"and it turned out this wasn’t driven by memory pressure. Rather, the new capacity had caused all of the servers in the fleet to exceed the maximum number of threads allowed by an operating system configuration."
An auto scaling irony for AWS! We seem to be back to the late 1990s :)
The car parking analogy does not fit. But if you want to use a similar analogy. Assume there is toll road which allows the first 100 cars.
This guy uses his superior tech skills, to get his clients (cars) in the first 100. He charges them a premium.
Now the toll road keepers, arrest him for helping his clients? That I think is wrong. If his clients had complained that he didn't deliver on his promise but charged money, then that could amount to cheating. He didn't do that. He used code he wrote to provide a service to his clients.
Yes I agree, it could be hacky code, and it worked because the website was itself sub optimal. But putting him into prison because the website couldn't be made better (prevent his hack) amounts to bullying to hide the technical incompetence.
India has a strong legal framework and unfortunately very poor implementation (the arrest is an example of poor implementation/bullying by the state). When you say illegal, you should be able to specify the law under which it is illegal.
Broadly classifying anything not convenient to the state as illegal does not stand ground, AFAIK there is no law which prohibits automation of forms on any website?
They do have API's but they aren't open. They gives access to them to some popular online travel portals. They have a process around giving access to their APIs
Yes. thats because technically thats what he seems to have done. Since tatkal tickets are limited in number, by prefilling and automating the forms he effectively helps his clients jump the queue.
This is a clear hack, but I find it irrational to arrest a person because the website is suboptimal and cannot prevent his hack from running. This similar to what Github did when they pulled down youtube-dl, bully your way to compliance.