For reasons like this, I draw a gigantic distinction between these kinds of criminals and most others. This kind of criminal is completely ineffective without the willing participation of his target.
Did you read the whole article?
They were able to reroute calls to certain numbers. The victims were not willing participants. They had no way of knowing that the number had been routed - nor did those who owned the numbers.
And at times they offered money to whoever orchestrated certain pranks (e.g. driving a car into the building). Once you start giving such incentives, the relationship becomes that of a hitman and the one paying to have someone killed.
The biggest difference between the two are verifying your sources. If a guy comes to your door claiming to be the police and asking to be let in, do you trust that he's the police and let him in?
No, because:
My life is not in danger (this isn't an urgent scenario).
I know my legal rights, and I know that unless he has a warrant, I don't need to let him in. However, I can sympathize with the many folks out there who don't know their rights. It's not as if they teach them in schools.
Or do you ask to see his badge and call the department to verify it's really him?
If a fireman comes to your door and tells you that you need to leave immediately because of a gas leak, are you going to say "Hold on! ID first, and let me call the fire department to make sure it's not a hoax".
The point is that you have less to lose by agreeing to leave the building than by verifying his story - the latter could cost you your life.
If a cop says he's evacuating your office building because some alleged local Muslim terrorist with Al-Qaeda sympathies has planted a bomb in the building that may go off at any minute, are you going to say "First show me this bomb you speak of"?
Do you seriously think they'll go to jail for any of that? The people who destroyed thousands of dollars' worth of property were the braindead idiots who were targeted by the calls, not the members of PrankNet.
It made them accessories, don't you think?
They trashed hotel rooms and so forth of their own accord, no one made them do anything.
That's like saying that hit men killed on their own accord, because no one made them do anything.
I know the case of a man who, over almost a decade, would call people in different parts of the world (mostly US and Canada, though), claiming to be stuck at an airport and needing money quickly. He would always know a number of the guy's friends, and personal details about them. Given the "emergency", a number of then roughly gave $1000-2000 (prior to cheap long distance calls and cell phones being common - so you couldn't easily verify). Happened to someone I know.
He was finally caught. And prosecuted. So clearly, it is illegal. The issue likely wasn't that he took the money, but that he caused loss of money.
And at the very least, they could be sued by the victims...
Seems like one of the Pranknet guys (Markle) was jailed for two years for raping a five-year-old. He "warned the girl that he would kill her parents if she did not comply with him".
Yes, and the Milgram Experiment has been repeated a number of times.
While I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't try to guard ourselves from the effects of authority, the fact that this has caused so much damage (as you put it), and that the experiment is very repeatable, suggests that those who exploit an innate human weakness like this one should get the bulk of the blame.
Putting it mostly on those who fell for the pranks is simply trying to make humans out to be something other than what they are. Sure - some will successfully thwart the pranks, but most will fail to do so under a systematic attack.
I was once walking down a street when I saw a bunch of people who looked like cops and firemen on the corner. They saw me (street was mostly deserted) and came over to me. They instructed me to take a detour of a few blocks because there was a gas leak in the area and they weren't sure it was safe as yet.
Should I have demanded an ID from them, and called the police and fire departments to verify their identities?
Re:The rest of the world is making fun of America
on
The Outing of Pranknet
·
· Score: 1
Just one or two well-publicised cases like that and suddenly the effectiveness of these pranks will strongly diminish. Knowing that it is unlikely to work anymore, the pranksters would then have a deterrant.
Hence their breaking the story, and it appearing on Slashdot.
The article also pointed out that one locale (forgot which - in Florida?) that had been the target of their pranks sent out a bulletin warning businesses.
But let's be realistic. Even with it being publicized, it's highly unlikely that most business owners will see it - running a business takes a lot of time. It's equally unlikely that their employees will see it as well.
Those "pranksters" are at the very least accessories to the crime. Impersonating certain officials (e.g. fire department) is likely also a crime. It wouldn't surprise me if duping can come under fraud, or some related law.
"Are you implying that because the prankster had bad intentions, it somehow excuses the fact that a person willfully and knowingly decided to do a lot of property damage merely because an unaccountable stranger told him it was a good idea?"
That's irrelevant to the discussion at hand. He/she didn't do it because someone told them it was a good idea. They did it because they were trying to save either the property or people's lives.
Though personally, I see the target's stupidity and particularly the desire to excuse and protect it as much more dangerous to society than the prankster's nonviolent maliciousness.
That's like saying that ordinary low level potential Al-Qaeda members are more dangerous than Bin Laden, and that most of the blame should be put on them rather than on Bin Laden. Or that drug addicts are a bigger problem than drug dealers, and that we should focus on targeting users rather than dealers.
Luckily now he's just going to go to jail for some relatively minor stuff.
Thus far no one seems interested in prosecuting. The article itself implied it due to the complications of dealing with another country. The people involved in the outing had an interview on CTV:
The Smoking Gun says it has turned over the information it has uncovered to the FBI, but no charges have been laid against any PrankNET member. While local police have investigated each prank, the FBI and the RCMP have not confirmed whether a cross-border investigation is underway.
Maybe people shouldn't be so stupid as to listen to anything someone tells them on the phone and demand to see someone in person if it's as serious as they are being told?
Some of the pranks were committed by people in person. How else do you think they got a car inside a building?
And really, if the fire departments calls your business saying that you need to leave ASAP because of a gas leak, you're going to say "Nah. You guys show up first. If the building doesn't explode before you get here, then I'll know it's a hoax."
Not suggesting that they weren't gullible, but you do have to take the element of urgency into account.
You'd be surprised at how much you yourself rely on trusting other people, even if you do speak like a stone cold trust no-one badass. You'd also be surprised at how much society relies on the ability of its people to trust each other. This is what pranksters and scammers rely on.
This really needs to be modded up.
Expecting people to routinely distrust authority will probably create more havoc than Pranknet will. Granted, they were a bit too trusting, but that doesn't make them the guilty party. The pranksters are always the ones who should be blamed.
So...I take it you're one of the pranksters on Pranknet?
Malik, of course, expressed no remorse for his stunts. Prank targets, he declared, were "responsible for their own actions." The victims he and his cronies abused and degraded daily were simply "sheep" with "no brains of their own."
I suppose it doesn't bother you either that much of the pranks are also illegal?
It's quite clear that fame was the motivation behind a lot of these so-called "pranks". They wanted popularity and didn't care who suffered for it.
The thing is, I see little difference between what they're doing and what Cohen does in Borat and Bruno: Exploiting other people because there's a market for it and he can make a buck/Euro off of it. Sure, Cohen is a lot more careful to stay within the law, but the intent and "morality" of it is the same. One just happens to be more extreme.
The following supports what I'm saying:
Malik appears to believe that Pranknet will someday achieve the mainstream success of the Jerky Boys or Comedy Central's "Crank Yankers." He remarked one evening that, "If we get it big enough, it could get more than just fun."
Obviously, a lot of the pranks listed in the article will never get that kind of success, but it shows the mentality is pretty much the same.
One of those cases I'd file under "parents enabling the problem".
That's a very naive way of looking at it.
If you read the whole article, you'd see that he's not the only one doing this. I'm not sure all of the other pranksters on Pranknet live in their homes on their mothers' income.
There may be patterns in their behavior, but this isn't something he can't do if he gets a full time job.
You know what really gets on my nerves? When people say they no longer care, when in reality they do. If he really didn't care, he would have typed the first sentence and stopped.
Please talk to the moderators at Slashdot. I no longer care.
Many of those I.F. were simply cumbersome and unforgivable but since this is all we had, we accepted it.
You may not know this, but by today's IF standards, the Infocom games are considered to be quite poor in quality (although few will utter such blasphemy without a lot of modifiers...).
Everyone agrees that they did have great prose and suspension of disbelief was not at all difficult. That's to their credit.
But game design? Mediocre at best (again, by today's standards). Each Infocom game I played had a dungeon/maze element that was quite tedious. I suppose it's because I never had the manuals.
Each Infocom game I played suffered from "I forgot to pick up an item a hundred moves ago and now I can't finish the game, and I don't even know that I can't!". Today, this is just considered poor design. A well designed game will not allow the game to progress, and will provide proper clues to help you figure out what you may be doing wrong.
Each Infocom game I played had ways to die that a real person in the world of the game has no way of knowing would kill him. That's considered poor design today. There should always be some clue that what you're about to do is dangerous, and dying and restoring shouldn't be the only way to know.
Some Infocom games I played had this whole "starving to death" notion that thankfully has been deprecated today. They were hard enough already, damn it!
You misunderstand their argument. Of course they want it indexed, just look at how many thousands of people look at their news everyday that wouldn't if it weren't indexed. They desperately want that readership... to pay them for the service. They aren't saying "we don't want people to read us", they're saying "we want everyone who reads us to pay for it".
Not sure why they can't do this.
Just post indexing info and excerpts for free, and put the rest behind a pay-wall. Google News will still carry it, and everyone (except readers like me) will be happy.
Erh... no. I grant people the right too reach me, as in, get in contact with me, if, and only if, I choose to answer it when they call me.
That's what I explicitly grant when carrying a cell around.
Erh... no. You explicitly grant the cell phone provider to do whatever it states on its terms of service. Not bothering to read it does not make it any less explicit, because you explicitly agreed to it.
Since I'm sure this posting will be flooded with a lot of love for Wikileaks, I feel I have to try to post possible negatives.
We must never forget this. We have the means to make our society better, to form a world in which there is a strong and united opposition against abuse. Locally, nationally, globally.
One problem I've often seen in the past with regards to certain activist groups is their unintentional imposition of values on the people they claim to support. A very common example in places like Europe and occasionally Canada is feminist groups speaking on behalf of oppressed Muslim women who have to wear certain kinds of clothing. Some of these women are oppressed, but usually the solution those groups present is as undesirable to them as is the original problem. Additionally, most of the Muslim women seriously dispute the notion that they are oppressed, only to be dismissively told that they don't see it because they're not yet free. In other words, the activist groups have this attitude of "We know what's right and the rest of the world is wrong." If any of you have spent a lot of times with activists, I think you'll find this is a trap often fallen into.
I've seen similar issues with some human rights organizations, labor oriented organizations, etc. They often fail to realize that while a problem may exist, the solution in their own society may be a poor solution in other societies.
The real question is: Can Wikileaks avoid such a path? Or will they ultimately take on certain philosophies with the belief that they hold for all humanity, while possibly having little experience with most of the world's major cultures. So far they seem to have done well, but I suspect that this is something they'll need to actively guard against.
Wikipedia agrees [wikipedia.org] that that is just a myth, although its wording is not very strong.
Wikipedia says so?
That's your source?
You do realize that Churchill's image is at stake, and if the truth about Coventry came out, the fact that he did foresee the bombing would result in a slaughtering of his reputation, a defacement of his grave, and possible retaliation against his descendants.
It was imperative to ensure that people don't realize what he did, and I'm sure if you dig deep, you'll find Jimbo Wales's hand in this one as well.
For a first year course entitled "data structures and algorithsm" isn't this kind of unavoidable?
Not really - there are lots of assignments one could give.
But even if what you say is true, the professor has no cause to get upset. Most have solutions online already. And even if they didn't, there's this thing called a library...
Isn't almost all of Nethack achievement points? I don't play to get the Amulet. I just play to kill, kill, and kill. Shouldn't that be considered playing for achievement rather than the whole of the game?
And then, you have achievements within achievements, like the ones you mention.
That and seminal works are often overhyped. Don't get me wrong - they may have made a great impact, but they're usually indicative of the beginning of a new field, and it may have taken decades/centuries for the field to figure itself out. Only then is it presented in a better manner for learning.
Take calculus. Limits weren't put on a firm rigorous basis till people like Bolzano, Weierstrauss and Cauchy over a hundred years after Newton. And general integration theory didn't come around until the late 19th century and early 20th.
Slashdot Mirror
For reasons like this, I draw a gigantic distinction between these kinds of criminals and most others. This kind of criminal is completely ineffective without the willing participation of his target.
Did you read the whole article?
They were able to reroute calls to certain numbers. The victims were not willing participants. They had no way of knowing that the number had been routed - nor did those who owned the numbers.
And at times they offered money to whoever orchestrated certain pranks (e.g. driving a car into the building). Once you start giving such incentives, the relationship becomes that of a hitman and the one paying to have someone killed.
The biggest difference between the two are verifying your sources. If a guy comes to your door claiming to be the police and asking to be let in, do you trust that he's the police and let him in?
No, because:
Or do you ask to see his badge and call the department to verify it's really him?
If a fireman comes to your door and tells you that you need to leave immediately because of a gas leak, are you going to say "Hold on! ID first, and let me call the fire department to make sure it's not a hoax".
The point is that you have less to lose by agreeing to leave the building than by verifying his story - the latter could cost you your life.
If a cop says he's evacuating your office building because some alleged local Muslim terrorist with Al-Qaeda sympathies has planted a bomb in the building that may go off at any minute, are you going to say "First show me this bomb you speak of"?
Do you seriously think they'll go to jail for any of that? The people who destroyed thousands of dollars' worth of property were the braindead idiots who were targeted by the calls, not the members of PrankNet.
It made them accessories, don't you think?
They trashed hotel rooms and so forth of their own accord, no one made them do anything.
That's like saying that hit men killed on their own accord, because no one made them do anything.
I know the case of a man who, over almost a decade, would call people in different parts of the world (mostly US and Canada, though), claiming to be stuck at an airport and needing money quickly. He would always know a number of the guy's friends, and personal details about them. Given the "emergency", a number of then roughly gave $1000-2000 (prior to cheap long distance calls and cell phones being common - so you couldn't easily verify). Happened to someone I know.
He was finally caught. And prosecuted. So clearly, it is illegal. The issue likely wasn't that he took the money, but that he caused loss of money.
And at the very least, they could be sued by the victims...
Seems like one of the Pranknet guys (Markle) was jailed for two years for raping a five-year-old. He "warned the girl that he would kill her parents if she did not comply with him".
That sounds like a prank gone horribly wrong.
Yes, and the Milgram Experiment has been repeated a number of times.
While I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't try to guard ourselves from the effects of authority, the fact that this has caused so much damage (as you put it), and that the experiment is very repeatable, suggests that those who exploit an innate human weakness like this one should get the bulk of the blame.
Putting it mostly on those who fell for the pranks is simply trying to make humans out to be something other than what they are. Sure - some will successfully thwart the pranks, but most will fail to do so under a systematic attack.
I was once walking down a street when I saw a bunch of people who looked like cops and firemen on the corner. They saw me (street was mostly deserted) and came over to me. They instructed me to take a detour of a few blocks because there was a gas leak in the area and they weren't sure it was safe as yet.
Should I have demanded an ID from them, and called the police and fire departments to verify their identities?
Just one or two well-publicised cases like that and suddenly the effectiveness of these pranks will strongly diminish. Knowing that it is unlikely to work anymore, the pranksters would then have a deterrant.
Hence their breaking the story, and it appearing on Slashdot.
The article also pointed out that one locale (forgot which - in Florida?) that had been the target of their pranks sent out a bulletin warning businesses.
But let's be realistic. Even with it being publicized, it's highly unlikely that most business owners will see it - running a business takes a lot of time. It's equally unlikely that their employees will see it as well.
Those "pranksters" are at the very least accessories to the crime. Impersonating certain officials (e.g. fire department) is likely also a crime. It wouldn't surprise me if duping can come under fraud, or some related law.
"Are you implying that because the prankster had bad intentions, it somehow excuses the fact that a person willfully and knowingly decided to do a lot of property damage merely because an unaccountable stranger told him it was a good idea?"
That's irrelevant to the discussion at hand. He/she didn't do it because someone told them it was a good idea. They did it because they were trying to save either the property or people's lives.
Though personally, I see the target's stupidity and particularly the desire to excuse and protect it as much more dangerous to society than the prankster's nonviolent maliciousness.
That's like saying that ordinary low level potential Al-Qaeda members are more dangerous than Bin Laden, and that most of the blame should be put on them rather than on Bin Laden. Or that drug addicts are a bigger problem than drug dealers, and that we should focus on targeting users rather than dealers.
Luckily now he's just going to go to jail for some relatively minor stuff.
Thus far no one seems interested in prosecuting. The article itself implied it due to the complications of dealing with another country. The people involved in the outing had an interview on CTV:
The Smoking Gun says it has turned over the information it has uncovered to the FBI, but no charges have been laid against any PrankNET member. While local police have investigated each prank, the FBI and the RCMP have not confirmed whether a cross-border investigation is underway.
Maybe people shouldn't be so stupid as to listen to anything someone tells them on the phone and demand to see someone in person if it's as serious as they are being told?
Some of the pranks were committed by people in person. How else do you think they got a car inside a building?
And really, if the fire departments calls your business saying that you need to leave ASAP because of a gas leak, you're going to say "Nah. You guys show up first. If the building doesn't explode before you get here, then I'll know it's a hoax."
Not suggesting that they weren't gullible, but you do have to take the element of urgency into account.
You'd be surprised at how much you yourself rely on trusting other people, even if you do speak like a stone cold trust no-one badass. You'd also be surprised at how much society relies on the ability of its people to trust each other. This is what pranksters and scammers rely on.
This really needs to be modded up.
Expecting people to routinely distrust authority will probably create more havoc than Pranknet will. Granted, they were a bit too trusting, but that doesn't make them the guilty party. The pranksters are always the ones who should be blamed.
So...I take it you're one of the pranksters on Pranknet?
Malik, of course, expressed no remorse for his stunts. Prank targets, he declared, were "responsible for their own actions." The victims he and his cronies abused and degraded daily were simply "sheep" with "no brains of their own."
I suppose it doesn't bother you either that much of the pranks are also illegal?
It's quite clear that fame was the motivation behind a lot of these so-called "pranks". They wanted popularity and didn't care who suffered for it.
The thing is, I see little difference between what they're doing and what Cohen does in Borat and Bruno: Exploiting other people because there's a market for it and he can make a buck/Euro off of it. Sure, Cohen is a lot more careful to stay within the law, but the intent and "morality" of it is the same. One just happens to be more extreme.
The following supports what I'm saying:
Malik appears to believe that Pranknet will someday achieve the mainstream success of the Jerky Boys or Comedy Central's "Crank Yankers." He remarked one evening that, "If we get it big enough, it could get more than just fun."
Obviously, a lot of the pranks listed in the article will never get that kind of success, but it shows the mentality is pretty much the same.
One of those cases I'd file under "parents enabling the problem".
That's a very naive way of looking at it.
If you read the whole article, you'd see that he's not the only one doing this. I'm not sure all of the other pranksters on Pranknet live in their homes on their mothers' income.
There may be patterns in their behavior, but this isn't something he can't do if he gets a full time job.
You know what really gets on my nerves? When people say they no longer care, when in reality they do. If he really didn't care, he would have typed the first sentence and stopped.
Please talk to the moderators at Slashdot. I no longer care.
Many of those I.F. were simply cumbersome and unforgivable but since this is all we had, we accepted it.
You may not know this, but by today's IF standards, the Infocom games are considered to be quite poor in quality (although few will utter such blasphemy without a lot of modifiers...).
Everyone agrees that they did have great prose and suspension of disbelief was not at all difficult. That's to their credit.
But game design? Mediocre at best (again, by today's standards). Each Infocom game I played had a dungeon/maze element that was quite tedious. I suppose it's because I never had the manuals.
Each Infocom game I played suffered from "I forgot to pick up an item a hundred moves ago and now I can't finish the game, and I don't even know that I can't!". Today, this is just considered poor design. A well designed game will not allow the game to progress, and will provide proper clues to help you figure out what you may be doing wrong.
Each Infocom game I played had ways to die that a real person in the world of the game has no way of knowing would kill him. That's considered poor design today. There should always be some clue that what you're about to do is dangerous, and dying and restoring shouldn't be the only way to know.
Some Infocom games I played had this whole "starving to death" notion that thankfully has been deprecated today. They were hard enough already, damn it!
You misunderstand their argument. Of course they want it indexed, just look at how many thousands of people look at their news everyday that wouldn't if it weren't indexed. They desperately want that readership... to pay them for the service. They aren't saying "we don't want people to read us", they're saying "we want everyone who reads us to pay for it".
Not sure why they can't do this.
Just post indexing info and excerpts for free, and put the rest behind a pay-wall. Google News will still carry it, and everyone (except readers like me) will be happy.
I've heard a lot of words used with Netscape 4. I can confidently say "loved" was never one of them.
4 was actually the good one. It was 4.5 that kept crashing.
Erh... no. I grant people the right too reach me, as in, get in contact with me, if, and only if, I choose to answer it when they call me.
That's what I explicitly grant when carrying a cell around.
Erh... no. You explicitly grant the cell phone provider to do whatever it states on its terms of service. Not bothering to read it does not make it any less explicit, because you explicitly agreed to it.
Everything else is implicit.
How, exactly, is this a troll?
I didn't even criticize Wikileaks?
Are the moderators suggesting that Wikileaks will never do anything wrong?
Since I'm sure this posting will be flooded with a lot of love for Wikileaks, I feel I have to try to post possible negatives.
We must never forget this. We have the means to make our society better, to form a world in which there is a strong and united opposition against abuse. Locally, nationally, globally.
One problem I've often seen in the past with regards to certain activist groups is their unintentional imposition of values on the people they claim to support. A very common example in places like Europe and occasionally Canada is feminist groups speaking on behalf of oppressed Muslim women who have to wear certain kinds of clothing. Some of these women are oppressed, but usually the solution those groups present is as undesirable to them as is the original problem. Additionally, most of the Muslim women seriously dispute the notion that they are oppressed, only to be dismissively told that they don't see it because they're not yet free. In other words, the activist groups have this attitude of "We know what's right and the rest of the world is wrong." If any of you have spent a lot of times with activists, I think you'll find this is a trap often fallen into.
I've seen similar issues with some human rights organizations, labor oriented organizations, etc. They often fail to realize that while a problem may exist, the solution in their own society may be a poor solution in other societies.
The real question is: Can Wikileaks avoid such a path? Or will they ultimately take on certain philosophies with the belief that they hold for all humanity, while possibly having little experience with most of the world's major cultures. So far they seem to have done well, but I suspect that this is something they'll need to actively guard against.
Wikipedia agrees [wikipedia.org] that that is just a myth, although its wording is not very strong.
Wikipedia says so?
That's your source?
You do realize that Churchill's image is at stake, and if the truth about Coventry came out, the fact that he did foresee the bombing would result in a slaughtering of his reputation, a defacement of his grave, and possible retaliation against his descendants.
It was imperative to ensure that people don't realize what he did, and I'm sure if you dig deep, you'll find Jimbo Wales's hand in this one as well.
Wikipedia. Blah!
For a first year course entitled "data structures and algorithsm" isn't this kind of unavoidable?
Not really - there are lots of assignments one could give.
But even if what you say is true, the professor has no cause to get upset. Most have solutions online already. And even if they didn't, there's this thing called a library...
The GPL grants you additional freedoms on top of this. Viral is just a criticism whiny people use because they want something shiny for free.
Thank you for pointing out that the GPL is not, in fact, free.
Isn't almost all of Nethack achievement points? I don't play to get the Amulet. I just play to kill, kill, and kill. Shouldn't that be considered playing for achievement rather than the whole of the game?
And then, you have achievements within achievements, like the ones you mention.
Please, oh please do so, Mr Murdoch. Because I really want as much of your business as possible to fail.
That and seminal works are often overhyped. Don't get me wrong - they may have made a great impact, but they're usually indicative of the beginning of a new field, and it may have taken decades/centuries for the field to figure itself out. Only then is it presented in a better manner for learning.
Take calculus. Limits weren't put on a firm rigorous basis till people like Bolzano, Weierstrauss and Cauchy over a hundred years after Newton. And general integration theory didn't come around until the late 19th century and early 20th.
Of course, there are always exceptions...