Ethical Hackers Donate 1,000,000 Air Miles To Charity (offensi.com)

An anonymous reader writes:Certified ethical hackers at Offensi.com identified a bug allowing remote code execution on one of United Airlines' sites, and submitted their findings to the airline's "bug bounty" program. After a fix was placed into production, their team was awarded 1,000,000 Mileage Plus air miles, which they say was accompanied by an email informing them that the IRS would consider their award as $20,000 of taxable income. "If after evaluating the taxable amount you choose not to accept your award, you are also able to donate your award to charity," the e-mail explained. The hackers ultimately chose to distribute their air miles among three charities -- the Ronald McDonald house, the Muscular Dystrophy Association, and the Casa de Esperanza de los Ninos Organization.
Another security researcher complained in November that United failed to close a serious vulnerability he'd identified for almost six months.

Comments

Re:What's wrong with that?

[AthanasiusKircher]

I thought we invented money to fix the problems with barter?

Actually, not really. This is a myth made up by economists (well, specifically Adam Smith, though it ultimately goes back to Aristotle). Anthropologists have disputed this with exhaustive surveys for at least a century. It's really only economics textbooks that keep telling this fairy tale.

Money emerged in most societies as tokens to deal with pre-existing systems of credit. There's no historical evidence that barter in the classic sense (e.g., "I'll give you ten chickens for those two goats!" "Nah, but if you throw in twelve chickens and that nice basket, I'll take it!") has been a predominant form of exchange within a human society. It relies on a myth that people in primitive cultures would stockpile goods they didn't really need, ready to trade when a buyer arrived... but that sort of thing doesn't tend to happen in primitive societies. It also tends to depend on this weird idea that two people would always have exactly what others wanted -- e.g., "I'll give you bread for meat," but what if you don't need bread? So then you need a third or fourth or fifth party in this transaction until everybody gets something they want.

By the time you get people able to stockpile goods, you usually have a pretty elaborate system of credit going. Money then emerges as a way of denominating that credit. (Societies not advanced enough to have stockpiled goods generally just depend on gift transactions with elaborate notions of levels of indebtedness or rely on leaders to divvy up goods and resolve disputes, rather than requiring bartering for goods.)

Anthropologists have usually observed barter mainly in unusual transactions taking place BETWEEN societies, e.g., with a neighboring tribe you may not have much contact with and therefore can't trust within your usually systems of indebtedness. Barter sometimes also emerges on a limited scale in more advanced societies (who are used to money) when currency becomes scarce, though generally an alternative currency emerges and/or credit and debt-recording systems actually take over pretty quickly for most transactions.

Whether money emerged as a way of standardizing private debt transactions or as a leader/government-imposed way of regulating debt instruments is probably dependent on the society... but there's really no evidence that a full-fledged "barter economy" ever existed. (If you think I'm making all this up, there are plenty of articles and books out there -- mostly not written by economists, but by historians or anthropologists -- about this. A recent article in the Atlantic is perhaps one place to start. One reason this probably hasn't caught on among economists is that it challenges fundamental notions of capitalism, which rely on the idea that "free markets" will work correctly because we're all just "bartering" in the end, with currency as a medium of exchange... and like these mythical bartering transactions, monetary imbalances should ultimately level out to fair "markets" without intervention. If currency instead emerges as a debt standardization instrument, sometimes related to government intervention or regulation, that's a vastly different story to the beginning of economics.)