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posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday July 08 2014, @11:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the Not-going-to-make-a-bear-pun! dept.

Washington DC-area residents with a hankering for lion meat lost a valuable source of the (yes, legal) delicacy last year when a restaurant called the Serbian Crown closed its doors after nearly 40 years in the same location. The northern Virginia eatery served French and Russian cuisine in a richly appointed dining room thick with old world charm. It was best known for its selection of exotic meats -- one of the few places in the U.S. where an adventurous diner could order up a plate of horse or kangaroo. "We used to have bear, but bear meat was abolished," says proprietor Rene Bertagna. "You cannot import any more bear."

But these days, Bertagna isn't serving so much as a whisker. It began in early 2012, when he experienced a sudden 75 percent drop off in customers on the weekend, the time he normally did most of his business. The slump continued for months, for no apparent reason. Bertagna's profits plummeted, he was forced to lay off some of his staff, and he struggled to understand what was happening. Only later did Bertagna come to suspect that he was the victim of a gaping vulnerability that made his Google listings open to manipulation. He was alerted to that possibility when one of his regulars phoned the restaurant. "A customer called me and said, 'Why are you closed on Saturday, Sunday and Monday? What's going on?'" Bertagna says. It turned out that Google Places, the search giant's vast business directory ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/restaurants/serbian-crown,1147678.html ), was misreporting the Serbian Crown's hours. Anyone Googling Serbian Crown, or plugging it into Google Maps, was told incorrectly that the restaurant was closed on the weekends, Bertagna says. For a destination restaurant with no walk-in traffic, that was a fatal problem.

http://www.wired.com/2014/07/hacking-google-maps/

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by d on Tuesday July 08 2014, @12:11PM

    by d (523) on Tuesday July 08 2014, @12:11PM (#65862)

    Come on, they're not "hackers". You should know better.

    • (Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Tuesday July 08 2014, @12:15PM

      by AnonTechie (2275) on Tuesday July 08 2014, @12:15PM (#65863) Journal

      You are correct. Please assume that crackers have replaced hackers.

      --
      Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
      • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @12:47PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @12:47PM (#65875)

        FTFA: "Ordinary users can submit community edits to your listing with details like operating hours—as Barbara Oliver discovered."

        So they were not even crackers. They used standard documented interfaces to change the information through the official ways. No cracking involved. It's like claiming Wikipedia was cracked if someone writes wrong information on a Wikipedia page.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:17PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:17PM (#65883)

          Broke in by design.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:41PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:41PM (#65893)

          Sounds like a clear case of a social hack. They exploited people's willingness to trust google without verification. That's essentially the same thing as calling up some clerk and impersonating someone in a position of authority in order to get the clerk to do something they wouldn't do for an ordinary citizen.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @02:04PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @02:04PM (#65915)

        Crackers are poor, white, southern, racists, so unless YOU'LL LET A WORD HAVE MORE THAN ONE MEANING you can't use that either.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @02:30PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @02:30PM (#65940)

          "Cracker" is associated with poor white southerners, but not with racism.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday July 08 2014, @12:40PM

      by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 08 2014, @12:40PM (#65872) Journal

      I've changed it - but I also think that you should know that the battle has already been lost. It may not be what we would like, but the whole world knows them as hackers. We'll just have to live with it.

      • (Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Tuesday July 08 2014, @08:47PM

        by SlimmPickens (1056) on Tuesday July 08 2014, @08:47PM (#66188)

        The battle is not lost. Just like all those people who called flash memory "USB's" eventually had to learn that USB meant something else and it was never going to change because we need it to mean what it means. The same is happening in our media here in Australia, they're gradually not calling online abuse 'Trolling' any more. They've actually looked up a dictionary.

        "Hacker" is a little different though, since we also use it in ways that do not mean re-purposing code.

        But still, Never Give Up!

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 09 2014, @08:28AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 09 2014, @08:28AM (#66413)

        The same world knows the computer as "hard drive". If we are to use their language, we'll never get anything in working order.

        - Someone who has driven for half an hour to help a user with "a broken hard drive", that turned out to be a broken solder on the graphics card. Guess which part we did not bring...

        The user knew what the problem was, but his insistence on using technical terms he did not know the meaning of, rather than describing the broken part, made two tech support guys come to the same conclusion: The guy is just spouting off technical sounding terms and the fault will be the usual broken monitor cable.

    • (Score: 1) by cout on Wednesday July 09 2014, @01:29PM

      by cout (4526) on Wednesday July 09 2014, @01:29PM (#66507)

      There is no cracking here. Hacking really does fit better (in the sense that the software was used in a way other than the way it was intended). I think your objection is that this use of the word assigns a negative connotation to the word "hacker", even though the denotation is the same as someone who hacks on software all weekend or builds a giant spinny beanie hat on top of a building at a well-known center of higher education.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by elf on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:06PM

    by elf (64) on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:06PM (#65878)

    Some other URL's

    Link to what google shows now, this has probably changed a lot in the last 3 years but you can see a website for the restaurant and a selection of reviews. Even if it said "closed" I suspect quite a few people would load up the restaurant website to find more and would see a discrepency

    https://www.google.com/maps/place/Serbian+Crown+Restaurant/@38.97349,-77.295876,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x89b6360d0a8fbba5:0x79a2bbe49b2f3a1e [google.com]

    Yelp has some pretty bad reviews

    http://www.yelp.com/biz/serbian-crown-restaurant-great-falls [yelp.com]

    And trip advisor wasn't much better

    http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g57783-d497915-Reviews-The_Serbian_Crown_Restaurant-Great_Falls_Fairfax_County_Virginia.html [tripadvisor.co.uk]

    This is the actual website for the restaurant

    http://www.serbiancrown.com/ [serbiancrown.com]

    The whois on this URL shows that the website was around since 2001 and last updated in 2009. This would mean the url was most likely in the google map results when the issue took place (don't know if this was hacked url though, hard to tell from article)

    I personally use trip advisor to find new places to go or Zaggat which google shows, most places also have a website which is the single place I always check.

    I can't believe 75% of people suddenly decided to not go based on the google restaurant times shown. You were either a regular and you knew the times and wanted to come back, a regular who knew the times and didn't want to come back, someone new who wanted to try it out but thought it was closed or someone who was new, saw it was listed as closed but did more research and found out this was an error. (probably lots of other types of people too...can't list them all though :))

    Out of those only one set of people would go down because of the issue, and you would expect regulars to make up the bulk of people (my personal view...I have no evidence to back this up). With the reviews posted from trip advisor and yelp I going to go out on a limb and say it wasn't all google in this situation...we will see how the law suit comes along.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday July 08 2014, @02:00PM

      by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday July 08 2014, @02:00PM (#65913) Journal

      Mod this up.

      I doubt the google listed hours of operation would have caused the sudden drop in business. I always call restaurants I have never visited to confirm hours and wait time. I suspect many people would as well. From a quick skim of Yelp it appears that the problem was their crap service. Crap service will kill a restaurant faster than anything else. There were some food related complaints, that is to be expected as you can't satisfy everyone. Reading back to even 2010 there were complaints of very slow service. People waiting 30 minutes for bread/menus, over an hour for a meal to come, staff that likes to hide, staff does not check up on tables, staff is rude etc. I have been to those types of places and I never go back. Ever.

      The best restaurants are the ones where the staff doesn't leave you alone. There is one restaurant by me, not exactly haute cuisine but the food is pretty good and their service is always perfect. If you tell the waiter "Tell Joe I said hello" (Joe is the owner), everyone gets a free glass of red or white house wine and they advertise that little "secret" right on their menu. The best part? The owner Joe is always there and prowls the floor. He stops by your table at least once asking about your meal and service. Any complaint or request is immediately addressed. If you go there enough he will remember you.

      Also have you ever seen a diner go out of business? Diner food is pretty crappy at times, bland burgers, soggy fries, maybe the steak is old or tough. But people keep coming back because its cheap and the staff hover around you. I have only seen one diner near me close and that was because the owner retired and couldn't find a buyer.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Silentknyght on Tuesday July 08 2014, @05:04PM

      by Silentknyght (1905) on Tuesday July 08 2014, @05:04PM (#66047)

      From user Stevesaw, commenting on the original article at Wired; I thought it had some really interesting background information & insights---especially that there's been a recent change in management:

      Just out of curiosity, when I read the lines in the article, "Demonstrating causation between a bad Google Maps listing and Serbian Crown’s decline is going to be hard, though. For one thing, the restaurant’s Yelp listing—also a big factor in choosing a dinner reservation—is packed with abysmal, almost frightening, reviews" I decided to check out the yelp reviews referenced. Then I decided to read the tripadvisor reviews for this restaurant. I then googled a few other listings for "Serbian Crown" restaurant reviews.

      What I found was that the Serbian Crown, while having been around for about 40 years, changed owners several years ago. It seems that the restaurant's reputation declined severely after Rene Bertagna took it over.

      The vast majority (about 90%) of the reviews are very, almost excruciatingly, negative. Several diners said eating there was their worst dining experience, ever. From very poor wait service, to food switches, lengthy delays, to over-billing, bad oysters, to rudeness from the wait staff and owner, refusal to honor coupons, etc., etc., it seems this place went from bad to terribly worse under Bertagna's reign. And the over-priced food wasn't even really Serbian!

      As for his lawyer's "theory" that a competing restaurant may have messed with the Google Places listing? He'd better have some evidence for that hypothesis -- my bet would be that a quite dissatisfied diner or two may be the more likely culprit, if the mass of hilariously bad and negative reviews are to be believed.

      I urge readers to check out the yelp and tripadvisor reviews, to get a better sense of what really may have caused this restaurant's demise -- they really fill in the picture. Oh, and the few 4 and 5 star reviews? They seem fabricated in how over-the-top and ridiculously glowing they are. I'd suggest very bad management is the root cause of the Serbian Crown going down. Google has nothing to worry about from this lawsuit, IMHO.

  • (Score: 2) by Covalent on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:08PM

    by Covalent (43) on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:08PM (#65879) Journal

    I've seen this problem on many occasions, particularly with the address of a business being incorrect. In those cases I've just assumed it was an honest error or perhaps the business moved and nobody updated the info. But in this case it seems that someone may have done this maliciously. I wonder if they can find out who made the edit. If it was malicious, that's a sneaky underhanded person.

    --
    You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
    • (Score: 1, Troll) by VLM on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:35PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:35PM (#65887)

      WRT "malicious", the problem is a restaurant is a stereotypical example of a .biz that involved "modest" numbers of humans as employee and "huge" numbers as customers.

      So its a law of human nature, one of the managers is going to be banging one of the servers and dump her for a hotter server so the ugly one wants to get even, or someone is going to feel unjustly fired, or some patron is going to go home and puke and possibly correctly identify the cause as food poisoning.

      The bug isn't the people, unless you have a proposal to change human nature, the bug is in not having .biz procedures to handle human nature in a .biz that is made mostly out of people.

      Crying about "boo hoo the world has changed and I don't wanna" isn't any cooler with google maps than with any other rich business owner whining. Change or die, just like everyone else. Don't wanna, that's fine, there's a zillion equally qualified people ready to take over.

  • (Score: 1) by WillAdams on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:39PM

    by WillAdams (1424) on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:39PM (#65890)

    A business shouldn't allow trash or graffiti to linger on their physical property --- they should perform the same sort of cleanup and maintenance on their on-line presence.

      - ensure all information everywhere is accurate
      - take ownership of pages where possible
      - find bad reviews, discuss them w/ staff, find solutions and try to regain the lost trust directly w/ the customers

    As a corollary, find good reviews, determine which staff were involved and reward them. Discuss how the on-line perception and the business's reputation affects the bottom line w/ staff.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:41PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:41PM (#65894)

      A classic marketing technique for a restaurant --- hand out two pairs of coupons for free meals to the owner of every hair salon w/in driving distance --- please note this only works if staff and food are excellent

    • (Score: 1) by CRCulver on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:54PM

      by CRCulver (4390) on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:54PM (#65904) Homepage

      A business shouldn't allow trash or graffiti to linger on their physical property --- they should perform the same sort of cleanup and maintenance on their on-line presence.

      If a couple of competing businesses decide to play dirty and mess with your listing, then you are already outnumbered. You can throw more money and staff at the problem, but you might still end up losing.

    • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday July 08 2014, @11:12PM

      by hemocyanin (186) on Tuesday July 08 2014, @11:12PM (#66246) Journal

      I have a small professional service type business and practice a very niche area. But we still get calls from people asking to help them with problems we don't do and have never done. When we ask how they got our contact info, it's some vague reference to "internet" or they googled us -- most people don't even really understand that the spammy sites offering listings of professionals aren't related to google, legitimate listing businesses, or anything other than their search -- these are sites purely designed to capture input and display ads. As a small business owner, there is no way I could possibly police all of those crap sites and still do my work.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Dunbal on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:40PM

    by Dunbal (3515) on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:40PM (#65892)

    Because it smells like rat. Good restaurants rely heavily on repeat business from regular customers. Specialty restaurants like this one more so. So, how likely are you to google the place you have already been to in order to find its address on the map? How likely are you to never eat there again if it's not open on a particular day, if you like the place? If you really like the place, how likely are you to never call and find out (like some people obviously did) why they're never open on (insert popular day here)?

    When business was tapering off absolutely no one considered any sort of advertising?

    I think that perhaps this is the case of a restaurant going out of business for many reasons - like restaurants often do - and blaming it on "hackers". Maybe business suddenly fell 75% in 2012 because the food started tasting like shit.

    • (Score: 1) by bziman on Tuesday July 08 2014, @07:10PM

      by bziman (3577) on Tuesday July 08 2014, @07:10PM (#66126)

      This is one of those special occasion type places where you'd go for a five year anniversary or a fiftieth birthday. I went there on a date once back in the 90s, and it was really impressive. Of course, a lot has probably changed in twenty years. You'd have to be pretty strange and rich to be a "regular".

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:45PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:45PM (#65896)

    That sort of attack is small potatoes compared to what else you can do by fiddling with the data in google maps.

    This guy changed the phone numbers on the listings for the FBI and Secret Service [gawker.com] which caused people to call his phone number instead. He silently forwarded their calls to the legit phone numbers but also recorded the phone calls.