London Banter - View Single Post

Roland Perry · July 14th 08, 09:02 AM posted to uk.transport.london

In message
, at
01:36:46 on Mon, 14 Jul 2008, remarked:
Looks like LUL have been disabling various Oyster cards. I wonder if a
load have been hacked to give free journeys and LUL were just
disabling any in a specific id range. I can't see any other reason why
they'd require people to get whole new cards since it should be fairly
easy to soft reset the ones they've got. No doubt we'll just get some
spin about "system problems" however and never hear any more about it.

That's a fascinating conspiracy theory, but the only cards that are
supposed to be disabled are ones that were actually used early on
Saturday. Won't news leak out if lots of cards are disabled that weren't
used on Saturday?

Curious how this unique event has occured only a couple of weeks after
some hackers claim to have cracked the system.

As it seems very likely that the problem was a software update gone
wrong, that update might have indeed been about hacked cards - even if
the idea wasn't to disable all the hacked cards [1] by stealth (in
addition to making hacked cards easier to spot).

[1] And a hundred thousand non-hacked ones as collateral damage.
--
Roland Perry