Lets be clear here- 600 requests every 1.2 seconds is 30,000 additional requests a minute. Uber is not Facebook or Twitter- the amount of requests per minute they get in a given city is probably in the hundreds, not the thousands. These were also not public API's- they were reverse engineered. That means that this puts real load on them, costs them real money in infrastructure costs, and was not done with anything even resembling permission.<p>A lot of people seem to say that Uber failed to communicate or were too harsh. If someone throws an order or magnitude (or more) traffic at me without telling me, without communicating with me, and using APIs that aren't supposed to be public, you're damn right I'm going to ban them. Even OP knows why they banned him, which he flat out said.<p>In this case it does seem like pure lack of thinking, and now that the story is out there I'm hoping someone from Uber notices and removes the ban. I'm also really hoping that Will learns a lesson here, and next time he does something like this communicate with the company <i>before</i> releasing anything that's going to use their resources.
Amos here from Uber. First of all, this was a very cool app Will. I love your passion for technology and your interest in Uber. For some pretty obvious reasons (many of which are mentioned in the comments), we didn't have a choice to but to suspend your account. That said, there's no hard feelings. We've re-activated your account and would love to chat with you about an internship this summer. I hope you continue creating and exploring!
Sorry, have to side with Uber. Hackers do not live in a bubble of innovation that renders them immune to being penalized for the potentially negative consequences of their hacks. Uber's priority is to serve their <i>paying</i> customers (like me) as best as possible, and if that requires banning someone who's being a nuisance, then so be it.
Well that is quite interesting. A service that - as far as I can tell - just got itself started by hacking the local travel business, blacklists a dev, who just hacks his way to "expose" their API?<p>Isn't Uber fighting hard to deregulate a market, after it entered it and turned it upside down - for better or worse?<p>Wasn't the Uber-CEO the absolute Ayn Rand disciple? [1]<p>[1] <a href="http://pando.com/2012/10/24/travis-shrugged/" rel="nofollow">http://pando.com/2012/10/24/travis-shrugged/</a><p>Not that these two things have anything in common, but I find it slightly amusing, that one the one hand...<p>... well, I believe you know, what I wanted to say.
They should be talking to, or hiring people like you. Why be so uptight? Makes them kinda similar to the traditional cab companies who don't like people stepping on their turf.
I can't know, but I imagine you cause a lot of internal grief. Bosses would have been kicking off, blaming techies for it, one way or another. I imagine a couple of decision making noses were well put out of joint, if not broken. Egos well bruised. Perhaps lots of Malcolm Tucker, if you know what I mean.<p>If you want your account back, or what ever, try writing a proper letter to the MD or something. Grovel like hell, and offer something helpful in return if you can.
I guess thats as good lesson as any on "how to scale".<p>If your product works through remote requests to another site (which is already terribly slow with building up the connection), you absolutely want to do all of that in the backend and repackage the data for users of your site. Especially here, where everyone sees the same data.
Regarding prior notice et al.: "Private API" is a slight understatement IMO. Uber is running a $3.4bn business and their car data is a lot of what makes them valuable. I wouldn't blame them for automatically blacklisting accounts with unusual usage patterns just to be safe.
A shame. I was at this hackathon and witnessed this pair working on the hack; very driven and talented hackers. This sort of activity should be encouraged from such young talent, not punished.