back to article Over The Air: Losing drones and forging bus tickets

Mobile applications might have gone professional, but London's Over The Air event this weekend proved that nothing is more innovative than an over-caffeinated developer working for glory not money. Over the Air is an annual gathering where developers are invited to spend 36 hours creating the best mobile application they can, …

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  1. Francis Boyle

    Please tell

    What is an iPope. Obviously not an app for arresting the Pope since that would have a somewhat larger target audience.

    1. Jerome 0

      iPope

      I'd imagine it's some form of calculator, with a continuously updating figure showing how much of our tax money has so far been wasted on bringing the evil emperor to our shores.

  2. TeeCee Gold badge
    FAIL

    Lobster.

    Isn't there a slight flaw in there?

    There may be no difference in the beep noise, but the difference between an Oyster card and an iPhone with a shonky pic on the screen might be a shade obvious. I have a sneaking suspicion that there aren't enough blind bus drivers around to make this a viable scam.

    1. goron59
      FAIL

      FAIL FAIL

      I see you've never used an oyster card - they usually stay in your wallet, and besides, the driver is usually looking out the window, mirrors, etc.

      The pic of an oyster card is not meant to pretend to be a real card.

  3. A J Stiles
    Happy

    Forged Bus Tickets

    I was doing this as long ago as 1994; using a dot matrix printer I found in a skip (needed a ribbon refill -- the type you wound into the old cartridge by hand -- to get the right shade of purple) and an old XT-compatible running DOS, and a BASIC program I wrote. I then printed "return" tickets onto blank stock, which I salvaged from the litter bin when the driver changed the roll (or on one occasion, shamelessly blagged by borrowing a child).

    Of course I took the whole thing up a gear when the local bus company introduced a 12-journey ticket, whereby the numbers 1 to 12 were punched out as the ticket was used. Mine were only good for eleven journeys, since number 1 would have been punched out immediately after issue, but that hardly mattered when I wasn't paying .....

    And the buzz whenever a satisfied ticket inspector handed back my forged tickets was something else!

    1. Ed Deckard
      Stop

      Interesting, but

      I think you should have posted this as AC

  4. Martin Gregorie

    Puzzlement

    Why is a Parrot controller app even slightly impressive? AFAICT you get one free when you buy the Parrot.

    1. Wider Web
      Thumb Up

      PAYG drone hire

      the hack was pay-as-you-go drone rental using paypal. but more amusing was the drone ending up parked 4m up in the air when the clock ran out.

    2. Russ 3

      It was impressive

      because they wrote one themselves. And not only that, they integrated the PayPal APIs so you could bill someone's paypal acount for an alloted chunk of time depending on how long you wanted to play. The same app also controlled a little RC car with a mounted camera.

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