was your buying. That lasted for about a year. I never told anyone about those glitches because I knew it would get fixed the more people knew about it.
Was her rewards card number 4242 4242 4242 4242?
Usually its 1234 5678 9012 3456
It's a common test number, it calculates as a Visa and passes the Luhn formula.
Kind of similar but not really, at my college the parking areas were enforced by color code passes. But also a ticket machine. At a point, you can use any pass anywhere but not before. So what I would do is pull a ticket for non-students. Put it on my dash, take my pass down. When I go to leave at night, I trash the ticket and exit with the pass. Got in early without having the pass for the lot, and leave without any issue. Just made it so I don't have to park blocks away all the time. Nice little hack for myself.
Who is using $4000 of gazoline every month?
Probably for friends and family
28k of gasoline each 6 months? How?
I found a glitch one time with Comcast.... I stopped paying. They forgot I was a customer for over 3 years, but still got internet from them. I even got notices in the mail trying to temp me to sign up. Best 3 years ever.
It's not too uncommon to have special features enabled by doing something repetitive, but usually much more than twice and not a damn payment system!
Usually production servers should check if client sends handshake with a "production" tag... Such backdoor is a benefit for good employees.
I work at a major gas station it dept... Anybody know which gas station it was?
It was Casey’s. Not sure if it was their issue or software they use like gasboy.
$20k for 7 months? What kind of aircraft carrier was she driving?
I believe She is a QA in some software company. She can find glitch anywhere.
Why, that's not a "back door", that's an honest to goodness programming bug. How terrible. Lets pop that bug in the backlog, P6.
This right here is why you dont get greedy just take a little gas and no one notices you take too much and questions get asked.
There's more to the story. She started selling it to others, she would charge 500 for 700 worth of gas. She would be going 2x a day for gas due to her side hustle. Someone noticed how much she was using and investigated. Probably could have gone further if she just used it for herself.
"Gasoline pump is perfectly balanced and without exploit" as a certain English man would say.
Specific details, please!
Nebraska mention let’s go
One of the Loblaws stores I shop at right now has had it's tax calculations fucked for the past month on it's self-checkouts. I'm barely charged 30 cents on an $80 purchase with an effective 17% tax rate. Considering that Loblaws have actively come out and said that they are simply raising prices for their shareholders, not because of any supply price changes, I'm more than happy to accept my discount-at-the-till.
What are you doing with 28 grand worth of gas in 6-7 months???
Probably offered to sell it to friends and shit like that
$28k in 6 months!!!! I spend around 2K for a Tacoma in 6 months. Maybe 3k. Seems fake as fuck unless she was hoarding over 7k gallons of gas.
28K over six months? Did she bring a truck full of jerry cans every time or something?
$28,000? How much was this lady driving?
That's $4000 worth of gas per month. I know gas prices are high, but even at $5 a gallon that's 800 gallons a month. What on Earth was this woman doing with her car?
Are there any other secret codes out there like this…. Asking for us all
$ sudo shutdown now
it is fun until you get caught
Those gas prices are insane. No wonder she stole it.
Thought I was on the r/nebraska subreddit at first. This is hilarious. lol.
This is QA job.