[tedivm]

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.

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.

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 before releasing anything that's going to use their resources.

[will3942]

I completely agree with this, I acknowledged this and realised I would probably get banned. It was more a case of letting people see how the Uber api could be used, that's why I've now replaced it with a video so people can continue to see it.

I completely agree with why they banned me, it's a huge load to throw on the server. Although I'd love to be unbanned and use it again, I would be surprised if I was.

Thanks for the advice to communicate before, definitely seems like the correct approach.

[tedivm]

Yeah, I figured you got it, and my comment was not directed at you. However, in the few minutes this post has been up there's a lot of blame going towards Uber, which is what I wanted to call out.

[will3942]

Yeah, no worries, I completely agree this is not Uber's fault at all. Their reasoning is more than valid.

[throwaway1664]

You're still publishing the tool you used to 'attack' the Uber API, might want to take that down if you're serious about not causing Uber harm.

[mcantelon]

Maybe Uber should implement the necessary rate limiting.

[tedivm]

They did. Since it was a non public API he was abusing they just rate limited him to zero.

[will3942]

I feel that I should keep it up just for reference and educational purposes. This was in no way an attack, but a mere hack that was created in 24 hours. It was not intended to be damaging to the service, although I do take responsibility that it was.

[mangotree]

So you knew you would get banned, but you are also upset at getting banned, because you use ht service? Why did you out up a website then?

[will3942]

I understand why I was banned, I'm not particularly upset, I'd just rather be able to use the service again. I fully accept responsibility.