MRT3 has been all over the news lately, from the long queues, not enough trains to accommodate the riding public, the extortion scandal exposed by a diplomat – among others. Unfortunately, most, if not all of them are bad news.

That’s what made me think on what app to build to help the riding public. I tried to brainstorm. First thing to do was to do an inventory of data available to me. Unfortunately, it’s next to none. The only thing that I found was the CCTV live footage from the stations.

I pondered on what information I can extract from the footages until I had this idea of getting frames every certain number of seconds, compare them with a relatively empty platform and use that to get the relative number of people in the station. I started researching what tools to use then tried to extract the frames from the website.

As I was trying to study the HTTP requests to get the frames, I found something unusual in the responses.

As you can see, the ‘hackers’ intentionally left trails in the headers. (X-Powered-By: hampaslupa, X-Powered-By: AnonymousPhilippines, MyHeader: -= busabos =-, MyHeader: hampaslupa) I’m not sure if these headers were set on the webserver level (in this case, Apache) or via PHP. It also seems that their website doesn’t use any CMS at all. I just wonder if MRT is aware of this or not. 😛

P.S. I did not push through with my endeavor. Can’t seem to get a continuous stream of images, times out from time to time. 🙁