From riding the train so often my Computer Science mind couldn’t help but start to think its evil ways. And thus I will explain how simple it is to hack the train.

On my train the conductors do not check for tickets between each and every stop. If you were to take a train between two local stops it will likely be a free ride. Just be careful not to get on the train car with the conductor standing right there. But then again, they are so apathetic it might not matter.

The lazy and apathetic conductors are the easiest way to get free rides. Basically these people walk up and down the train making sure that everyone paid for their ride in some capacity. They also have to think about the running of the train in cooperation with the engineer. One time I pretended to have lost my ticket even though it was in my pocket. The conductor and people around me looked annoyed as expected, but I persisted. The conductor eventually got tired of waiting and moved on. I had the ticket ready in case he returned, but he never did.

Now the ticket I get is a weekly ticket because my situation prevents me from getting a monthly ticket yet. The weekly ticket allows unlimited rides between two stations for 7 days Saturday-Friday. Unless the conductor takes it and studies it the only thing he can see from afar is the expiration date. This ticket, unlike the one way, round-trip or 10-trip tickets does not get a hole-punch. The conductor just glances at it and moves on. To test I just saved a ticket from a previous week and only exposed to the conductor a portion of it without the expiration date. He saw it and moved on. So a weekly ticket is potentially a lifetime ticket. Also, if you bought one with a conveniently editable expiration date like 08/08 or something you could use white-out or sharpie to edit the expiration date carefully and get free rides.

There are two holy grails of free train rides. The first is ticket forgery. That is too boring to even get into. The real interesting hack is to manipulate the little slips the conductor uses to keep track of who has paid and who has not. On a long ride they have to make multiple passes through the train checking tickets. On a crowded train the conductor cannot possibly remember every face on the train. So they use this system of little cardboard tickets and a hole puncher to keep track of who they need a ticket from. They punch and place these tickets in little slots on all the rows of seating. If armed with a properly shaped hole puncher and some properly colored blank slips you could mark your seat to indicate to the conductor that he had already collected your ticket.

I have not reverse engineered this system entirely, but I do know quite a few things about it. First, the way in which the slip is tilted indicates something. Secondly, each conductor seems to have a different shaped hole puncher, so having multiple shapes, especially star and triangle is important. Most important is getting and sitting on the train as far away from the conductor’s starting position is important. You can’t very well make fake hole punches if the conductor is watching. Other passengers are too apathetic to say anything. So let’s say you want to get a free ride on the train. Get on before other people and find someone sitting alone in a two-seat row in the window seat. Examine their slip. Then find an empty two-seat row and sit in the window seat generating an identical slip for yourself. Then you must skillfully ignore the conductor as he comes through. The rely heavily on the fact that honest people who have not had their tickets collected will bustle around when they say “tickets please”. People who have already been ticketed don’t even move. The fact that you move signals that you have a ticket to show. If you just keep going about your business he will likely walk on by.

If you get caught, pay up. The railroad has a system whereby purchasing tickets before you get on the train is cheaper than buying them on the train. This is to discourage people from trying to get free rides. It also helps them make the trains more efficient because they can better track how many tickets where purchased if you don’t buy them from the conductor. However, if you are getting tons of free rides by hacking the system it will end up being cheaper for you to buy the occasional ticket at the higher on-train price.

And lastly I just want to say that I never actually have cheated the train out of anything. For every time I have taken the train I have legally purchased a ticket. The matter is that I simply can’t help but try to figure out ways to mess with the system. That is the nature of people like me.

Who is going to listen to a bunch of punk hippy kids standing around with newspapers printed with red and black ink? It reeks of weed, communism and waste. Not very persuasive if you ask me. It’s the same as all the crazy lefty protesters. You know, the Green Peace / PETA types. They always have really clever signs, clever chants/songs, clever costumes and more. In fact, I congratulate them for providing great amusement for the rest of the world while having a fun time themselves. Protesting is always fun. But these people wont make a difference just like the socialists wont. Nobody is going to take you seriously. Maybe a few passers-by who are like minded will join you. But nobody who is opposed to your point of view, especially not the people you are protesting at, will take you seriously. The methods are simply not effective for bringing change to the world, good or bad.

There was a man name Ghandi, maybe you heard of him? He liked to do this thing called civil disobedience. Martin Luther King Jr. borrowed his idea and it worked for him to. Basically you break the law, on purpose, because the law is unjust. Then you gladly accept the consequences while simultaneously fighting the injustice. It’s a very effective method for obvious reasons. What happens is you begin suffering. You go to jail, you starve, you become poor. But if you stay strong through the troubled times people can’t feel badly about you, its something in human nature. This is what the terrorists do wrong. They use violence as their method for trying to convince people to go their way. But its easy to hate violent people, so even if you agree about the idea of an Islamic state you can’t really join up with them because they are so violent. Nobody likes killers. Everyone loves sufferers. Even those Evangelicals love to give money to starving children in African and South America. So willingly suffering in a dignified and public manner is an effective tool for instigating social change.

Why does it seem this method has been lost to us? Everyone is so afraid of suffering these days. Everyone is too much of a wuss to take any personal suffering. Even the hardest core anti-DMCA nerds will settle with the RIAA if a lawsuit comes their way. It’s quite pathetic. As I’ve said in the past, both Israel and Palestine are too cowardly to use these methods. But if either one of them decided to go for it, they would win almost instantly. If one of the two sides laid down their arms, and the other side did not, then the rest of the world opinion would turn in favor of the non-violent side creating clear victory for them. At worst BOTH sides would lay down their arms. Oh nos, PEACE, we can’t have that! The protesting method of civil disobedience has been lost due to the overwhelming cowardice in our society, especially in the USA. It is often said that Americans are excellent at dealing with big problems like wars and bombs, but terrible at dealing with light inconveniences. That’s why our soldiers get coca-cola before they get Kevlar.

Of course, I am in favor of reviving the methods of Ghandi in order to change the world for the better. What to change is a separate issue not to discuss here, but how to use the methods in a modern society is very interesting. Neither Ghandi nor MLK Jr. had the Internet. What if they did? What would they do? First off, they would use the Internet effectively to publicize their suffering. The more people who heard and felt sad for their plight the more effective their work is. Secondly, they would use the Internet to research and get ideas for new things to do. Research is infinitely helpful prior to action. For example they could check out the full text of all the laws they planned on or might be incidentally breaking during their civil disobedience. That way they can avoid any likely false charges and avoid breaking just laws, like laws regulating permits for organized protests and such.

Most obviously they would use the Internet to recruit. Civil disobedience works much better when more people do it. One man in jail is a nut, a thousand people are a cult of crazies, a hundred thousand are a revolution. Combine this with the flash mob. If you didn’t know about flash mobs, they are these awesome things where large groups of people gather in one location very spontaneously and create an instant mob. Like a flash flood, but with people. If you combine the idea of a flash mob with the idea of civil disobedience you can get some very interesting effects. Imagine if instead of one Rosa Parks sitting on a bus and refusing to get up you have thousands of Rosa Parks’ all around the city filling up every seat on every bus and not moving. It will be the great bus sit. Instead of three guys in a Walgreen’s counter you have every Walgreen’s in the state. Instead of a Boston Tea Party you have a tea party in every port coast to coast. Imagine if a thousand laptop bearing nerds congregate outside record company and movie industry buildings, create ad-hoc networks, share and enjoy copyrighted digital video and audio files together. That’s a powerful and convincing message, and its the way we can pave a path to a better tomorrow.

EDIT: I just found out about this. Let me be clear this is not what I mean at all. After murder, suicide is just about the worst thing there is. And it definitely doesn’t work well as a protesting technique because you are passed of as a nut. The worst part is that unlike with other forms of protest, the more people you have join in your suicide the nuttier you are, and therefore the less effective you are. Not to mention the loss of people to aid your cause because you are fucking dead. I’ve heard more than one older member of society say that its not the end of the world. They felt the same way when Nixon got re-elected and things turned out OK. Don’t kill yourself over stupidity like this. Go watch The Power of Nightmares and get over it.