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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/
(Score: 4, Informative) by d on Tuesday July 08 2014, @12:11PM
Come on, they're not "hackers". You should know better.
(Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Tuesday July 08 2014, @12:15PM
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
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
Broke in by design.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:41PM
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
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
"Cracker" is associated with poor white southerners, but not with racism.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday July 08 2014, @04:13PM
Not on the part of the object of the term but it is by definition a racist term.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday July 08 2014, @12:40PM
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
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
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
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.