
Ask HN: Has software you've written ever bitten you IRL? - OJFord
Reading this comment&#x27;s &#x27;fun story&#x27; about the time its author accidentally made 1M API calls to a $x&#x2F;request service made me wonder if anyone else has &#x27;fun&#x27; tales of times they automated something or otherwise wrote some software intended for fun, profit, or benefit; that had some unintended real-world consequence?<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22212063
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Samon
Not exactly 'IRL', but many years ago I wrote a simple bash script to submit
many entries into an online competition. Yes, I know... I did scour the
competition T's&C's and they didn't have anything in there explicitly
prohibiting it (its obviously implied, but I was young and bored...). Anyway:

Each entry required a unique email address, which then had a validation link
you needed to click. I scripted this up using curl to submit the request using
a randomly generated email address via a catch-all on my domain, reading the
mail to extract the submission URL, and then using curl to hit that.

I actually ended up winning the 'random draw', but now I get ~18000 copies of
their spammy newsletter! Unfortunately their unsubscribe page has the anti-bot
protection that their competition page really should have had ;)

