The new electric bus fleet from National Express allows passengers to charge their devices for free via USB ports.
Noel Art is a programmer and tech guy with a YouTube channel. He caught a bus recently and noticed it was an electric bus with multiple USB ports for customers to use for free. So he charged his phone, tablet, battery pack, torch, smart glasses and his watch.
It occurred to Noel that it would be pretty easy to hack the electric vehicle via the CANbus and divert power to certain USB ports.
THEY HAVEN’T STOPPED ME YET
The next day Noel purchased a DayTripper ticket boarded one of the electric buses with his laptop and a BTC mining rig. By the end of the day he’d mined a quarter of a bitcoin worth around £16,000 at the time of writing.
Newsishy spoke to Noel via webcam, he was on a bus. We asked how he’s getting away with it?
“Really, I’ve no idea, I literally film and post what I’m doing online but they haven’t stopped me yet.”
Can you tell our readers who haven’t seen your videos what you do?
“Yeah man. I have my lappy, a mining rig and some sandwiches in a bag. I wait for one of the electric buses to come along and I buy a DayTripper for five quid, that means I can get on any bus all day long.
I’ll sit at the back and connect my lappy via USB. I’m not going to say how I do it but I’ve basically written a program which allows me to divert power to a specific USB port without alerting the driver.
Then I connect the mining rig to one port and a fan to another and Bob’s your uncle, I’m making money baby!”
MEGA BATTERIES
Mining Bitcoin uses a lot of power, doesn’t the bus run out?
“Yes it does, when they get low on power they transfer passengers to another bus and return that one to the garage. These electric buses have huge mega batteries which usually last about eight hours. Once I’m plugged in it’s gonna last 2 hours max but that’s fine, I just wait for the next electric bus to come along, I can do this all day.”
Noel has so far mined over 6 Bitcoins and caused over 150 buses to return to the garage early.
