Ask HN: Has software you've written ever bitten you IRL?

3 pointsOJFord1 comment

Reading this comment's 'fun story' about the time its author accidentally made 1M API calls to a $x/request service made me wonder if anyone else has 'fun' tales of times they automated something or otherwise wrote some software intended for fun, profit, or benefit; that had some unintended real-world consequence?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22212063

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Not exactly 'IRL', but many years ago I wrote a simple bash script to submit many entries into an online competition. Yes, I know... I did scour the competition T's&C's and they didn't have anything in there explicitly prohibiting it (its obviously implied, but I was young and bored...). Anyway:

Each entry required a unique email address, which then had a validation link you needed to click. I scripted this up using curl to submit the request using a randomly generated email address via a catch-all on my domain, reading the mail to extract the submission URL, and then using curl to hit that.

I actually ended up winning the 'random draw', but now I get ~18000 copies of their spammy newsletter! Unfortunately their unsubscribe page has the anti-bot protection that their competition page really should have had ;)

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