Hacking McDonalds API 🍔

​McBroken - Hacking the McDonald’s API​

The brains behind this project, Rashiq, reverse-engineered McDonald's internal API and places 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 data is then visualized on a map of the US showing the status of the ice cream machine at every McDonald's location. Brilliant! This is probably one of the best use cases for companies to open their APIs. The Director of McDonald's analytics even said "I'm Lovin' It"... One of my favorite tweets out of this project is that Rashiq runs the entire project on a $5 Digital Ocean droplet.

​The Swiss Telco Swisscom achieves 1Gbps on a moving train​

As a former Swisscom employee, I still believe it is one of the best technology companies in Switzerland, and it has one of the greatest cultures I have worked in. I still keep track of what's happening at Swisscom, but this article surprised me when it was at the top of Hacker News. Swisscom has been busy testing cell phone transmission speeds on moving trains for quite some time now. They built a four-kilometer-long corridor to test different train windows, seating positions, and a special antenna corridor. All this provides Swiss train passengers the best coverage while working on the go. I completed many projects while working on Swiss trains, so I look forward to these advancements.

​GitLab Security Report​

The second edition of the GitLab security report didn't disappoint. Rather, it highlighted trends in security vulnerabilities across thousands of GitLab projects. What I find the most interesting in the report is the animated moving timeline to see how vulnerabilities change over time. A couple of the highlights include the % of secrets (AWS keys, SSH, etc) committed to GitLab and non-secret with passwords in the URL running #1. Protect yourselves and start scanning your projects today!!

​Grafana rolls our new Test & Trace Tools​

Grafana made some big announcements this week at the first virtual ObservabilityCon. Loki hits 2.0 with a ton of new features. best to read the release notes as it is big. Grafana announced a new distributed tracing tool Tempo which integrates with all the major tracing tools.

​The Implosion of Firefox and Mozilla the company​

Drew DeVault has been tracking the slow descent of Firefox. Considered by many the last chance of a free internet has taken a turn for the worse. Bad decisions, layoffs of the core engineering team, and a 400% increase in executive's salaries while their market share declined 85% is all sad to read. DeVault has already been writing about the slow demise of Mozilla since 2016. I hope they can turn the ship around in time!

…That’s this week’s theByte newsletter!

-Brian