I always like a good hack. And this story delivers. Basically, the New York City bikeshare program has a system to reward people who move bicycles from full stations to empty ones. By deliberately moving bikes to create artificial problems, and exploiting exactly how the system calculates rewards, some …

Culture is increasingly mediated through algorithms. These algorithms have splintered the organization of culture, a result of states and tech companies vying for influence over mass audiences. One byproduct of this splintering is a shift from imperfect but broad cultural narratives to a proliferation of niche groups, who are …

Back in the 1960s, if you played a 2,600Hz tone into an AT&T pay phone, you could make calls without paying. A phone hacker named John Draper noticed that the plastic whistle that came free in a box of Captain Crunch cereal worked to make the right …

Canadian legislators proposed 19,600 amendments —almost certainly AI-generated—to a bill in an attempt to delay its adoption. I wrote about many different legislative delaying tactics in A Hacker’s Mind, but this is a new one. [...]

Selling miniature replicas to unsuspecting shoppers: Online marketplaces sell tiny pink cowboy hats. They also sell miniature pencil sharpeners, palm-size kitchen utensils, scaled-down books and camping chairs so small they evoke the Stonehenge scene in “This Is Spinal Tap.” Many of the minuscule objects aren’t clearly advertised. [...] But …

The islands of Åland are an important tax hack : Although Åland is part of the Republic of Finland, it has its own autonomous parliament. In areas where Åland has its own legislation, the group of islands essentially operates as an independent nation. This allows Scandinavians to avoid the notoriously …