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title: Hack a Bike
date: 2004-12-17 00:00:00 
updated: 2012-02-18 20:47:45 
author: 46halbe
tags: update, hack a bike
previewimage: /images/01.jpg


The "Call a Bike" system of the german railway company "Deutsche Bahn" offers bikes for self-hire in Berlin and other german cities. Sophisticated technology enables customers to rent a bike using their mobile phone. The system is advertised as being "unbreakable" but an article in our latest edition of our magazine "Die Datenschleuder" demonstrates the opposite: "Hack a Bike" uses advanced reengineering to turn the system upside down.


<!-- TEASER_END -->

The blinking bikes of "Deutsche Bahn" are part of the cityscape in
Germany for quite some time now. An intricate system named ["Call a
Bike"](http://www.callabike.de/) offers the option to rent a bicycle
whereever you find one. The bikes themselves are not connected "online"
but expect an unlock code that a customer can retrieve by calling a
central number using his mobile phone.

An article in our magazine [Datenschleuder](http://ds.ccc.de/) that has
been passed along from an anonymous source details how the the system
can be circumvented to gain free access to the bikes without calling
anybody: ["Hack a Bike"](/hackabike/index.html) is a fine example of a
true hack.