Get ready for virtual jamming

Yea that was in berlin, he used a very unconventional method, namely buying 99 smartphones and tricking Google maps into thinking there was a traffic jam, resulting from that, nobody went there.

Now that's comedy

"performance artist" 🙄

Im wondering how many I can emulate with pi virt

I like how he referred his video on Youtube as "Hacking Google Maps", while in reality its nowhere near that.

@24th-Dragon
This sounds like a dark web startup waiting to happen

@shoop
Chaos engineering is dirty job, but it's so damn fun.

@shoop you "can" rearrange the traffic the way you would like...
Eg. You start the morning with mocking huge traffic on the way to work, after some time the real traffic will be routed elsewhere by google to prevent them from traffic jam...
And you have the whole street just for you.

Or i could see this in action movies, like the robbers route the traffic in the way of the cops, while they escape on the "traffic jam roads"

Villagers did that in the past to avoid Google routing the traffic through their villages because of construction works on nearby highways.

Opinions about this is the new era of social engineering?!
Basically he just social engineered a computer... i think this is just beautiful :)

@myss That is absolutely the original way the word hack was used. Hacks were basically really elaborate, inconvenient pranks.

@figoore The amount of traffic re-routed by google is limited. So many times I told someone that I always check the traffic on google maps before I leave, and the answer is "Oh I didn't know that, is it really accurate?". And those people just drive their regular routes, no matter what google would suggest.

@24th-Dragon Wow wait, so... if I gather 100 people, and we mock our position all to the same place... we can remotely jam Google Ma-THAT'S INSANE LOL

Data manipulation for the win!!

Time to play some 4D chess.

Keep 600 phones in your car so it reports everywhere you go as congested and diverts everyone else away from you.

@kwilliams 8D chess: mock locations to clear your entire GPS route ahead of time

@Parzi There is one big flaw in your chess game:

How do you know when your route is free? You cannot check Maps...

@ddephor people tend to get off the road when possible to avoid jams. An actual jam may have occured, true, but you can cache the old data from before manipulation and use that...

1st, repost

2nd, wasn't this proven to be fake?

@cprn it was. 🙄

@Ranchonyx eventually google will put in some detection method. Way I would do it if I was google would be to generate a frame that measures certain variables or time-limited sliding window for each phone that acts as an inertial profile.

For example each driver, even in a traffic jam, is not gonna accelerate or hit the breaks at exactly the same time. The slight delay between when the driver (and thus the phone) moves versus when the vehicle moves is another give away.

Blue-tooth or even sonic distance (using subaudiable pings) to other phones would be another tell.

In this way a vehicle and who is traveling together can be identified by the details of their relative motion.

Whichever google engineer fixes this exploit, will probably do something like I just mentioned.

Or they might just identify the car capacity of a road and set a threshold to ignore it for 'unphyisical' reported usage.

@Wisecrack Vanilla GPS tech is (and was back then) accurate within 5 metres (16 feet). Software and things like RTT made it possible to narrow that to 1m (3ft) about 5 years ago. Google took advantage immediately increasing the value of data from modern devices. How many people can you get in 1m radius? Even if each of them held 3 phones, it'd make no sense to accept almost identical GPS data from 10+ devices. You don't need anything fancy on the client side. So if these phones had that level of accuracy, they'd be ignored due to data redundancy being considered an error and if they didn't, they'd be almost ignored due to low data value. In both cases 100 phones pulled in a cart couldn't do the trick.