It's stories like this that can teach us how useless much of the things we think are "secure" are actually not.
I'm always frustrated with the bogus security measure out there that do nothing to stop the criminals and just serve as a hassle to honest people.
Checks are one of those. I have a micr font and a few nice check mockups in Photoshop for "verifying" checking accounts for direct deposit. I'll simply plug in the bank routing number and account number, print it out and write "void" on it. As if that is some kind of security. I also keep some blank checks in case I need to actually print a check. There is nothing special about them except for the number placement (magnetic ink hasn't been a thing for a long while, it's almost all optical now).
Another is a utility bill. I've had several occasions where a utility bill with your name on it is required to verify your location and identity and I either don't yet have the utilities in my name or they are in the name of a roommate. A quick scan, clone brush, and type tool and you've got a utility bill in your name.
I have never had anyone take a second glance at any of this stuff. It always works.
If you get caught, there's no plausible deniability. No way to pretend you just got confused, or that you were in a hurry and just marked "Yes" and signed without reading.
If you were e.g. applying for state welfare while living out of state, a forged bill with an in-state address would not get you caught, but may be crucial for proving ill intent if you get caught by unrelated means.
A lot of security measures add just that much security. It's easy to break, but breaking it removes plausible deniability.
Most home locks wouldn't stop even a person slightly below average strength, bump it with your shoulder a couple times, and you're in. But you can't then claim you got lost, confused, or thought it was your friend's house, or thought you heard someone say "come in". A surprised homeowner will be less hesitant to use available violence, and no court would believe you meant no harm.
This is an aspect of security that a lot of smart technical folks seem to have problems reasoning about. Technical systems sit within cultural and legal systems, and it is the totality of all of those that shapes our behavior.
Schuyler Towne has (several?) great talks on this, going through the history of physical security and our assumptions about perfect security vs. social and cultural symbols.
you’re welcome!
the good thing about this technique is that the load is distributed and it’s knee+hip. also because of the lower contact area you can deliver more force in the right area (ie the handle)
Yup; home security will deter a quick grab, but if someone wants to come in they will. The main things there is, will it be noticed in the act (like how much noise will it cause), and will there be damage. If you get robbed with no damage or evidence of a break-in, insurance won't pay out.
I mean me and my neighbours' houses have a big sliding glass door for a back door, one of the neighbours has had it yote in with a brick last year. Not even at night, it was in bright daylight. Probably had a laptop or something in view with nobody around.
Something I think is lost from your comment, though:
It's also stories like this that can show us that people are generally benevolent. Your reaction to this is to call this "forgery" and say the signage is not "secure". Neither of those actually occurred to me here. The only thing I see is a well-intentioned person fixing inadequate signage. It doesn't seem all that less legitimate than signage from the state.
To me, a better argument for increasing "security" of the signage is that occasionally in urban areas I've seen taggers paint over highway signs. That has the potential to confuse drivers, possibly leading to accidents, and it costs the state money to re-paint. But there is no danger in a vigilante making the signage more accurate.
He did it right by their standards, though. Apparently even affixed it well enough to not introduce liabilities (sign shearing off in high wind and slicing into a windshield).
If you don't satisfy codes, the city will undo your work [1].
A lot of traffic laws are essential to the distributed consensus algorithm that allows people to get where they want to go mostly safely.
There are many things you could do in a car, but the small number of things you are allowed to do makes it manageable to build a mental model of the people around you, even when you can't see their body language. The only 'body language' you have is this static chunk of metal, which is why we mandate indicator lights, their size and their brightness, so you're telegraphing something at least.
It's not the central point of your argument, but it bears calling out - there is plenty of body language on the road. I can see these and more:
- Drivers turning their heads to check side mirrors before changing lanes.
- Swerving slightly when making blind-spot check.
- Front wheel turning before the vehicle turns.
- Drifting side-to-side within lane, signifying the driver
is distracted (or drunk).
- Speed discrepancy signifying the driver is possibly lost and at risk.
of making a sudden turn.
- Tailgating or excessively quick approach, indicative of possibly impulsive behavior.
Predicting behavior of other drivers on the road is key to survival.
- Turn signal on when there is no space to change lanes to indicate "soon I need to be in that lane so you'd better move before it becomes an issue"
But it takes a long time to learn this which is part of the challenge of being a 16 year old (or in the case of some people I know, an inattentive 35 year old).
The telegraphing is important enough that some of us flip out when a driver ignores right-of-way trying to 'be nice', or keeps tapping the gas and then not going. It's your turn (or at least it is now!) just go before you get somebody killed.
>A lot of traffic laws are essential to the distributed consensus algorithm that allows people to get where they want to go mostly safely.
I take the opposite view. Traffic laws are just the distributed consensus that's dumbed down enough to codify into law. The traffic participants mostly agree what is ok and what isn't but it's so nuanced and complex that we can't legislate it all so we just write imperfect rules for the big stuff like "thou shalt drive on the same side as everyone else" and mostly ignore edge cases like all those situations it's perfectly acceptable do something that isn't within the letter of the law.
Technically those are real checks you're making, not forgeries. A depositing bank might refuse to accept them if they don't conform to the technical requirements of automated processing, but they're legitimate negotiable instruments. Also, I could see your bank charging you a hefty fee if they had to manually process one. Does anyone know how this actually works out?
AFAIK there's a huge legal distinction between someone (else) forging a whole check, or stealing your duly created check and just forging your signature. For one, if your checks are stolen you have a duty to notify your bank (whereas you can't possibly be aware of a complete forgery). So you might not want to leave extra printouts hanging around.
Yeah, I wouldn't risk not using MICR ink just because you will eventually run into a party that uses a bank that still uses MICR readers and it will turn into a massive headache. But it's misleading to imply that MICR is a security feature, it wasn't even used until the very late '50s.
The security model of checks is complicated. Ultimately the paper document is not really regarded as any kind of authentication, it's usually destroyed fairly early in processing (by the depositor's bank) and replaced by an image. In some cases, less common today, it may later go from image back to a "replacement document" which is a brand new copy of the check produced for convenience when clearing with a bank that doesn't yet support clearing by image. Nothing about the document itself is important to or required for clearing, only the data on it.
Yet it is common for printed checks to contain various anti-counterfeiting features. From first principles this seems a bit confusing.
But checks are not authenticated by their own right. A party who accepts a check is taking on a certain amount of risk, the amount of which depends on the nature of the situation. They are not really "authenticating the check" but actually performing a risk analysis, in which only one of the factors is security features present on the physical document. When you ask to cash a check at a grocery store, they are unlikely to cash it unless it is a payroll check from a nearby company and has expected security features---this is because they are taking on a relatively great risk. But when you deposit a check via ATM, you're often credited the full amount (up to some limit) instantly with virtually no verification besides the ATM trying to parse the number. This is because, as a holder of an ATM card, you have an ongoing relationship with the bank and they feel fairly confident that, if the check is bad, they can recover the value from you in some way.
My point is that talking about forging checks for payroll direct deposit reasons is kind of the most extreme possible case. The only reason you're asked to present a check is because most companies have had way too many incidents of people providing the wrong routing and account numbers and it turning into a real headache when their paycheck disappears. If you went to the trouble of forging a check in order to set up DD, I suspect it's also very likely that you got the routing and account numbers right, clearly you put some effort into this. So in practice a "forged" check is probably every bit as good for their purposes as a legitimate one.
The principle is true enough though: a check is just an order to pay a certain amount of money from a certain account to a certain person: https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/3/3-104 It doesn’t need to be in the standardized form found in a checkbook.
This is just the physical equivalent of the same thing we have been dealing with in the virtual world. A utility bill provides no more or less proof than having both my mother's maiden name and the name of my first pet. Most people are good so most companies and organizations choose convenience over security. The end result is that it is often incredibly easy for malicious actors to socially engineer themselves into secured areas both physically and digitally.
All security (crpyto math aside) is weak. Door is locked? Break the window. Circumventing security measures means you understood what you were doing, and can be punished more severely for it.
Throwaway account for obvious reasons. I think I got a job offer from telling this story.
I heard this Podcast a little while ago. I am a civil engineer and found it amusing. I apply for a job in transportation engineering with a big agency and go through the interview process. I passed the written exam and the second oral interview. Next interview is with heads of the organization. They are asking me good questions and I think they like me and my answers. One of them asks how I keep up with news and latest things happening in civil engineering. I mention podcasts as one of the mediums. Then to keep the conversation lively, I tell them about this story that I heard through 99% invisible. They all laughed and found it amusing. It’s a transportation engineering job talking about a sign on the highway. I know my audience. Haha. And I followed up that podcasts are a great news medium and I wouldn’t have heard this story if I wasn’t listening to them. I like to think they liked me from my qualifications but this story pushed them into picking me.
I ended up declining the offer because I got a better offer somewhere else.
I’m just glad to know I have a really good interview story.
You can go back in time and look at the 2008 view and see the guerilla sign too.
While I was looking, I noticed that there is barbed wire around the pole that supports the sign, to prevent people from climbing up. But it's only on the pole that's in the middle of the freeway, not the one that is near the side of the road. Clearly not a lot of thought was put into this sign!
If I recall the story correctly, Caltrans replaced the guerrilla sign with an official one in the same location, and returned the replica to the artist.
The highway construction outfit is some excellent social engineering.
For some reason this reminds me of the stories after Manhattan (?) legalized bee-keeping. People started confessing that they'd had clandestine hives for years. My favorite was the guy who made a fake AC unit, installed it on the roof, and bought a stereotypical AC repairman outfit that he wore every time he went to do maintenance work.
"The short answer is that it's a scam for parking illegally in loading zones. The nerdy answer is that it's an ongoing experiment in corporate phenomenology, urban camouflage, and brand development."
Did you know you can get through the security cordons at international summits by simply arriving with flags on your car and your own motorcycle outriders? https://youtu.be/TdnAaQ0n5-8?t=56
>My favorite was the guy who made a fake AC unit, installed it on the roof, and bought a stereotypical AC repairman outfit that he wore every time he went to do maintenance work.
This is some 90's sitcom silliness I absolutely love it.
I'm sure a lot of people continued to keep quiet about their hobbies. Admitting you were doing something against the rules all along when they change the rules to make what you're doing ok seems like a great way to find yourself under scrutiny when they change the rules yet again.
There's a longer documentary on the project somewhere that I can't seem to find right now, but in it they talk about what it took to set up the last jump (starting around 3:00). If I remember right, they actually closed down part of the road (without permission) in order to set up the ramp and make the attempt.
Rob Cockerham's site is part of the Olde Web and is filled with things that are not-quite-similar to this, e.g. the "High-Profile Sculpture Replacement" http://cockeyed.com/pranks/mall/plazaprank.html
I grew up during the Earth First! movement which started in the late 1970s on the coattails of various other forms of environmental civil disobedience and tree hugging.
I think what's changed today is that due to the national debt etc, most of us know that things are going wrong but we're so disenfranchised/disempowered that we feel helpless to do anything about it, even if we wanted to or knew we wanted to. It's not just that we haven't had a raise in 20-40 years, but that our bosses haven't had one, and neither have their bosses. We've reached chronic, systemic ineffectualism.
It changes things when we go from a "how do we stop those guys" perspective to a "how do we start helping society fix things" perspective.
I always wonder what system the LA area is using for their signage. They seem to have a rule to mark exits as late or confusingly as possible. This leads to people suddenly swerving across all six lanes. It requires a certain skill to mark that badly....
Socal freeways usually have center signs every couple of miles letting you know what named exits are coming up in how many miles, then the named exit sign maybe half a mile before the exit, then the sign that just says exit with an arrow. Highway interchanges have overhead signs with lane indicators (although this particular one was deficient untill guerrila fixed).
It's pretty good as long as you're expected named exits. California built their highways before federal standards on numbering, so they were exempted from numbering exits until about 2000. In 2000, they decided to add exit numbers when replacing signs, and signs have a planned lifetime of 10 years, so anytime now everything should have exit numbers ;). It's gotten better, but there was a while where all the map software would tell you to take exits by number, but the numbers weren't posted (yet), a mix of better databases and more posted numbers and me moving out of CA means I don't recall seeing that in a while.
As Californian, I hate exit numbers. I typically know vaguely where I'm trying to go, but navigation apps nowadays often favor the exit numbers. Exit numbers are still poorly marked in a lot of places, and are typically harder to spot.
Missed an exit one time because Google Maps said "take exit 34C" and the exit number was only posted far down the offramp, after it was too late. Best part was Maps neglecting to say "for highway XXX", pretty much the most important highway for the area, which would have made navigating incredibly easy.
It’s not that the signs are bad insofar as the roads are old and weren’t designed for the speeds that people are driving and the volume of traffic that they handle. Cutting over four lanes over the course of a mile when everybody is going 50 and there’s plenty of room is significantly easier than how it is now.
The U.S. Interstate system was designed for 70mph. California's freeway system is older. IIRC, California built the first "freeway" in the U.S.[1] It wasn't until I moved to California that I ever even heard the term, freeway, used regularly; elsewhere in the U.S. most people use the term, highway, as a general word for a fast artery. Some east coast locales often have their own terminology (e.g. turnpike) for the same reason California does--they were the first to build such infrastructure, and to do so long before the interstate system.
FWIW, the U.S. Highway system predates the U.S. Interstate system, and is still primarily composed of a patchwork of pre-existing state roads, "freeways", etc. At the time the interstate system was created highways weren't limited access--and still aren't necessarily, though most people don't understand or obey the technical distinctions in the terminology, or what type of road they're driving on.
This results in lots of confusion. For example, California Vehicle Code defines "highway" as "a way or place of whatever nature, publicly maintained and open to the use of the public for purposes of vehicular travel. Highway includes street." This is much wider understanding of what "highway" is than that of the rest of the country.
"Freeway" is the term for the kind of road that has "highway" in its official name. Also "parkway", from the era when there was more landscaping around freeways.
I enjoy amateur etymology. I'm also from the east coast. Turnpikes are a specific thing dating back to original tolls. I think what most mean by "highway" is actually a freeway. There are plenty of real "highway" roads as well, but I don't think anybody I've known refers to them as that. (Learned something today!)
That's funny because after moving to SoCal from the DC area, I was impressed by how good the signage is. I used to joke that in DC "Next right" means "you already passed the exit"
Maybe it's improved since I moved away (early '00s), but it was terrible when I last lived there.
Is that still an issue today with modern GPS systems, which tell you which lane to be in (and when to exit)? I know that in the Chicago area I barely pay attention to the signage anymore.
As the article notes, the MUTCD defines the right way to mark roadways, and generally most states follow it, or something based on it. Of course, in particularly... unique... roadways, the guidelines may need a bit of a tweak to handle it well. And of course, sometimes mistakes are made.
Ah I'd heard about this earlier but the details are a lot of fun:
"He copied the height and thickness of existing interstate shields, copied their exact typeface, and even sprayed his sign with a thin glaze of overspray of gray house paint so that it wouldn’t look too new."
Of course, not everyone should be doing this, but what a brilliant story!
This is like the real-world version of applying a userContent.css file to patch a UX flaw in a web application, except in this case he patched a UX flaw in the freeway.
As users of web applications and freeways, I think we tend to overestimate our expertise in designing solutions to the things that annoy us. This story had a happy outcome because the expert user was careful and competent. Thankfully the barrier to entry for submitting patches is relatively high.
The Charging Bull bronze is a piece of guerilla art. NYC towed it away after the artist put it near the New York Stock Exchange. Its current location isn't the original one.
It was a promotion for the artist, who wanted to sell four more of them.
With the decline in street traffic and large increase in pedestrian traffic around my neighborhood, I'm thinking about buying a couple of street barricades and putting up "local traffic only - pedestrian right of way" signs.
In my experience the transportation authorities care deeply about proper signage, and may have been happy to put up a new sign had he asked (did he?). It's not hard to print one in the machine shop, and definitely would have been less work than what this guy did.
I’m glad it worked out in this case. He seemed careful and diligent. If the wrong person did it I could see this leading to people getting hurt (falling off the catwalk) or damage to cars (improper fastening). Overall I love it though.
>If the wrong person did it I could see this leading to people getting hurt (falling off the catwalk) or damage to cars (improper fastening)
I really don't like seeing this sort of whatifism whenever a story about somebody doing something that is not their day job comes up. It's amazing it's still considered safe to file your own taxes. The dude had the skills and he did the job and did it well. Hand wringing over what-ifs adds nothing to the discussion.
The risks aren't significantly different than from other things people do on a regular basis. People have died from objects falling out of the back of a pickup truck. People have died from a long list of shoddy home improvement projects. People have died (and killed others) from working in an official capacity for the Department of Transportation.
The answer is to do the things that you do safely, not to never do anything.
Someone was suggesting that we discourage people from doing something because of "risk", and that thing is not significantly more risky than other things people commonly do.
Not far from me there was an indication to take an exit to get to another highway... but then no indication that you have to exit again to get to that highway. It was a sort of "go here to get there and then you're on your own" sort of sign.
I thought about doing something similar, but only as an amusing thought.
Fortunately they fixed the sign a few months later and gave extra indications where you needed to go.
In high school, a teacher told me about an artist who was applying for a job. The application required three pieces of art. The artist included two pieces of art and a note explaining that the third piece was the postage stamp drawn on the front.
These are the best kind of hacks. And it makes me think about the high barriers that end up around fixing things like this. If he had tried to make an appeal to get it fixed through official channels, how long would it have taken? Would it have been fixed?
I've fantasized about doing this very thing for years!
There's a location here in Oregon that fails to tell motorists of a major traffic merge coming. If you miss the merge, you exit the freeway. Granted it's not difficult to get back on, but there's no way to know this in advance. Prior to the pandemic - at minimum once a month - there would be a traffic incident here because people don't get any warning this merge is coming up so make drastic changes at the last second.
Result? A daily traffic nightmare and constant near-death experiences.
EDIT: BTW Google Maps makes it look like you have plenty of time to move from the exit lane and back onto the free-way, but it's an illusion. People are flying at high speeds on the left and you only have several seconds to get into the correct lane.
EDIT: Forgot to mention this funny part. Conversely on the other side of traffic for that same freeway (I-205), they DO make use of adequate signage. Here's one that shows a merge is coming up: https://www.google.com/maps/@45.370089,-122.749564,3a,75y,52...
Reminds me of this onramp to I-376 in Pittsburgh, where you have a stop sign (!) at the bottom of the onramp (!!), which then dumps you into an exit-only lane with a few hundred feet to merge left (!!!):
HAH! I took this exit twice last weekend! Really terrifying merge during Saturday afternoon traffic, but it was easy on Sunday morning (as I breathed a sigh of relief that I was leaving Pittsburgh and wouldn't have to do it again). Reminds me of a similar on-ramp onto the BQE in Brooklyn, which is equally if not more congested: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6899298,-73.9989999,3a,75y,1...
The exit off I-376 coming out from the tunnel is also really annoying -- exit, then left turn over a bridge, then you're back on the highway and need to exit, then pick the correct lane to head into Squirrel Hill, but it seems pretty arbitrary, and you may end up making a weird left turn anyway just to get "into" the neighborhood.
Pittsburgh driving taxes one's navigation skills on a good day, to put it mildly. Lived in Squirrel Hill for 8 years and got used to it but it's probably the most local-knowledge-dependent driving I've seen in the US. The five-way at the bottom of Murray at Forward is fun too (you want to go straight, but WHICH straight?).
unless I'm missing some important context, the full stop seems like a really bad design choice here. where I live, that sort of entrance would just be marked "no merge area!". in dense traffic, people should probably stop, but in light traffic people could be going a lot faster; it really sucks merging into 65+ mph traffic from a full stop.
I suspect the whichever department is responsible for the intersection has some internal rules about where they put what kind of traffic signage and this merging area is too small for a proper merge with a yield sign so they just slapped a stop sign on it knowing full well that most drivers will treat it like a yield it in light traffic conditions.
Of course this causes problems when dutifully law abiding drivers from out of town follow the law to the letter and cause near misses or rear endings because they are behaving unexpectedly compared to normal traffic but that's not the problem of the people who put the sign there. Ignoring these kinds of edge cases and expecting someone else (often the courts) to sort it out on a case by case bases when it causes problems isn't exactly uncommon in government. It's like their version of an unanswered bug report from 2010 with a bunch of "hey I found this by googling and I have the same issue" comments below it.
The hilly geography (and poor advanced planning) means you don't have room for your lane to continue ahead of you. It's an intensely short merge that would be dangerous to allow people to fly out into, given you don't have time to look and merge safely before your lane ends.
Yeah that merge sucks all around in both lanes. The left lane just merges directly into the freeway with no onramp space, while the right lane exits. Meanwhile you've got traffic on I5 which is still coming up on you at 75mph since that's the point where the limit drops, and some of them want off at Nyberg.
Not my favorite interchange, either. Not the worst in Portland by far, but definitely awkward at times.
> Not the worst in Portland by far, but definitely awkward at times.
That's true. I could probably come up with a decent list of them.
This one in Portland is similar, and it's on a bridge. Everyone on the right wants to go left, everyone on the left wants to go right and all want to do it above 60MPH with as little space in-between as possible. Scares the shit out of me every time.
https://www.google.com/maps/@45.5065751,-122.6714366,3a,60.7...
The merge point is as soon as the lanes touch. The dominant traffic flow is I5 to I84 and every last one of those cars has to switch lanes to get there, and some traffic will need to cross in front of them to get from I405 to I5. There's about a quarter mile to make it all happen, while on a bridge with narrow lanes 130 feet in the air, moving at speed. No, you will not be leaving large gaps to let people in, LOL. You will back off and leave exactly enough room for a car to get in front of you (assuming you are not just going to trade lanes). It works okay as long as everyone acts as expected and nobody wimps out. It can get dangerous when grandma goes through there and panics when it all gets really dense for a moment.
Which is a great solution if everybody complies, but when you have people unfamiliar with the area, bad drivers, and anxiety over Google Maps directions is when it spells trouble. I've lived in Oregon for over 30 years, so I don't typically have a problem but I get nervous over the unpredictable behavior of other drivers in those situations I outlined.
I've done it twice. The response is basically along the lines of "thanks for letting us know, we are aware improvements in signage are needed" and then they never do anything.
It could start with a simple lane closure today, if traffic stays at the current levels.
Thanks for posting the link. Will look for info on how to fund/vote for this project. As mandelbrotwurst said below, it's a small cost to greatly improve mental and physical health.
Is that expensive? Back of the envelope, 10,000 one way trips per day at $5 in avoided costs of alternate transport per trip = $18.25M per year, seems like could pay for itself well within the lifetime of the bridge?
Well, maybe, unless providing this new alternate method of transit decreases congestion and pollution, improves mental and physical health of its citizens, and by extension their productive capacity and the amount of income or other taxes that they might pay.
While it's laudable that the City considers funding sources for various projects, particularly so given its many budgetary issues, it is flawed to think that the cost benefit analysis in considering whether to invest in a given project is as simple as "will this project pay for itself directly through fees that it generates".
Money is fungible and the City has the ability to issue bonds. It should consider the effects of what it invests in on the overall health of the urban system at large.
We do this for things that are considered "social projects", but not for infrastructure, but this is an arbitrary distinction, and as always, it's all connected!
Note: I don't intend here to argue that any of the what are called "social projects" are worth or not worth their expense , just calling attention to what I see as an odd disconnect in how we determine what is worth funding.
...as a sidenote, your point also only holds if all of these trips are replacing previously vehicular traffic going over the bridge. Also note that you could have alternatively chosen to focus on the decrease in wear and tear on the bridge!
I’m not sure we really want people trying this on their own initiative. This was a very good quality implementation, but most attempts at this would’ve consisted of a piece of cardboard and some spray paint.
It's stories like this that can teach us how useless much of the things we think are "secure" are actually not.
I'm always frustrated with the bogus security measure out there that do nothing to stop the criminals and just serve as a hassle to honest people.
Checks are one of those. I have a micr font and a few nice check mockups in Photoshop for "verifying" checking accounts for direct deposit. I'll simply plug in the bank routing number and account number, print it out and write "void" on it. As if that is some kind of security. I also keep some blank checks in case I need to actually print a check. There is nothing special about them except for the number placement (magnetic ink hasn't been a thing for a long while, it's almost all optical now).
Another is a utility bill. I've had several occasions where a utility bill with your name on it is required to verify your location and identity and I either don't yet have the utilities in my name or they are in the name of a roommate. A quick scan, clone brush, and type tool and you've got a utility bill in your name.
I have never had anyone take a second glance at any of this stuff. It always works.