Parking Lot Hero
I went to CSU Monterey Bay where the parking enforcement was brutal. They had over-enrolled, and there was pretty much nowhere to park out in the off-campus housing. You received two parking permits per unit, but only one car could fit in the driveway. However, there could be as many as five people living in one unit. If all five people had cars, they’d have to drop $120 to get another pass.
The penalty was a $45 ticket if parking enforcement ever found the rules being broken. We were all incredibly broke, so this was obviously a terrible situation. Now, they did have a guest pass system that any student could use 10 times during a semester, but only if you had visitors. So, for the visitor permit, one would click the link on your online profile, and he or she would get a parking permit generated for that day at that time with a special QR code stamped on it.
Upon closer inspection of the script they used to generate these things, we realized that the QR code was simply the date and time of printing hashed into the bar code. No other data. So, I came up with a genius plan—I downloaded the raw HTML of the page that was generated, wrote a quick PHP script to randomize the time, looped through the next 50 days, and printed out passes for all of my friends’ cars.
I decided not to sell the permits to people who needed them. Instead, I generated a standalone PHP program to generate permitted up to 10 at a time that they could print themselves. All they’d have to do is fill in their cars’ info, generate 10 printable pages, print ’em, and stash ’em in their cars. I was a hero.