a hacker reverse engineered the San Francisco parking ticket system and made a website "Find My Parking Cops", so anyone could see every ticket seconds after it’s written, and figure out the patterns of ticket writing, and use that info to avoid getting a ticket
The map on the website went viral, and revealed an impressive amount of information: the make, color and location of the car, and the reason for the ticket. The vast majority of the citations doled out Tuesday morning were street cleaning violations, but outliers like “too far from curb,” “hill parking,” and “missing plate” were also recorded. The site also displayed the initials of the officer who wrote the ticket, their enforcement route and a leaderboard — the top ticketer issued 63 in under 7 hours, resulting in $6,617 in fines.
Given the potential lost revenue at stake, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency caught on like the rest of the internet, and by Tuesday afternoon, the site had been quickly rendered obsolete. Undeterred, Walz restored the site again after 10 p.m., though this, too, didn’t last. By his estimation, it was only active for a few more hours.
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