His goal was to help people by closing the security hole. He contacted Google, but they didn't fix it. What would you have done to get the hole fixed? No one was harmed here, after all.
What I would have done? Warned as many people as I could that the numbers they see on there may not be accurate. Even if no deliberate deception was involved in them, they could be out of date and incorrect, because there are no safeguards in place to prevent errors.
And saying that nobody was harmed as a means to justify the act is something that The Ethics Scoreboard refers to as a "Results Obesssion", and an example of a slippery slope argument:
Many argue that if no tangible harm arises from a deception or other unethical act, it cannot be "wrong:" "No harm, no foul." This is truly an insidious fallacy, because it can lead an individual to disregard the ethical nature of an action, and look only to the results of the action. Before too long, one has embraced "the ends justify the means" as an ethical system, otherwise known as "the terrorism standard."
Closely related to The Results Obsession is the "white lie" syndrome, which embodies the theory that small ethical transgressions are not ethical transgressions at all.
Both carry the same trap: the practice of ethics is based upon habit, and one who habitually behaves unethically in small ways is nonetheless building the habit of unethical behavior. Incremental escalations in the unethical nature of the acts, if not inevitable, are certainly common. Thus even an unethical act that causes no direct harm to others can harm the actor, by setting him or her on the slippery slope.
I stand by the points I made previously that people shouldn't just blindly trust everything they see online, and that "nobody was hurt" should not *EVER* be considered a justification for doing something that was still, in the end, an ethical infraction.
The means should not have to be justified by the ends... the means should justify themselves. If he can't make that happen, then it doesn't somehow become his fault for not doing anything further, because the situation was not something within his realm of control in the first place. If it bothered him that much, he could have started up an education program warning people about the dangers of trusting the numbers that are on google maps, and advising them that not only can they be considerably out of date and incorrect, but that there are absolutely no safeguards to prevent people from putting up deliberately false numbers, which may be used by phishing scams. If someone doesn't understand his point without it happening to them first, that's hardly the fault of the person who's trying to educate people... one might as well blame the police programs that teach young women maneuvers in self defense for not actually trying to rape young women who don't come to their classes just so that they will finally understand the importance of learning such skills. I trust you can appreciate the absurdity of this example.
But no... he felt he needed to commit a deliberate deception as part of of an effort of trying to make his point, misrepresenting himself and his phone number to unsuspecting people, and without any authority whatsoever, essentially commit an act that by all rights, IMO, should have been fraud. Nope. Not somebody I'd have any respect for.
It's not like we don't have what are essentially remote science laboratories that we've sent there which should theoretically be able to find this sort of stuff in the samples they collect.
... and more about people who blindly trust whatever they see on the Internet... even if it is from a company that is prominently known, and thus often implicitly trusted by many. If the people utilizing these fake numbers had actually done any serious fact checking of their own, outside of google maps, they would have quickly realized that the fake numbers on google maps were incorrect, at the very least, even if not actually realizing they were deliberately faked.
And IMO, knowingly deceiving people (ie, deliberately misrepresenting your own number as a conduit for contacting somebody else) to try to expose a security flaw is still deception... and IMO, a severe ethical infraction, even if the law allows it when no real harm has been done.
Good ends should not require bad means to achieve. I believe that the means must justify themselves... and if that is just not possible, then... well, you just do the best that you can with whatever it is that you have, and go forward from wherever it is that you are.
This is false... I know this is anecdotal, but I currently own an iPhone, am strongly considering switching when my contract is up (two more months), and had never once even thought about this feature of the iPhone before reading this story, and it's not something I ever would have particularly cared about, so I never once explicitly turned on iMessage on my iPhone. In spite of this, I discovered that it was indeed enabled on my device. I bought the phone brand new, so this was not something done by any previous owner. Sure looks like it's by default to me.
The problem is, apparently, once you have an iMessage session going with somebody because you've been texting back and forth between two iPhones, if *YOU* ever decide to switch platforms, but keep your phone number, unless the other iPhone user switches iMessage off on their phone as well, or else they completely delete your text messaging session from their messaging history, you will no longer receive any texts from them (your texts will go out,but any responses they make will not get received because their phone will not fall back to SMS, because it believes that you still have an iPhone. If opting out of iMessage completely only requires that the feature be turned off from the phone with a single button tap, that's fine and dandy, and entirely acceptable in my case, but what about for people who no longer have their iphone, because it got lost or destroyed, and have replaced it with an alternative platform, but kept the same phone number?
Seriously... if an iphone user switches to a non-iphone, it would make much more sense if other iphones trying to send messages to a former iphone user would fall back to ordinary text message protocols. But they don't do that... and a person who swithes from an iphone to another phone will now have to jump through hoops like what you describe.
The consequences of switching are that apparently you can't accept even perfectly ordinary text messages from iphone users who you once used iMessage with. Any iphone users that were former contacts who may not have turned iMessage off on their phones will have to now switch iMessage off to continue to send any text messages to you at all unless you had the foresight to turn iMessage off when it first came out.
So the consequences of switching are felt by people who may not have ever bothered to switch... and create a ratther major inconvenience even for people may actually be informed about the consequences for themselves if or when they do, because they would then have to contact all of the people they know with an iPhone and tell them all to turn iMessage off to continue to talk to them.
The point, I think, is that this feature was turned on by default... which meant iphone users were communicating via iMessage unless the explicitly disabled it.
But if you were ever using iMessage with somebody in the past, then if you switch phones, then the person you were formerly using iMessage with will no longer even be able to send you any text messages without shutting off iMgessage on their end as well.
If you don't see how that's a problem for users today who may be considering moving away from Apple products, I'm not sure what is.
So if she's not able to accept iMessages, then *YOU* have to turn iMessage off on your phone? Do you not see how that might be problematic if a person who had formerly accepted iMessages switched to a different platform? Suddenly this peron can no longer accept messages from people with an iPhone unless they switch off iMessage on their phone first...
but if I turn off iMessages, doesn't that mean that any other iphone user will no longer be able to keep sending texts to me unless they reset their imessage settings as well?
I get the pushback about laws pertaining to specific types of distractions but the problem is that "distracted driving" is not an unambiguous enough concept that you can definitely say, by simple observance, "that person is distracted"... they have to be actually doing something that obviously distracts them and the problem is that every single person is going to think differently about what they are or are not capable of. By drawing a hard line somewhere, you make what they are doing unambiguously illegal when they are breaking the law.
I agree... but that really, that rule already exists, and is impossible to actually enforce in practice because even daydreaming can take your attention off of the road. Simply by observing externally, unless a person's driving is already visibly erattic, you cannot tell if a person is thinking about other things than driving their car. The point behind my suggestion is an objective metric by which you can unambiguously observe that a person is breaking the law and they will have absolutely no reasonable defense when they do such things.
Heres an idea, make it illegal to hold or manipulate *ANYTHING* with either of your hands that is not actually part of the vehicle (ie, headlights, signal lights, gear shift are all okay), while the vehicle is in motion.
If a developer chooses to pull their own app from the itunes store for iOS devices, will the app get deleted from people's phones who may have already installed it the next time they try to sync with their library?
This article shows us how we've already destroyed ourselves.
May I introduce you to the concept of verb tense. "Destroyed" is past tense, and connotes something that has occurred in the past. If, in fact, we had destroyed ourselves in the past, for any reasonably accepted definition of destroyed, I highly doubt that you or I would be in any state to talk about the matter since we would, in fact, be destroyed along with the rest of the human race.
Whether or have already done things that may have made our future destruction certain and imminent is immaterial to the fact that such destruction still hasn't happened yet.
It's not like changing ones lifestyle happens magically either. Point being that if it took time to develop it will proably take even more time to correct and by the time these markers can even be found, it may already be too late.
That, plus what evidence is there that these markers are directly influenced by lifestyle?
... when technology has advanced far enough that there is no inherent need by virtue of its function for something that may be outwardly visible. Even current technology spy cams are less noticeable than google glass is.... I can only imagine it's a matter of time before tech has advanced far enough that a user of something like this would be all but completely indiscernable from the rest of the crowd.
The argument goes, although I don't necessarily agree with it's validity, that given the frequency with which you seem to regularly hear about any single specific "unregulated currency" being used as a money laundering system by criminals, that said specific currency is problematic by association.... What I take from this is that as long as any single unregulated medium of exchange does not become too ubiquitously used or popular, illegal activity is diluted across all of them, and falls under the radar of public consciousness. This might be perceived as important because the more they hear about it, the more they may also think about ways to have done it without getting caught, which may tempt people to try something similar.
Don't worry about us destroying mother nature. She's set safe gaurds in place. a.k.a. Creating a species guaranteed to destroy itself when it reaches critical mass.
This may be true, but is ultimately just hypothetical speculation, since we have no examples from history of species on earth that destroyed themselves.
This feature however well intended would take the control out of the hands of the owner who purchased the device.
Only if the feature were not implemented as I described. If there were a back door that did not require the user-entered password in order to lock it, then that would be another matter entirely. My point was to implment the system that I described... nothing more, and nothing less. The authorized owner fully controls whether or not their own device gets bricked to the extent that they are competent enough to actually utilize those mechanisms effectively. The government, or anybody else would not be able to lock it remotely because they do not have the correct password, and if anything but the correct password were able to brick the device, then the device would not be implementing the mechanism that I described in the first place.
... has value. Lowest trade value today was evidently $430.
Just sayin'.... it may not be a total loss except for people who thought it would be a good idea to buy some while the price was sitting at around $1k/bitcoin last november.
If you are successful at reducing phone thefts, what do you think will be the outcome?
Cell phone thefts would be reduced, obviously.
People would turn to stealing other things (things that are easier to steal
People are already stealing such things anyways, there is no basis to presume that making cell phones harder to steal would result in the increase of theft of things that might be easier to steal. In practice, the amount of criminal activity of a given type in a given area tends to saturate quickly in a population as a function of how many people live in that area and how easy it is to get away with that particular crime.
In fact, arguing that it is somehow pointless to try to reduce the impact of a particular type of property crime because of some vague argument that it would supposedly increase criminal activity elsewhere is even at best a purely hypothetical conjecture, and at worst may even convey the appearance of sympathizing in some way with people who would engage in such crimes or condoning their activities. I'm not saying that's what you are doing... I'm just saying that's how it can look.
Slashdot Mirror
What I would have done? Warned as many people as I could that the numbers they see on there may not be accurate. Even if no deliberate deception was involved in them, they could be out of date and incorrect, because there are no safeguards in place to prevent errors.
And saying that nobody was harmed as a means to justify the act is something that The Ethics Scoreboard refers to as a "Results Obesssion", and an example of a slippery slope argument:
I stand by the points I made previously that people shouldn't just blindly trust everything they see online, and that "nobody was hurt" should not *EVER* be considered a justification for doing something that was still, in the end, an ethical infraction.
The means should not have to be justified by the ends... the means should justify themselves. If he can't make that happen, then it doesn't somehow become his fault for not doing anything further, because the situation was not something within his realm of control in the first place. If it bothered him that much, he could have started up an education program warning people about the dangers of trusting the numbers that are on google maps, and advising them that not only can they be considerably out of date and incorrect, but that there are absolutely no safeguards to prevent people from putting up deliberately false numbers, which may be used by phishing scams. If someone doesn't understand his point without it happening to them first, that's hardly the fault of the person who's trying to educate people... one might as well blame the police programs that teach young women maneuvers in self defense for not actually trying to rape young women who don't come to their classes just so that they will finally understand the importance of learning such skills. I trust you can appreciate the absurdity of this example.
But no... he felt he needed to commit a deliberate deception as part of of an effort of trying to make his point, misrepresenting himself and his phone number to unsuspecting people, and without any authority whatsoever, essentially commit an act that by all rights, IMO, should have been fraud. Nope. Not somebody I'd have any respect for.
It's not like we don't have what are essentially remote science laboratories that we've sent there which should theoretically be able to find this sort of stuff in the samples they collect.
And IMO, knowingly deceiving people (ie, deliberately misrepresenting your own number as a conduit for contacting somebody else) to try to expose a security flaw is still deception... and IMO, a severe ethical infraction, even if the law allows it when no real harm has been done.
Good ends should not require bad means to achieve. I believe that the means must justify themselves... and if that is just not possible, then... well, you just do the best that you can with whatever it is that you have, and go forward from wherever it is that you are.
This is false... I know this is anecdotal, but I currently own an iPhone, am strongly considering switching when my contract is up (two more months), and had never once even thought about this feature of the iPhone before reading this story, and it's not something I ever would have particularly cared about, so I never once explicitly turned on iMessage on my iPhone. In spite of this, I discovered that it was indeed enabled on my device. I bought the phone brand new, so this was not something done by any previous owner. Sure looks like it's by default to me.
The problem is, apparently, once you have an iMessage session going with somebody because you've been texting back and forth between two iPhones, if *YOU* ever decide to switch platforms, but keep your phone number, unless the other iPhone user switches iMessage off on their phone as well, or else they completely delete your text messaging session from their messaging history, you will no longer receive any texts from them (your texts will go out,but any responses they make will not get received because their phone will not fall back to SMS, because it believes that you still have an iPhone. If opting out of iMessage completely only requires that the feature be turned off from the phone with a single button tap, that's fine and dandy, and entirely acceptable in my case, but what about for people who no longer have their iphone, because it got lost or destroyed, and have replaced it with an alternative platform, but kept the same phone number?
And that's not vendor-lock in how?
Seriously... if an iphone user switches to a non-iphone, it would make much more sense if other iphones trying to send messages to a former iphone user would fall back to ordinary text message protocols. But they don't do that... and a person who swithes from an iphone to another phone will now have to jump through hoops like what you describe.
The consequences of switching are that apparently you can't accept even perfectly ordinary text messages from iphone users who you once used iMessage with. Any iphone users that were former contacts who may not have turned iMessage off on their phones will have to now switch iMessage off to continue to send any text messages to you at all unless you had the foresight to turn iMessage off when it first came out.
So the consequences of switching are felt by people who may not have ever bothered to switch... and create a ratther major inconvenience even for people may actually be informed about the consequences for themselves if or when they do, because they would then have to contact all of the people they know with an iPhone and tell them all to turn iMessage off to continue to talk to them.
The point, I think, is that this feature was turned on by default... which meant iphone users were communicating via iMessage unless the explicitly disabled it.
But if you were ever using iMessage with somebody in the past, then if you switch phones, then the person you were formerly using iMessage with will no longer even be able to send you any text messages without shutting off iMgessage on their end as well.
If you don't see how that's a problem for users today who may be considering moving away from Apple products, I'm not sure what is.
So if she's not able to accept iMessages, then *YOU* have to turn iMessage off on your phone? Do you not see how that might be problematic if a person who had formerly accepted iMessages switched to a different platform? Suddenly this peron can no longer accept messages from people with an iPhone unless they switch off iMessage on their phone first...
but if I turn off iMessages, doesn't that mean that any other iphone user will no longer be able to keep sending texts to me unless they reset their imessage settings as well?
... this is just an observation of the pareto principle?
I get the pushback about laws pertaining to specific types of distractions but the problem is that "distracted driving" is not an unambiguous enough concept that you can definitely say, by simple observance, "that person is distracted"... they have to be actually doing something that obviously distracts them and the problem is that every single person is going to think differently about what they are or are not capable of. By drawing a hard line somewhere, you make what they are doing unambiguously illegal when they are breaking the law.
Then pull over... or do it at a stop sign or something... just not while the vehicle is in motion.
Yep... I'm insensitive.
I agree... but that really, that rule already exists, and is impossible to actually enforce in practice because even daydreaming can take your attention off of the road. Simply by observing externally, unless a person's driving is already visibly erattic, you cannot tell if a person is thinking about other things than driving their car. The point behind my suggestion is an objective metric by which you can unambiguously observe that a person is breaking the law and they will have absolutely no reasonable defense when they do such things.
Heres an idea, make it illegal to hold or manipulate *ANYTHING* with either of your hands that is not actually part of the vehicle (ie, headlights, signal lights, gear shift are all okay), while the vehicle is in motion.
If a developer chooses to pull their own app from the itunes store for iOS devices, will the app get deleted from people's phones who may have already installed it the next time they try to sync with their library?
May I introduce you to the concept of verb tense. "Destroyed" is past tense, and connotes something that has occurred in the past. If, in fact, we had destroyed ourselves in the past, for any reasonably accepted definition of destroyed, I highly doubt that you or I would be in any state to talk about the matter since we would, in fact, be destroyed along with the rest of the human race.
Whether or have already done things that may have made our future destruction certain and imminent is immaterial to the fact that such destruction still hasn't happened yet.
That, plus what evidence is there that these markers are directly influenced by lifestyle?
... when technology has advanced far enough that there is no inherent need by virtue of its function for something that may be outwardly visible. Even current technology spy cams are less noticeable than google glass is.... I can only imagine it's a matter of time before tech has advanced far enough that a user of something like this would be all but completely indiscernable from the rest of the crowd.
The argument goes, although I don't necessarily agree with it's validity, that given the frequency with which you seem to regularly hear about any single specific "unregulated currency" being used as a money laundering system by criminals, that said specific currency is problematic by association.... What I take from this is that as long as any single unregulated medium of exchange does not become too ubiquitously used or popular, illegal activity is diluted across all of them, and falls under the radar of public consciousness. This might be perceived as important because the more they hear about it, the more they may also think about ways to have done it without getting caught, which may tempt people to try something similar.
Possibly.... but only if the trade also involved the transfer of any kind of commodity that was not actually controlled by the game.
Isn't that kind of a contradiction in terms?
This may be true, but is ultimately just hypothetical speculation, since we have no examples from history of species on earth that destroyed themselves.
Only if the feature were not implemented as I described. If there were a back door that did not require the user-entered password in order to lock it, then that would be another matter entirely. My point was to implment the system that I described... nothing more, and nothing less. The authorized owner fully controls whether or not their own device gets bricked to the extent that they are competent enough to actually utilize those mechanisms effectively. The government, or anybody else would not be able to lock it remotely because they do not have the correct password, and if anything but the correct password were able to brick the device, then the device would not be implementing the mechanism that I described in the first place.
Just sayin'.... it may not be a total loss except for people who thought it would be a good idea to buy some while the price was sitting at around $1k/bitcoin last november.
Cell phone thefts would be reduced, obviously.
People are already stealing such things anyways, there is no basis to presume that making cell phones harder to steal would result in the increase of theft of things that might be easier to steal. In practice, the amount of criminal activity of a given type in a given area tends to saturate quickly in a population as a function of how many people live in that area and how easy it is to get away with that particular crime.
In fact, arguing that it is somehow pointless to try to reduce the impact of a particular type of property crime because of some vague argument that it would supposedly increase criminal activity elsewhere is even at best a purely hypothetical conjecture, and at worst may even convey the appearance of sympathizing in some way with people who would engage in such crimes or condoning their activities. I'm not saying that's what you are doing... I'm just saying that's how it can look.