I Ate FREE at My University Dining Hall for 3 Years
cs student finds a real software bug in his college dining system. eats free for three years. it’s not stealing if the terminal says green light every time, technically.
IT told him the bug didn’t exist for six months.
it existed.
read with live piano and sound effects throughout.
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36 Comments
This is "how I found my carrier" 😂
“Insanely lucky” is absolutely accurate. That’s wild. My gobs are smacked by how that turned out. And your piano usage definitely added to the story! Thank you for yet another great story reading. ❤
"Pretty sure a semester is about four months" made me laugh out loud.
Thank you for the story! Made folding my laundry fly by 🙂
Here's an idea for you, if you like it: it would be cool if you created a recognizable "sound effect" for your own asides/comments when you speak for yourself and not reading the text of the story. It would be great for those of us who listen and don't watch.
The first time it happened he knew something was wrong, but being a broke college student he rationalized it. It turns out that when you make a decision like this you tend to keep doing it. Alternatively, if you take the high ground you will keep doing that. I think he got very lucky. I can't help but wonder if being a "promising young man" played into his good fortune as it often does in matters like these (their name is Sneaky Pete so I assume we are talking someone who is likely male).
Making decisions like this is how you get people in institutions robbing Peter to pay Paul; they think, "I'll do it just this once," and then they do not stop, inexorably their moral compass slides, the next thing they know its 10 years later, the house of cards comes down, and they are holding the bag thinking, "I am not a bad person, how did this happen?"
However, the moment you take the high road even if it is the more difficult choice that also can be a self-fulfilling prophecy that defines who you are to yourself; you can chose it at any time, even after you've started taking the low road. There may be consequences of course, but the longer those consequences are delayed, the worse they generally become.
i'd say im a cs guy but i hate excel
10:30 – I'd be going into that meeting with a grin wide enough to make the moon jealous 🙂
Such a great story! I think part of it was his reaction to the disciplinary meeting. If he had responded other than being calm and polite, things would not have had the same ending.
We got to use our dining cards for dominoes pizza, that was the best year of school.
Hello
now personally I'm older and more jaded so I'd say that taking advantage of a system bug via nothing more then timing means the meal is free, that's their system failing because of their neglect and this is a collage, not like they don't have plenty of money to spare.
when presented with the bill i would tell them it would cost them more in leagal fees for a single court date where that cost would be my maximum exposure and they would have to dredge through their logs to prove every single dollar.
I'd also demand that if they are going to charge me they need to back charge every student for even a single error and that it be accurate so no "well here is the average so just charge that".
large institutions NEED to be punished when they make errors like this, it MUST be assumed when their system does something their system has the authority to do it and the consequence to go along with it.
if you are large enough to have a lawyer on staff you are large enough for this standard, and large enough to absorb 3k in damage caused by your own negligence.
they demanded repayment because they knew a collage kid wouldn't be able to afford the leagal help to properly navigate the situation.
2,340 at 3 years = 780. 40 weeks *3 days = 120 = 70% = 84 meals/year = $10 a meal
I thought CS meant cybersecurity given the story and it being ironic, but that may just be me
absolutely brilliant XD ~ i can't believe you only have about 1k views 😮
your content is great and you choose great stories, and the piano ditties are a fun inclusion. ^__^ be well sir.
that was such a good story. and waffles. i get that. when i go to hotels and they have waffles, i get waffles every time.
I really love this channel. I watch a few different YouTubers in this vein, but you have a distinctly different spin on it which is refreshing and also you bring different content than just “Karen” videos and aita and whatnot. Watching for you every day. Hope you blow up and make a million $$$
Also I legit love your hair. I’m stupid jealous.
Nice video
Noon has always been lunch so 11:45–12:30 makes sense. Every cafeteria I’ve been to (multiple colleges, hospitals, hotels, etc) has always been the busiest at noon. Whether your first class is at 7 or at 1pm lunch is at noon.
The work experience interview must be crazy. 100% approval rate
Why does it feel like having something appear on screen is evolving or leveling up in sime way? ❤
I love Daniel Thrasher’s videos in his second channel, and now I have a different channel to listen to!
They did well in hiring him for the audit. He was probably the only person on campus that already had a very accurate mental model of how the system actually worked.
Everyone in that room knew he had exploited the system for monetary gains. But legal proceedings would've been difficult, as "I like to eat lunch at exactly noon, and that register is my favorite" is an almost 100% airtight defense, especially if the standard is "beyond any reasonable doubt".
I came across your videos in the last month or so and I just want to say what a joy they are ❤, your tone of voice mixed with the musical accompaniment is just lovely 😊
Something similar happened in the UK reconciling local Post Office transactions with the main Horizon server, but it was far less fun than this. There were no free waffles but in some cases free low star accommodation.
The discrepancies in the transaction logs were noticed and nearly a thousand completely honest Post Office subpostmasters often in small villages, were prosecuted for theft that they didn't commit and had their reputations ruined. This continued for 15 years with managers at the Post Office and their Fujtisu contractors obstinately maintaining that there was no fault in their system, so the only possible explanation was fraud.
Reminds of the time I found a bug with the hospital car park, if you got the weekly pass then got a new ticket then entered with one and exited with the other it let you in and out past the expiry date infinitely. No clue what the actual bug was but I exploited that when visiting the hospital, free parking for months. To be honest is should be free to begin with.
I assume it never voided the ticket because I never entered with it so didn't clock an entry date, that would be my guess, but it always let you out because it had to because you had to enter the car park first to buy the weekly ticket and they told you the chuck the one you entered with in the bin, so I took their advice, pushed the button for a new ticket then chucked it in the bin.
I'm good at finding exploits.
Oh my god you make full length videos?!?!?! Hell yeah!
CS student here.
As someone in the cybersecurity community as a hobby for 10+ years i hope you read more hacler related stories like this
Piano Man offers commentary. I like it! 😊
Tbh I feel like the university handled the whole thing super well. Their job is to prepare their stuents for the working world, and what he understood of the system was technically impressive/an excellent learning opportunity for him. So they brought him in to a very serious environment with an attourney present and everything – scared him shitless about the POSSIBLE consequence of his actions, teaching him how badly it could go wrong if he did this in future – then issued reasonable consequences in the form of paying back what he took – then, offered him a valuable working world opportunity, paying him a fair rate for his time, and allowing him to profit from his skillset in a way that was ultimately more beneficial for him than if he'd just stayed exploiting the system in secret. Lesson learned.
I continue to enjoy. But one thing I would love to see on your channel – playlists, with category groups. Be it luck, humor, feel good, whathaveyou. I love the stories and the presentation, but there are times I want a certain feel to the stories, or at least want to avoid certain feelings, and having a way to know what to expect from the story would be fantastic.
I agree a waffle station is a dangerous thing at college. But I would pose being able to get omelettes can be dangerous as well.
Love the past stuff, however the recent addition of your thoughts detracts from the flow. Reminiscent of how when some people take photos of objects they stand in front if it meme. Stick to the content that's what people come for.
I mean the problem isn't the fail open state, it's the systems incorrect syncing and failing to deduct balances and logging that as a success.
"I kept it to 1 meal a day, always lunch. I wasn't being greedy about it – partly because I'm not actually that greedy and partly because I understood that anomalies at scale get noticed faster than anomalies that stay small"
Also, entirely because it only worked at lunch when the footfall was enough to exploit.