nothin Gov’t Team’s Target: “3rd-Party Lock-Ups” | New Haven Independent

Gov’t Team’s Target: 3rd-Party Lock-Ups”

Paul Bass Photo

Rush hour on the late-running bus known formerly as the B, now as the 243.

The investigators slipped into town, tracked down the target — then returned to home base to plan how to thwart an unstable” and corrupted” Internet foe.

That may sound like the latest chapter in the Russia‑U.S. web wars.

Instead, it’s the latest word from the state Department of Transportation (DOT) about the quest to help New Haveners figure out when CT Transit buses are running late, and when they’ll arrive.

A team of DOT fact-finders hit New Haven this week in response to reports from Independent readers and the city’s transit chief that a long-awaited GPS-fed app — designed to let waiting riders track through their phones the status and location of late-running buses (you can now access the app here)— has a debilitating flaw: Once a bus hasn’t shown up at its appointed time (i.e., when riders need the information most), information about it vanishes from the app. The Independent first reported on the problem in this Sept. 22 article and again in this Nov. 9 article.

The DOT fact-finders learned that … the complaints were true. The riders were right. The fact-finders were able to replicate the problem and discover that the app stopped working in those cases, according to DOT spokesman Kevin Nursick.

Nursick said in an interview Thursday that next the DOT team sought to discern the cause of the glitch. It concluded that the first three steps of the process were working fine: Drivers were logging into the system, the buses’ GPS systems were transiting real-time location data, and the data was going from the buses’ modems to a central Transit Master” system.

The next step is for the DOT system to package and send out a feed — through a standard industry format for sharing schedule and real-time information known as General Transit Feeds Specification, or GTFs. The Google and Transit App developers draw the information from the feed so riders can then tap their apps for it.

We’ve determined,” Nursick said, that something is broken with the GTFS feed generation. It’s getting sent up there accurately. But what that feed is generating is broken or inaccurate.

The actual GTFS feed is getting corrupted. It’s unstable and or is seeing frequent outages with that feed.”

Why is that happening?

The DOT team has a theory: An unidentified third-party developer” is also consuming that feed and locking it up, overwhelming it,” and causing the error.

We have software specialists working on it. A solution may involve initiating security parameters to restrict that feed down to only Transit App and Google,” Nursick said. And if that fails, the team will seek to come up with a way to refresh the data feed to prevent third-party lock-ups.”

Nursick promised to update us soon on how it goes. He made a point of thanking Independent readers for the constructive feedback.”

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