Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49361626

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Title: Built: Second City Citation — A Live Chicago Parking Ticket Tracker - Zayyan Faizal

Second City Citation is a project that tracks Chicago parking tickets by reverse-engineering the city's public payment and verification web portals. The city's parking payment API was found to be insecure, as it fails to verify hCaptcha tokens on the backend, rendering the UI-based security ineffective. Accessing the city's internal ticket data requires an authorization token obtained through a secondary security endpoint, which revealed poor implementation of RESTful standards. Parking violation images provided by the city contain metadata, such as officer IDs and exact locations, which can be extracted using OCR technology. Ticket distribution patterns are inconsistent because enforcement officers frequently skip ticket IDs during shifts, breaks, or when moving between zones. Ticket ID allocation is not strictly sequential, as the API returns 422 errors when boundaries of assigned ticket blocks are reached. The developer successfully mapped ticket data by using intelligent scanning algorithms that group active tickets into bands based on ID proximity and recency. The project utilizes an automated scanner that manages hot, warm, and cold exploration intervals to identify and track new ticket ranges efficiently. To manage infrastructure costs, the project was deployed on a self-hosted server using Debian and Coolify, secured by Cloudflare Tunnels and Access. Despite the city attempting to block the server's IP and adding CAPTCHAs to image viewers, the developer maintains the tracker by bypassing these security measures.

I'm attracted but of course need big figures before moving my colleagues there

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49250763

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49200393

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49025701

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

I would compare it to the number of lawyers over population

:(

yes, of course a lot of sh..., but also some really good stuff.. (we are able to decide ourself, no? )

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48998830

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

it looks great, but too new of course: waiting for others'feeds

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48988078

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

coming from us westpoint military academy :(

Road policemen (and policewomen) are ridiculous, and if they feel free to ask for money on the road you can image what their bosses do in their office.