Recent content by theenbyperor

Oh, indeed you are right. I thought form GRC3 applied to the FoIA as well as the GDPR. Turns out it does not!

There's some extremely funny business going on with Interrail in the UK. Presently, Interrail is issued in a way that the pass cover number is always at the same byte offset within a barcode. Thus, when a UK inspection devices sees a barcode that starts #UT (the prefix for any European...

The International Union of Railways members (so those operating cross-border services) do actually stick to a hard 1-year limit on key length. Although the Dutch railways have recently (as in, two days ago) failed to copy Interrail's new key into their system, so Dutch fare gates broke for...

Believe it or not, the TOCs’ ticketing system operators are awful at actually updating keys. I’m pretty sure the Avanti key is still used, in spite of being ostensibly expired.

This is indeed correct. Thankfully, the public keys have been leaked: https://git.eta.st/eta/rsp6-decoder/-/blob/master/keys.json?ref_type=heads

Unfortunately, it was decided that the keys are “held” by the RDG not the TOCs, and so aren’t even in scope of the FoIA.

It took them about half a year to come to their decision, then another just over half a year in the courts themselves on appeal. If the ICO don't do anything (i.e. provide a status report, allocate a case officer) for 3 months, you can apply to the tribunal to force them to move your case along.

I've written a paper on it, currently waiting for peer-review on that.

One of the arguments I used for the release of these standards is that it was me who discovered this fraud in Germany, and it was precisely because the specs were open that I could do that. See here: All my Deutschlandtickets gone: Fraud at an industrial scale.

They did. Probably saw the writing on the wall, but still dragged it out until a few days before the trial was due to start.

Hey all, As I'm sure you're aware, the RDG like to keep the spec for their bacoded tickets rather secretive. However, after a 15 month (ish) Freedom of Information Act fight, I've managed recently to settle a court case against the Department for Transport giving me the specs under the FoIA...

Well, the UIC’s interests don’t always align with what the ERA is doing.

The UIC eTCD does charge per ticket issued. I’m not sure exactly the pricing model of the UK’s eTVDs, but seemingly they do not. The other point is a misunderstanding. The UK allows multiple interoperable eTVDs, as does the ERA system, it’s just that only the UIC one exists for now.

The eTCD spec will be public *soon*. It is just currently working its way through the final stages of EU approval before publication. I dislike that it works like this, but this is the way the EU is. 1768159205 Simple answer: they did not

Oh entirely agreed. Perhaps if TTK had read the standards, they have an idea of what offline fallback should look like. Its certainly not like we wrote that down :P