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Bot orders $18,752 of McSundaes every 30 min. to find if machines are working:
Burgers, fries, and McNuggets are the staples of McDonald's fare. But the chain also offers soft-serve ice cream in most of its 38,000+ locations. Or at least, theoretically it does. In reality, the ice cream machines are infamously prone to breaking down, routinely disappointing anyone trying to satisfy their midnight McFlurry craving.
One enterprising software engineer, Rashiq Zahid, decided it's better to know if the ice cream machine is broken before you go. The solution? A bot to check ahead. Thus was born McBroken, which maps out all the McDonald's near you with a simple color-coded dot system: green if the ice cream machine is working and red if it's broken.
The bot basically works through McDonald's mobile app, which you can use to place an order at any McDonald's location. If you can add an ice cream order to your cart, the theory goes, the machine at that location is working. If you can't, it's not. So Zahid took that idea and scaled up.
[...] "I reverse-engineered McDonald's internal ordering API," he explained when he launched the tool, "and I'm currently placing an order worth $18,752 every minute at every McDonald's in the US to figure out which locations have a broken ice cream machine."
[...] The Verge interviewed Zahid about his project once his tweet announcing it took off.
NB: The bot does not actually place the order. It attempts to set up an order, and if it is allowed to add the item, it is assumed to be available. Taking note of that, it then exits out of the attempt. At no time is money exchanged. Also, he discovered that he had to back off to once every 30 minutes or it got blocked.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Zinnia Zirconium on Tuesday October 27 2020, @10:43PM (1 child)
No, you're wrong and I'll tell you why. This has nothing to do with computers. Being "good" with computers is not impressive. Doing something cool on a computer will not impress anyone. It never has. Nerds are not cool. Nerds have never been cool. I know this because I've been writing bots to do scraping tricks for ten years and nobody gives a shht about anything I do. Nobody gives a shht because I don't care to scrape billion dollar corporations. The companies behind the sites I scrape are small and relatively unknown.
No you're looking at this story all wrong. This is not a story about some guy who wrote a bot. This is about some guy who wrote a bot to target a billion dollar corporation. The guy doesn't matter. The bot doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that the guy used a computer. The billion dollar corporation matters. The money matters.
It's all about the fukken money, boys.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2020, @12:17AM
+1 Sardonic