In 2024, we each seperately submitted Freedom of Information requests to our country’s railway operators, asking for specification about how their barcodes worked. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
This talk details the drama, lies, and nonsense, that ensued as seemingly every part of the UK’s and Slovenian rail industry set out to stop us from getting access to the documents we requested.
Train tickets in the UK can be issued in two formats: on security card stock, or as a barcode on a mobile phone. Being the curious beings we are, we were curious about what was in those barcodes. What information on us is processed in them? How do they encode our journeys? Can we do anything interesting with their contents?
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In spite of knowledge from the reverse engineering work about these tickets’ use of public/private key cryptography, and the absolute non-issue of making public keys, well, public, seemingly every part of the UK rail industry put Q’s picture on their office dartboard and vowed to never let them have these documents.
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A really interesting-sounding session at MRMCD 2025 in a couple of weeks, by that other hacker called Q. Wish I could be there… but failing that, perhaps the talk, or at least the discoveries, will make their way onto the open Internet?
yes it will all be recorded
I find it unintuitive to get to the original source of your reposts. The only link seems to be the ‘elsewhere’ link at the top box, which otherwise looks like a generic category heading. It’s even worse from the RSS feed, which doesn’t display it at all (my reader doesn’t show `
Oops, that should have been `<blockquote cite=>` between the tick marks. I always forget the syntax for wordpress comments. (While I’m making website suggestions, maybe a link to the comment formatting docs below the textbox would be useful. Nowadays I mostly assume markdown syntax unless otherwise stated, even for blogs I use frequently.)
Love both of those suggestions. Will see what I can do for the next redesign!