Author Topic: [HAMR] New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1  (Read 164556 times)

Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #450 on: 20 January, 2016, 01:21:36 pm »
Shame that Bruce seems to have burnt his bridges with the UMCA.

I don't think that at all. I'm sure they'd welcome a subsequent application for HAM'R as long as he complied with the rules and got his membership sorted.

Yes perhaps it would be OK for a 'reboot'...

I was just looking at this:
Quote
The UMCA Board wishes Bruce Berkeley well in his attempt, but UMCA will not certify the attempt and will not verify mileage for the attempt.

At least his fee has been refunded - so I guess that might be a bit of an 'open door' to a restart.
Cycle and recycle.   SS Wilson

Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #451 on: 20 January, 2016, 01:26:53 pm »
What are the alternatives to SPOT trackers?

The DeLorme inReach is one. It's costs a lot more, though.

Mr Larrington

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Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #452 on: 20 January, 2016, 01:28:43 pm »
but Kurt used a recumbent

This seems to me to be one of the key ingredients as to why we should give UMCA such little credibility.

The rule of being able to ride a recumbent bicycle was introduced after Steve had his 'off'.  The fact that Hoppo seems to have had a controversial role in both Steve's camp and the UMCA camp points to the rules being amended on the fly to suit one particular rider.  Of course this does not even scratch the surface when in 2014 Steve helped draft all the rules in the first place.

Kurt then used this rule change to his full advantage.  In my opinion, this was most unfortunate - as it questioned the legitimacy of his putative record.

Compare this to Bruce's attempt.  Instead of rules being changed to assist his attempt (recumbent), rules are being changed (prescribed manufacturer's kit) to hinder his attempt.

HAMR rules always permitted the use of unfaired recumbents; USAnian cycling organisations have a refreshingly unstuffy attitude to the use of recumbents.
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red marley

Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #453 on: 20 January, 2016, 01:31:11 pm »
A few years back another guy approached me having decided to take the record on. I was extremely cynical as he had done about zero riding before, but he approached Guinness for some terms and here is an excerpt. Have a good laugh at this and then ask yourself "do you really want these people involved in the year record verification"?

[...]

That's great. I can picture the scene:

~~~~~~~~

A few years back...

Support team chief: Mr McWhirter, McWhirter! We've finished our record attempt!
N.McW: Ah good. How's your rider?
STC: A little dizzy.
STC: Anyway, here's the filmed evidence of the attempt for you to verify. *Hands over a large box of video tapes*. The other 6 lorries of video tapes are parked outside.

Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #454 on: 20 January, 2016, 01:35:29 pm »

 Have a good laugh at this and then ask yourself "do you really want these people involved in the year record verification"?

Snip


Well I guess whoever sent that out saw "cycle" and "record" and banged out the standard rubric. Obviously things have moved on for Kajsa's attempt
We are making a New World (Paul Nash, 1918)

LittleWheelsandBig

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Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #455 on: 20 January, 2016, 01:36:34 pm »
It talked about counting push ups!
Wheel meet again, don't know where, don't know when...

Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #456 on: 20 January, 2016, 01:39:11 pm »
Ha!

365 days of 12 hours riding = 4380 hours.

2 minutes per hour of 4380 hours = 146 hours.

That's 4 weeks of a 9-5 job to watch it all to verify it. Almost worth doing it just to make them have to watch it.

An hour of 720p video footage is ~6GB, so 146 hours would easily fit on a 2TB HDD. No lorries required sadly. Of course, you could burn the videos on to ~1200 CDs for a similar (modern) effect.
"Yes please" said Squirrel "biscuits are our favourite things."

Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #457 on: 20 January, 2016, 01:39:51 pm »
It mentions nothing about leap years.
<i>Marmite slave</i>

Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #458 on: 20 January, 2016, 01:41:33 pm »
It mentions nothing about leap years.

Or leap seconds.

Kurt benefited from an extra second added at June 30, 2015 at 23:59:60 UTC.

Tommy didn't have this, etc, etc, etc.
"Yes please" said Squirrel "biscuits are our favourite things."

crowriver

  • Крис Б
Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #459 on: 20 January, 2016, 01:44:02 pm »
Well, having seen the transcript, and had a look at Bruce's Fb page, it all seems a bit of a storm in a teacup that could have been avoided.

It does come across a little bit like Bruce's ego is getting in the way of making a 'serious' attempt at the record. He's all caught up in his 'fame' on Strava (look, over 1,000 followers, wowza!), riding with 'the boys' from Team Sky, etc. In contrast it appears that UMCA were trying to help and advise but apparently this rubbed Bruce up the wrong way.

Good luck to him, he's clearly a strong rider. I do wonder though just how long he can keep this up with the current low budget solo approach, with no support, couch surfing, etc. I shall be interested to find out in the months to come.
Embrace your inner Fred.

Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #460 on: 20 January, 2016, 01:52:05 pm »

Good luck to him, he's clearly a strong rider. I do wonder though just how long he can keep this up with the current low budget solo approach, with no support, coach surfing, etc. I shall be interested to find out in the months to come.

Yeah, can't see that helping



 ;D

crowriver

  • Крис Б
Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #461 on: 20 January, 2016, 02:01:56 pm »
Autocorrect: damn you Apple!  ;)

Now adjusted.
Embrace your inner Fred.

TimC

  • Old blerk sometimes onabike.
Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #462 on: 20 January, 2016, 02:47:27 pm »
A few years back another guy approached me having decided to take the record on. I was extremely cynical as he had done about zero riding before, but he approached Guinness for some terms and here is an excerpt. Have a good laugh at this and then ask yourself "do you really want these people involved in the year record verification"?

[...]

That's great. I can picture the scene:

~~~~~~~~

A few years back...

Support team chief: Mr McWhirter, McWhirter! We've finished our record attempt!
N.McW: Ah good. How's your rider?
STC: A little dizzy.
STC: Anyway, here's the filmed evidence of the attempt for you to verify. *Hands over a large box of video tapes*. The other 6 lorries of video tapes are parked outside.

;D

Actually, those rules (or something very like them) are up on the Guinness website.

When Steve was researching this a couple of years ago, he made the following statements here on YACF:

Quote from: teethginder 6 Jun 2013
TG 6 June 2013
Guinness pretty much refuse to reckognise any attempt at the record. The only way they would validate it would be if someone did it on a velodrome while being watched by someone in person.

TG 7 June 2013
Guinness are corrupt because they charge about £1000 per claim, which rules out anyone from poor countries making a claim. The LEJOG record is still held by Andy Wilkinson (1991) according to Guinness. Gethin Butler took almost an hour off it in 2001. It was all observed and checked by the same people (RRA) so the RRA records are correct.
It's not just having someone there as witness to satisfy them either, they have their own critria about altitude gain and stuff which would instantly rule out riding on the open road.
If I do it I'll do it because it's something I want to do.

Kajsa showed the Guinness rules pack up on her FB feed at the end of December - it looked pretty daunting!

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Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #463 on: 20 January, 2016, 02:54:20 pm »
I am pleased that UMCA have released that information (is there a link to that? Edit - I see it on their facebook page). It strikes me that they possibly did not release it earlier out of respect for Bruce. Now they have, he does appear to be the twuntish one.

Such a shame to see an attempt go to waste over such minor issues as paying a $35 membership fee and buying a £200-250 (including the annual fee) tracker.

No matter what he does now, he will only ever be a footnote in the second edition of Citizenfish's book.

It is very sad.  The guy clearly has the contacts to get hold of £5k+ bikes from canyon etc., but can't/won't pay out modest sums to become compliant with the requirements.

What a mess.

<not entirely serious> From what I read elsewhere, if he can get any sort of bike out of Canyon, he's got superhuman powers</not entirely serious>
There are two ways you can get exercise out of a bicycle: you can
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Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #464 on: 20 January, 2016, 03:16:30 pm »
<not entirely serious> From what I read elsewhere, if he can get any sort of bike out of Canyon, he's got superhuman powers</not entirely serious>

Indeed.  I was toying with the idea of buying a new piece of bling but was put off Canyon by the stories of 6-month waits or longer.
The sound of one pannier flapping

Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #465 on: 20 January, 2016, 03:30:16 pm »
<not entirely serious> From what I read elsewhere, if he can get any sort of bike out of Canyon, he's got superhuman powers</not entirely serious>

Indeed.  I was toying with the idea of buying a new piece of bling but was put off Canyon by the stories of 6-month waits or longer.
Anecdata time.....
My manager's company credit card (which 6 of us in this office avail ourselves of for the purchase of flights, hotels etc) was compromised last year to the tune of several £K on a spending spree at Canyon. All eyes in the office turned to me at that point.....  ::-)

Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #466 on: 20 January, 2016, 03:31:32 pm »
<not entirely serious> From what I read elsewhere, if he can get any sort of bike out of Canyon, he's got superhuman powers</not entirely serious>

Indeed.  I was toying with the idea of buying a new piece of bling but was put off Canyon by the stories of 6-month waits or longer.
Anecdata time.....
My manager's company credit card (which 6 of us in this office avail ourselves of for the purchase of flights, hotels etc) was compromised last year to the tune of several £K on a spending spree at Canyon. All eyes in the office turned to me at that point.....

 ;D  With good cause presumably?
The sound of one pannier flapping

Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #467 on: 20 January, 2016, 03:36:36 pm »
<not entirely serious> From what I read elsewhere, if he can get any sort of bike out of Canyon, he's got superhuman powers</not entirely serious>

Indeed.  I was toying with the idea of buying a new piece of bling but was put off Canyon by the stories of 6-month waits or longer.
Anecdata time.....
My manager's company credit card (which 6 of us in this office avail ourselves of for the purchase of flights, hotels etc) was compromised last year to the tune of several £K on a spending spree at Canyon. All eyes in the office turned to me at that point.....

 ;D  With good cause presumably?

Wholly unjustified IMHO - that's what you get when you're a minority cyclist amongst a workforce whose choice of transport is almost entirely planet-slaying.  ;)

Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #468 on: 20 January, 2016, 04:03:12 pm »
Find My Friends is in no way a tracker or a solution to the validation needs of such a record. Yes, you can locate a person who has shared their location with you (which requires you to share back), and yes it will locate the phone as long as there is cell coverage. Every person following your location has to have an iphone and be in your contacts list. It's ponderous, and it's also not tracking.

That said, the Garmin Connect app has a LiveTrack feature that allows anyone with the link to follow the day's ride, and that track can be shared via twitter. Publicize it at the start of every ride? It's dependent on cell coverage for data, and is pretty data intensive. I would imagine it would end up being more expensive than spot tracking because of the amount of data you'd need every day to broadcast (not to mention battery power you'd need).

Wowbagger

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Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #469 on: 20 January, 2016, 04:47:55 pm »
@ Clarion: I don't think the record keepers will have any problem ignoring Bruce's ride.

The kibitzers are another matter. Should he complete a year's riding in the way that he is, with no support, not even for meals and mechanicals, and come close to Kurt/Tommy/Steve's achievements, it will stand alone as a testament to something or other, and for that it will be remembered.

Edit: 41 new replies have been posted.

PS. It as been said above that it would be "easy" to falsify a .gpx file. That's true, but I think it would be quite hard to falsify one convincingly.
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Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #470 on: 20 January, 2016, 05:16:27 pm »
PS. It as been said above that it would be "easy" to falsify a .gpx file. That's true, but I think it would be quite hard to falsify one convincingly.

Easy is relative.  I guarantee that I have more chance of convincingly falsifying the GPX tracks than I would of riding 29000 miles in a year.

Think about it:  You cook up some software to generate pseudorandom tracks (complete with HR data that mimics your own under similar conditions) on pre-determined routes.  Then spend a while hand-crafting some routes, complete with weather fudge-factor, random stoppages, deviations for hedge inspections and so on.  Probably day-by day to allow for real-world conditions.

It's work, but a couple of orders of magnitude less work than going out and riding it all would be.

Of course for authenticity you want to be seen to do some actual riding.  So your algorithm needs to be reasonably consistent with the real data generated by that (or your riding needs to be consistent with the fake data generated by your software).  Which means you need plenty of testing, and a database of equivalent style rides to work with.  It's not something you'd hack up the week before the attempt and expect to work.

Live tracking is harder.  To fake it convincingly you need to use a commercial system like SPOT that won't arouse suspicion, which probably means reverse-engineering their hardware to inject your fake GPS signal.  Doable, I'm sure, but that means more dev time.

And you need to not be caught out by being provably somewhere else when you're supposed to be slogging into the fenland hair-drier or depleting the Marsh Gibbon Premier Inn of CAKE reserves.  That's not trivial, and combined with the above probably represents a similar level of commitment to actually going out and riding the thing.


The question is: Why bother?  As a hacking exercise, to show that it can be done, sure.  But it's effort that would better be put into, say, developing a more secure tracking system.  To convince the world that you've beaten a record, and then keep schtum?  Where's the glory in that?

hillbilly

Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #471 on: 20 January, 2016, 05:24:47 pm »
Began
Record
Until
Clerical
Error

But
Every
Rider
Knows
Entering
Late
Excludes
You

AKA

Crumbs,
You
Cocky
Late
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1

SoreTween

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Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #472 on: 20 January, 2016, 05:30:08 pm »
Further to Kim post with which I entirely agree it ought to be easier to fake power readings than HR. OTOH fake power might be easier to spot.
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Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #473 on: 20 January, 2016, 06:02:10 pm »
PS. It as been said above that it would be "easy" to falsify a .gpx file. That's true, but I think it would be quite hard to falsify one convincingly.

Easy is relative.  I guarantee that I have more chance of convincingly falsifying the GPX tracks than I would of riding 29000 miles in a year.

Think about it:  You cook up some software to generate pseudorandom tracks (complete with HR data that mimics your own under similar conditions) on pre-determined routes.  Then spend a while hand-crafting some routes, complete with weather fudge-factor, random stoppages, deviations for hedge inspections and so on.  Probably day-by day to allow for real-world conditions.

It's work, but a couple of orders of magnitude less work than going out and riding it all would be.

I love the theory of this (faking rides) and it's something I've thought about quite a bit in the past.

It's a lot easier if you ride, say, 5000 miles at your leisure, and use that as the basis for the subsequent forgeries. Just need to chop and change sections of the routes in and out to vary things, move the random stops about as you say (and adjust HR accordingly), add in small bits of randomness to each lat/lon point, run sections/segments slightly faster (interpolating new intermediate trackpoints to maintain the 1 second recording interval aspect), adjusting for headwinds, etc, etc.

Of course for authenticity you want to be seen to do some actual riding.  So your algorithm needs to be reasonably consistent with the real data generated by that (or your riding needs to be consistent with the fake data generated by your software).  Which means you need plenty of testing, and a database of equivalent style rides to work with.  It's not something you'd hack up the week before the attempt and expect to work.

Indeed, but Strava contains an enormous database of equivalent style rides you can steal from, many including power, cadence and HR data. And the data can be extracted from the "Analysis" page for any individual ride (but it's not per second any more). You just have to rebase the figures against a riders HRmin/HRmax and Wmax and interpolate the bits in the middle (which isn't so easy).

Live tracking is harder.  To fake it convincingly you need to use a commercial system like SPOT that won't arouse suspicion, which probably means reverse-engineering their hardware to inject your fake GPS signal.  Doable, I'm sure, but that means more dev time.

Someone somewhere demonstrated a relatively cheap (I think it was <$500) hack to fake the GPS signals from the satellites themselves (you just need to send something at a higher power to override them, it's still milliwatts) to a localised device (both SPOT tracker and a Garmin) to do that job for you. Come up with the GPX file and use that to drive the live trackers for the day whilst you work on tomorrow's forgeries (and your ever accruing guilt and hatred for yourself).

And you need to not be caught out by being provably somewhere else when you're supposed to be slogging into the fenland hair-drier or depleting the Marsh Gibbon Premier Inn of CAKE reserves.  That's not trivial, and combined with the above probably represents a similar level of commitment to actually going out and riding the thing.

Which is why they also required video/photo evidence from each day. That's an annoyance to have to fake. And not being spotted where you should have been is a big problem. But if you were riding one out of every 2 days (and faking the other day) you might get away with it I suppose if you were lucky.

The question is: Why bother?  As a hacking exercise, to show that it can be done, sure.  But it's effort that would better be put into, say, developing a more secure tracking system.  To convince the world that you've beaten a record, and then keep schtum?  Where's the glory in that?

The Spark Nano device (pointed out by someone else here) provides cryptographically signed GPS tracklogs, but if you're faking the GPS signals themselves it might be easily duped (depends on whether they log details of the inbound satellite signals in which case they could be compared to what was broadcast and received elsewhere).
"Yes please" said Squirrel "biscuits are our favourite things."

Re: New challenger - Bruce Berkeley AKA Cycle_dr 1
« Reply #474 on: 20 January, 2016, 06:06:13 pm »
Further to Kim post with which I entirely agree it ought to be easier to fake power readings than HR. OTOH fake power might be easier to spot.

If something is easier to spot then it's easier to fake, you just have to try lots of different fake values until you get something that doesn't look fake.

Having looked at all of this in the past I can say it's much easier to fake HR data than power data, but you'd not want to do either of them.

Taking a GPX file (of a route) with no timing, power, HR or cadence data and trying to add that data convincingly is hard. Time (hence speed) is easiest, then cadence, then HR, with power most difficult.

But you wouldn't do that, you'd work from a corpus of real data files and chop/change those around to create new and unique files.

Anyway, maybe this sub-discussion needs to be split off from Bruce's thread. I wouldn't want anyone to get any suggestion that Bruce could be involved in anything like this.
"Yes please" said Squirrel "biscuits are our favourite things."