Yeah, 'cause nobody ever managed to jailbreak an iPhone. Or unlock a simlocked Nokia.
The difference, of course, is that the Pre isn't "locked" in the first place (other than with respect to the carrier, of course). Look at the difference between the procedure for accessing root on the Pre and the iPhone -- and in particular, Apple and Palm's respective reactions to them. Palm actually touted homebrew apps at PreDevCamp. Meanwhile, Apple behaves as if doing any development outside the App Store will result in cell towers crashing and your JesusPhone spontaneously combusting.
Spoofing the ID to make the device work with the OS is one thing, spoofing it to make it work with a 3rd party application, that's a differnt ball game...
In both cases, it's about applications. Applications use the device drivers provided by the OS. The difference with iTunes is that an extra check is done, so that without the proper VID, iTunes won't hook into the proper drivers.
Granted, the author didn't modify a binary file, but the only way he even knew to do that was because of the low-level access the Pre gives you to the OS, and the fact that it's open. The fix would've been impossible on a locked-down phone.
Yup, and we expect either them to get slapped on the wrist and told to undo it by the association, told to stop selling the devices by court order and potentially recall all of them, or both the above combined with heavy fines.
Who is this "we" you speak of, and why would you and yourassociate think something so astonishingly wrong-headed?
1) The violated no law by spoofing the VID.
2) The USB-IF spec accommodates spoofing. That's how a lot of "Microsoft" brand non-Microsoft mice work with USB.
3) Palm is bringing the action to the USB-IF because what Apple is doing is actually more harmful to the spec. The whole point of USB is supposed to be Plug and Play. You plug a device into your computer, the device sends an ID to the OS, and the OS downloads the proper drivers. It's both against the spec and moronic to use the VID as a password to your application (which is essentially what Apple is doing with iTunes), because the ID is open for all the world to see. If Apple wants to keep non-iPods/iPhones from syncing with iTunes, they can put a unique ID in the firmware that's secret, so that any yahoo can't just plug the device into their machine and pull out the password (which again, is what the VID becomes when you use it this way). If everyone followed Apple's lead on this, we'd be left in the bad old days of the 1980's, where every application had its own drivers.
3) Even in the event that the USB-IF does decide they don't like what Palm did, there's no fine, no financial penalty at all. The only adverse effect for violating the USB-IF spec is you can't use the USB logo on your product's box.
The Pre's no different. In fact, the article details exactly that: how the author fixed the source code to prevent the upload to Palm of his information.
Frankly? If you're stupid enough to do what a person on the phone tells you without first verifying that the caller IS in the authority position he claims to be, well, you just learned a valuable, albeit expensive, lesson...
Do people need to do more verification, when possible? Of course. That sort of goes without saying. I used to work in an environment where we would get calls all the time from people seeking information about the company. The people asking the questions were always (to my recollection) well-mannered and outgoing, but that didn't change the fact that we weren't supposed to say anything to them. Whatever they asked, we were supposed to redirect them to the public relations department (although I think if it was concerning a specific employee, we were supposed to direct them to HR).
But I'd make two points about this:
1) These were non-critical situations, in which no one's life or property was directly at stake. I don't know what would happen if someone called and said something to the tune of, "I planted a bomb in the building. You must evacuate now!"
2) Even the response of sending a query to Public Relations or HR is a learned, authority-based response. The worker in question isn't making an independent judgement that it would be better to send such a request to a certain channel. If they did, the decision might go another way (which is the point of having a procedure).
To sum it up: Verification isn't part of most people's jobs. Their only task is to kick it up to whomever is responsible for the decision.
When you're dealing with an organization such as a fast food joint, anyone at that level is probably half a dozen levels and several thousand miles away from where the incident is taking place.
Certainly it has to come out of the company's revenue, thus effectively it's paid for by the customers. So far, so right. But he cannot simply increase prices to cover the fine, or customers will take their business elsewhere, to companies that don't have to factor in the cost for a fee or fine.
Granted, if the fine is small enough, the comapny will simply absorb it as the cost of doing business and take a hit for that quarter on their balance sheet. But a substantial fine (and I think we can both agree that the hypothetical fine mentioned was substantial) is going to be absorbed by the customers in one way or another, or else the company will fold. We can argue, of course, about what the limits are on a "substantial" fine, but for a fine to be punative (which would be the point of imposing one) it has to be big enough to hurt the company somehow, and if it's big enough to hurt the company, then the company is going to have to defray that cost.
It was unethical because Milgram was putting the subjects through psychologically traumatizing experiments, and did so with deception. Such an experiment would never be green-lighted in academia today.
I don't question the value of his work, but in general, I think anyone who would put human beings through such a process (whether they were harmed psychologically over the long term or not) is a cerifiable prick.
I never saw Borat, but from what I could tell in the commercials for it, the ways in which he embarrassed people all tended to be fairly tame, though obviously offensive, in their own right. By contrast, the Pranknet crew did things that were truly injurious and destructive. I think there's a huge moral difference between the two. I don't enjoy Borat's kind of humor, because I do think there's something unseemly about taking advantage of someone that way to mock them, but I still see it as a very different thing than what PrankNet does.
Penalizing a single company will not be passed on. Penalizing an industry will. Because everyone has to.
When you slap a single company with a fine, they have to swallow it. They can't just jack up the prices because then their competitor takes over, being cheaper.
When you slap a company with a fine, who do you think ends up paying that fine -- the Good Fine Fairy? Any and every business cost is paid by the customer. All the companies do is find artful ways to conceal it.
There's a very strong norm against publishing phone numbers, addresses, etc in journalism (esp. criminal and political journalism). I readily agree with this norm -- it seems that publishing such information can invite vigilantism and generate life-long problems for the accused without the benefit of a fair trial. I would generally expect journalists to abide this norm in news reports on robbery, drug trafficking, arson, embezzlement, etc.
Never-the-less, I felt a twinge of satisfaction while reading phone numbers and street addresses in TSG's article. I wouldn't mind if these serial harassers received a series of harassing phone calls.
Then again, TSG accuses Pranknet of systematically violating the informal norms that their victims rely on; is it proper for TSG to turn around and break an informal norm of journalism?
I'd like to better understand the ethical question here. Perhaps TSG's approach is the only way to deal with Pranknet? Perhaps it's poetic justice? Has TSG made a special ethical judgement regarding Pranknet? On what basis? Does TSG habitually violate journalistic ethics? Do the participants in Pranknet deserve worse treatment than anyone else accused of crime? How would our opinion change if TSG had presented the story differently?
First, I think the members of Pranknet deserve every bit of grief that life can give them -- and then some. By my count, their ranks include at least two child molesters, in addition to the execrable users who "merely" degrade people they've never met for fun.
And to me, that's the real disparity here: TSG simply published publicly available information. These guys thought they were invincible because they did everything over the Internet. Well, it came back to bite them in the ass. TSG should only be held accountable if they somehow got the information illegally, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
After reading about what they were involved in, it wouldn't bother me one bit if every member of PrankNet was publicly roasted over a slowly-rotating spit and fed to stray dogs.
I would prefer a society wherein people who behaved in this way towards their fellow human beings were in fear for their lives.
I really don't like this argument that if you financially penalize a corporation they'll just pass the cost to their consumers. If a corp is selling service, for example, at $45 per month, and they get a $900-billion slap from the EU, and they increase costs to $60 per month, why weren't they selling service for $60/month earlier?.
There could be a lot of reasons why they weren't doing it earlier. The most obvious one is competition. The free market isn't just based on charging whatever you can. It's based on charging what the market will bear. In practice, that means that if your competitor is charging $45/mo., you do whatever you can to stay at or below that threshold, so that you don't lose customers. If you get smacked with a $900 billion fine, and have to raise your rate to account for it, that will lead to a loss of business. (Of course, the impact on customers is rarely that obvious. Corporations usually try to hide such increases in fees that they don't have to include in the monthly rate, so that they can advertise "only $45 per month!", even though the new fees make the price considerably higher.
Re:The rest of the world is making fun of America
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The Outing of Pranknet
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Critical to what I said was that the recipient of the prank call SHOULD PAY FOR ANY DAMAGE THAT THEY DID merely because a random stranger told them to do it. What I said should be well-publicised are cases where the incompetent target who did damage was also held liable for that damage. The implication was that this should describe all such cases. THAT would make people think twice before smashing property they do not own merely because an unverifiable voice told them they should. It naturally follows that people who think twice (or even once) would be harder to successfully target with this kind of prank. That's the deterrant I mentioned.
But the problem is, that's a really bad idea. Why would you want someone to suppress their Good Samaritan instincts for fear of a lawsuit? Not only is it pointless, but it's counter-productive. The last thing anyone should want is for everyone to mind his/her own business in an emergency situation. Don't we have enough of that already?
authority, should never, ever, be given the benefit of the doubt just because its labeled as "authority". Such blind trust has caused so much damage throughout the history of human kind its terrifying.
That's true. But part of the point of Milgram's experiment is that people do trust authority figures. Even decades after the original experiment, follow-up experiments show basically the same results. It's part of the human condition, really. No, it's not irresistable. Milgram's experiments did show that approximately one third of people wouldn't administer the fatal shock. But there are two points to consider:
1) Two thirds (or more) of the participants would inflict the fatal shock.
2) Even those who wouldn't inflict the fatal shocks were still susceptible to the order to inflict very painful shocks.
It's very easy to look at these calls at a distance and call the people at the other end idiots, but I think that people are much more vulnerable to such attacks than they think.
When a stranger calls you up and tells you to do something on their authority, and you do it, you're not doing it because you trust him. After all, you don't even know him.
I disagree. When you obey something someone says over the phone because of their supposed authority, you're exercising a kind of trust that's generally called "benefit of the doubt", meaning that you trust someone unless/until they give you a reason to believe otherwise. That trust is not necessarily contingent upon the person speaking in complete sentences (although it probably helps). The fact of the matter is, authority and intelligence are not always coexistent in the same figure.
I'd also submit that the Nigerian scam emails can (and indeed should) make a person less trustful. It would be remarkable if a person could get thousands of scam e-mails a day and not look at his/her e-mail with more jaded eye.
Luckily, these kinds of incidents are rare, and in the e-mail realm, people are becoming a little bit more educated as to what kinds of requests would or would not come via e-mail.
If I were the motel owner and one of my guests did this, my response would NOT be, "Oh.. let's put our Sherlock Holmes hats on and find out who that mean prankster was!" It would be, "You better find a good lawyer, because my insurance company will be calling."
Well, of course that would be the reaction of the hotel owner. The hotel owner would be thinking short-term, that he/she just wants the damage fixed. But can you see how that would be a half-assed response to the problem? The minute the hotel owner got the damage repaired, the douchebag in question would just make another phone call and have the room trashed again.
The bottom line is that the people staying in the rooms aren't the real problem. These scams aren't successful because people are idiots. They're successful because there's a deeply-ingrained, very human instinct to cooperate with your fellow human beings -- particularly authority figures. As social animals, it's evolutionarily advantageous for us. And the reason that it usually works is because most people aren't antisocial douchebags.
To what extent is someone else responsible for bringing those actions about? A key difference here is that the Pranknet guys often rely on danger/panic scenarios: those situations when time wasted can be dangerous, and the guys at Pranknet were portraying themselves as helpers, whereas the scammers usually appeal to their victims for "help." I guess it's a difference of degree...
I think that makes all the difference in the world, really. It's difficult, if not impossible, to find any mitigation in the fact that someone's just being a greedy bastard. On the other hand, someone presented with an authority figure, telling them that there is some kind of immediate danger is a much more sympathetic figure. It's hard to look at such a person as a simple asshat, because it's something that the vast majority of people (many of them quite intelligent) are susceptible to. And it's a good thing, too. We need people to listen to authority figures at some basic level, or society in general would fall apart. In order to have a society, there have to be authority figures.
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? I sure as hell would tell anyone calling me on a phone to go fuck themselves if they even hinted at wanting me to do anything which I could be held liable for.
The whole reason this works is that everyone thinks they're smarter than that. But as someone's already said here, it's the supposed urgency of the call that breaks down the barriers. Add to that the voice of authority, and you've got a clear recipe for people being abused.
The idiots at PrankNet have probably never even heard of the Milgram experiment, though. As unethical as I think the experiment was, at least it was done for scientific reasons, and not sadistic pseudosexual gratification.
No offense, but you seem to be laboring under the misconception that when you pay for a subscription on the Kindle, you're paying for a subscription to the Kindle. That's not how it works. The Kindle is the vessel, not the provider of the content. What you're saying is akin to saying that when your morning paper gets delivered to your doorstep, you're subscribing to the delivery truck. The fact that the delivery truck could theoretically find out where you live without the newspaper's involvement doesn't change the relationship.
There are other problems, as well.
1) This whole thing is anthropomorphic. What make us think that other intelligent life wants to explore space and find us (or other lifeforms)? They could very well be perfectly happy doing what they're doing. Who's to say?
2) The universe is big. The Earth is small. Our view of things is smaller still. It strikes me as more than a little arrogant to assume that if some planet 1000 light years away sends out a probe the size of a basketball, we're going to know anything about it at all, even if it gets within 100,000 miles of Earth. Scientists sometimes have trouble seeing meteors until they're almost on top of us, and we're supposed to believe that they'd know any time someone was to send a probe our way?
3) The universe is very old. 10,000 years ago, the universe was basically the same as it is now. We, on the other hand, were still using stone and bone tools. We've only been systematically looking at the sky for a very short time, and for most of that time, even something as close as Mars was an indistinct mass. The idea that we'd be able to detect anything like an alien technology (that might not want to be found) is a little bit ridiculous.
With all the planets out there, it's inconceivable to me that none of them would have life at least as intelligent as us. (If we're the best the universe can do, how sad is that?) That doesn't mean that we'd automatically know if they were around, though. We're probably going to ahve to get lucky to find them, given the vast distances between planets (let alone inhabitable ones).
You don't think the Palm presenting itself as an 'iPod' device in iTunes is hijacking Apple's tech? If the experience isn't up to Apple's standards, then it just makes the 'iPod' brand look bad.
How does it make the "iPod brand" look bad? I would assume that the vast majority of people who bought a Pre realize it's not an iPod. The remainder probably can't even spell iTunes.
I suppose it depends on what your definition of "tech" is, but a Pre identifying itself as an iPhone is no more sophisticated than a Pre announcing itself as a Pre, as far as I can tell. It might be a hack, by some definitions, but, as hacks go, it ranks somewhere just below "hacking" the tags off of someone's web page to achieve a certain effect. And it's probably quite a bit less of a hack than that, actually, since you're using the ID tags as-is.
It's just very hard for me to see the duplicity in it, when the information is out there openly, by definition. It's like announcing your password to everyone you pass on the street, and then being surprised when your machine is "hacked". If it was that important that no Pre could sync with iTunes, they could've made iTunes/iPod communication a little more sophisticated than just, "Hey, I'm an iPod!". The only reason they do care is because the Pre is plausible competition for the iPhone. (No, I'm not saying it's an iPhone "killer". The iPhone doesn't have to die for the Pre to succeed. If it gets good reviews and can make Palm a strong player again, that's a success.)
And is anyone surprised ? Really ?
It's Apple's tech, they put the work in, they deserve to reap the rewards. Coming along late-to-the-party and just trying to muscle your way in without an invite just shows a lack of class, at least IMHO.
I can't see it really affecting anyone though. As any fule know, iTunes just sucks so badly at managing music that the alternative (what Pre owners are left with), the ability to "just drag files to it as a disk" ought to be a liberating breath of fresh air - at least going by/. comments in the past. Wonder how that'll work out in practice ? Guess we'll see:)
Simon.
Hi, Simon.
I certainly agree that no one should be surprised. And I mostly agree that most Pre users won't miss it much.
What I question is the idea that Palm hijacked any of Apple's "tech". All Palm really did was take information which iPhones broadcast over USB and mimic it. And even that is done at a pretty minimal level. It's just surprising that it took this long for Apple to issue the update, since it was pretty clear what the syncing method was.
Anyway, I'm sure the homebrew community will step up to the plate, for those who do miss the iTunes sync functionality.
There are lots of disorders that are simple point mutations of a single gene. Fixing those won't have any bizarre results. None whatsoever.
Don't take this as an attempt to contradict you, because I'm simply trying to understand your point. How do we know there won't be any bizarre results? Sure, we can't see any right now, but how do we know it?
Sure, we see a defect, we find a gene, and in some cases, when you turn that gene off (or on, as the case may be), the defect goes away, and the person appears fine -- even lives their entire lives with no seeming ill effects. All of that being true, how do scientists know that changing one gene won't a) ever have an effect on that person (in, say, a different point mutation that's changed, or b) not have some impact in combination with other genetic mutations in future generations? (The point of the article, after all, was the ability to pass on genetic changes. That's a whole different situation than making single changes that only impact one individual.)
Again, this isn't a criticism of your statement. I'm simply trying to understand how such things are known, in such a complex system. By way of background on my question, I have spina bifida, which is a condition that scientists now believe is caused by genetic and environmental factors (primarily, a folic acid deficiency in mothers). That's one reason why I'm a bit wary of thinking that mutations can be entirely known quantities, and that scientists can know exactly what a given change will do.
A dead or retarded baby is hardly the worst-case scenario. In fact, harmful genetic mutations are pretty much inevitable in the beginning, which is one of the ethical dilemmas.
The bigger problem is, what's being changed that we're not seeing right away (i.e., in the first generation)? What vulnerabilities are created when you change a given part of the genome? Such tinkering could very well create a recessive "time bomb" that takes several generations to show up.
And then there's the whole question of who decides what gets "fixed", once we do get the technology part down.
I'm not saying it shouldn't be done at all, but it shouldn't be a matter of, "If we can, we should...".
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, 'cause nobody ever managed to jailbreak an iPhone. Or unlock a simlocked Nokia.
The difference, of course, is that the Pre isn't "locked" in the first place (other than with respect to the carrier, of course). Look at the difference between the procedure for accessing root on the Pre and the iPhone -- and in particular, Apple and Palm's respective reactions to them. Palm actually touted homebrew apps at PreDevCamp. Meanwhile, Apple behaves as if doing any development outside the App Store will result in cell towers crashing and your JesusPhone spontaneously combusting.
Spoofing the ID to make the device work with the OS is one thing, spoofing it to make it work with a 3rd party application, that's a differnt ball game...
In both cases, it's about applications. Applications use the device drivers provided by the OS. The difference with iTunes is that an extra check is done, so that without the proper VID, iTunes won't hook into the proper drivers.
Granted, the author didn't modify a binary file, but the only way he even knew to do that was because of the low-level access the Pre gives you to the OS, and the fact that it's open. The fix would've been impossible on a locked-down phone.
Yup, and we expect either them to get slapped on the wrist and told to undo it by the association, told to stop selling the devices by court order and potentially recall all of them, or both the above combined with heavy fines.
Who is this "we" you speak of, and why would you and yourassociate think something so astonishingly wrong-headed? 1) The violated no law by spoofing the VID. 2) The USB-IF spec accommodates spoofing. That's how a lot of "Microsoft" brand non-Microsoft mice work with USB. 3) Palm is bringing the action to the USB-IF because what Apple is doing is actually more harmful to the spec. The whole point of USB is supposed to be Plug and Play. You plug a device into your computer, the device sends an ID to the OS, and the OS downloads the proper drivers. It's both against the spec and moronic to use the VID as a password to your application (which is essentially what Apple is doing with iTunes), because the ID is open for all the world to see. If Apple wants to keep non-iPods/iPhones from syncing with iTunes, they can put a unique ID in the firmware that's secret, so that any yahoo can't just plug the device into their machine and pull out the password (which again, is what the VID becomes when you use it this way). If everyone followed Apple's lead on this, we'd be left in the bad old days of the 1980's, where every application had its own drivers. 3) Even in the event that the USB-IF does decide they don't like what Palm did, there's no fine, no financial penalty at all. The only adverse effect for violating the USB-IF spec is you can't use the USB logo on your product's box.
The Pre's no different. In fact, the article details exactly that: how the author fixed the source code to prevent the upload to Palm of his information.
I accidentally gave this an incorrect tag of "Offtopic". Sorry about that. :(
Frankly? If you're stupid enough to do what a person on the phone tells you without first verifying that the caller IS in the authority position he claims to be, well, you just learned a valuable, albeit expensive, lesson...
Do people need to do more verification, when possible? Of course. That sort of goes without saying. I used to work in an environment where we would get calls all the time from people seeking information about the company. The people asking the questions were always (to my recollection) well-mannered and outgoing, but that didn't change the fact that we weren't supposed to say anything to them. Whatever they asked, we were supposed to redirect them to the public relations department (although I think if it was concerning a specific employee, we were supposed to direct them to HR). But I'd make two points about this: 1) These were non-critical situations, in which no one's life or property was directly at stake. I don't know what would happen if someone called and said something to the tune of, "I planted a bomb in the building. You must evacuate now!" 2) Even the response of sending a query to Public Relations or HR is a learned, authority-based response. The worker in question isn't making an independent judgement that it would be better to send such a request to a certain channel. If they did, the decision might go another way (which is the point of having a procedure). To sum it up: Verification isn't part of most people's jobs. Their only task is to kick it up to whomever is responsible for the decision. When you're dealing with an organization such as a fast food joint, anyone at that level is probably half a dozen levels and several thousand miles away from where the incident is taking place.
Certainly it has to come out of the company's revenue, thus effectively it's paid for by the customers. So far, so right. But he cannot simply increase prices to cover the fine, or customers will take their business elsewhere, to companies that don't have to factor in the cost for a fee or fine.
Granted, if the fine is small enough, the comapny will simply absorb it as the cost of doing business and take a hit for that quarter on their balance sheet. But a substantial fine (and I think we can both agree that the hypothetical fine mentioned was substantial) is going to be absorbed by the customers in one way or another, or else the company will fold. We can argue, of course, about what the limits are on a "substantial" fine, but for a fine to be punative (which would be the point of imposing one) it has to be big enough to hurt the company somehow, and if it's big enough to hurt the company, then the company is going to have to defray that cost.
Why do you think the experiment was unethical?
It was unethical because Milgram was putting the subjects through psychologically traumatizing experiments, and did so with deception. Such an experiment would never be green-lighted in academia today. I don't question the value of his work, but in general, I think anyone who would put human beings through such a process (whether they were harmed psychologically over the long term or not) is a cerifiable prick.
I never saw Borat, but from what I could tell in the commercials for it, the ways in which he embarrassed people all tended to be fairly tame, though obviously offensive, in their own right. By contrast, the Pranknet crew did things that were truly injurious and destructive. I think there's a huge moral difference between the two. I don't enjoy Borat's kind of humor, because I do think there's something unseemly about taking advantage of someone that way to mock them, but I still see it as a very different thing than what PrankNet does.
Penalizing a single company will not be passed on. Penalizing an industry will. Because everyone has to.
When you slap a single company with a fine, they have to swallow it. They can't just jack up the prices because then their competitor takes over, being cheaper.
When you slap a company with a fine, who do you think ends up paying that fine -- the Good Fine Fairy? Any and every business cost is paid by the customer. All the companies do is find artful ways to conceal it.
There's a very strong norm against publishing phone numbers, addresses, etc in journalism (esp. criminal and political journalism). I readily agree with this norm -- it seems that publishing such information can invite vigilantism and generate life-long problems for the accused without the benefit of a fair trial. I would generally expect journalists to abide this norm in news reports on robbery, drug trafficking, arson, embezzlement, etc.
Never-the-less, I felt a twinge of satisfaction while reading phone numbers and street addresses in TSG's article. I wouldn't mind if these serial harassers received a series of harassing phone calls.
Then again, TSG accuses Pranknet of systematically violating the informal norms that their victims rely on; is it proper for TSG to turn around and break an informal norm of journalism?
I'd like to better understand the ethical question here. Perhaps TSG's approach is the only way to deal with Pranknet? Perhaps it's poetic justice? Has TSG made a special ethical judgement regarding Pranknet? On what basis? Does TSG habitually violate journalistic ethics? Do the participants in Pranknet deserve worse treatment than anyone else accused of crime? How would our opinion change if TSG had presented the story differently?
First, I think the members of Pranknet deserve every bit of grief that life can give them -- and then some. By my count, their ranks include at least two child molesters, in addition to the execrable users who "merely" degrade people they've never met for fun.
And to me, that's the real disparity here: TSG simply published publicly available information. These guys thought they were invincible because they did everything over the Internet. Well, it came back to bite them in the ass. TSG should only be held accountable if they somehow got the information illegally, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
After reading about what they were involved in, it wouldn't bother me one bit if every member of PrankNet was publicly roasted over a slowly-rotating spit and fed to stray dogs.
I would prefer a society wherein people who behaved in this way towards their fellow human beings were in fear for their lives.
I really don't like this argument that if you financially penalize a corporation they'll just pass the cost to their consumers. If a corp is selling service, for example, at $45 per month, and they get a $900-billion slap from the EU, and they increase costs to $60 per month, why weren't they selling service for $60/month earlier?.
There could be a lot of reasons why they weren't doing it earlier. The most obvious one is competition. The free market isn't just based on charging whatever you can. It's based on charging what the market will bear. In practice, that means that if your competitor is charging $45/mo., you do whatever you can to stay at or below that threshold, so that you don't lose customers. If you get smacked with a $900 billion fine, and have to raise your rate to account for it, that will lead to a loss of business. (Of course, the impact on customers is rarely that obvious. Corporations usually try to hide such increases in fees that they don't have to include in the monthly rate, so that they can advertise "only $45 per month!", even though the new fees make the price considerably higher.
Critical to what I said was that the recipient of the prank call SHOULD PAY FOR ANY DAMAGE THAT THEY DID merely because a random stranger told them to do it. What I said should be well-publicised are cases where the incompetent target who did damage was also held liable for that damage. The implication was that this should describe all such cases. THAT would make people think twice before smashing property they do not own merely because an unverifiable voice told them they should. It naturally follows that people who think twice (or even once) would be harder to successfully target with this kind of prank. That's the deterrant I mentioned.
But the problem is, that's a really bad idea. Why would you want someone to suppress their Good Samaritan instincts for fear of a lawsuit? Not only is it pointless, but it's counter-productive. The last thing anyone should want is for everyone to mind his/her own business in an emergency situation. Don't we have enough of that already?
authority, should never, ever, be given the benefit of the doubt just because its labeled as "authority". Such blind trust has caused so much damage throughout the history of human kind its terrifying.
read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
That's true. But part of the point of Milgram's experiment is that people do trust authority figures. Even decades after the original experiment, follow-up experiments show basically the same results. It's part of the human condition, really. No, it's not irresistable. Milgram's experiments did show that approximately one third of people wouldn't administer the fatal shock. But there are two points to consider: 1) Two thirds (or more) of the participants would inflict the fatal shock. 2) Even those who wouldn't inflict the fatal shocks were still susceptible to the order to inflict very painful shocks. It's very easy to look at these calls at a distance and call the people at the other end idiots, but I think that people are much more vulnerable to such attacks than they think.
When a stranger calls you up and tells you to do something on their authority, and you do it, you're not doing it because you trust him. After all, you don't even know him.
I disagree. When you obey something someone says over the phone because of their supposed authority, you're exercising a kind of trust that's generally called "benefit of the doubt", meaning that you trust someone unless/until they give you a reason to believe otherwise. That trust is not necessarily contingent upon the person speaking in complete sentences (although it probably helps). The fact of the matter is, authority and intelligence are not always coexistent in the same figure. I'd also submit that the Nigerian scam emails can (and indeed should) make a person less trustful. It would be remarkable if a person could get thousands of scam e-mails a day and not look at his/her e-mail with more jaded eye. Luckily, these kinds of incidents are rare, and in the e-mail realm, people are becoming a little bit more educated as to what kinds of requests would or would not come via e-mail.
If I were the motel owner and one of my guests did this, my response would NOT be, "Oh.. let's put our Sherlock Holmes hats on and find out who that mean prankster was!" It would be, "You better find a good lawyer, because my insurance company will be calling."
Well, of course that would be the reaction of the hotel owner. The hotel owner would be thinking short-term, that he/she just wants the damage fixed. But can you see how that would be a half-assed response to the problem? The minute the hotel owner got the damage repaired, the douchebag in question would just make another phone call and have the room trashed again. The bottom line is that the people staying in the rooms aren't the real problem. These scams aren't successful because people are idiots. They're successful because there's a deeply-ingrained, very human instinct to cooperate with your fellow human beings -- particularly authority figures. As social animals, it's evolutionarily advantageous for us. And the reason that it usually works is because most people aren't antisocial douchebags.
To what extent is someone else responsible for bringing those actions about? A key difference here is that the Pranknet guys often rely on danger/panic scenarios: those situations when time wasted can be dangerous, and the guys at Pranknet were portraying themselves as helpers, whereas the scammers usually appeal to their victims for "help." I guess it's a difference of degree...
I think that makes all the difference in the world, really. It's difficult, if not impossible, to find any mitigation in the fact that someone's just being a greedy bastard. On the other hand, someone presented with an authority figure, telling them that there is some kind of immediate danger is a much more sympathetic figure. It's hard to look at such a person as a simple asshat, because it's something that the vast majority of people (many of them quite intelligent) are susceptible to. And it's a good thing, too. We need people to listen to authority figures at some basic level, or society in general would fall apart. In order to have a society, there have to be authority figures.
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? I sure as hell would tell anyone calling me on a phone to go fuck themselves if they even hinted at wanting me to do anything which I could be held liable for.
The whole reason this works is that everyone thinks they're smarter than that. But as someone's already said here, it's the supposed urgency of the call that breaks down the barriers. Add to that the voice of authority, and you've got a clear recipe for people being abused. The idiots at PrankNet have probably never even heard of the Milgram experiment, though. As unethical as I think the experiment was, at least it was done for scientific reasons, and not sadistic pseudosexual gratification.
No offense, but you seem to be laboring under the misconception that when you pay for a subscription on the Kindle, you're paying for a subscription to the Kindle. That's not how it works. The Kindle is the vessel, not the provider of the content. What you're saying is akin to saying that when your morning paper gets delivered to your doorstep, you're subscribing to the delivery truck. The fact that the delivery truck could theoretically find out where you live without the newspaper's involvement doesn't change the relationship.
There are other problems, as well. 1) This whole thing is anthropomorphic. What make us think that other intelligent life wants to explore space and find us (or other lifeforms)? They could very well be perfectly happy doing what they're doing. Who's to say? 2) The universe is big. The Earth is small. Our view of things is smaller still. It strikes me as more than a little arrogant to assume that if some planet 1000 light years away sends out a probe the size of a basketball, we're going to know anything about it at all, even if it gets within 100,000 miles of Earth. Scientists sometimes have trouble seeing meteors until they're almost on top of us, and we're supposed to believe that they'd know any time someone was to send a probe our way? 3) The universe is very old. 10,000 years ago, the universe was basically the same as it is now. We, on the other hand, were still using stone and bone tools. We've only been systematically looking at the sky for a very short time, and for most of that time, even something as close as Mars was an indistinct mass. The idea that we'd be able to detect anything like an alien technology (that might not want to be found) is a little bit ridiculous. With all the planets out there, it's inconceivable to me that none of them would have life at least as intelligent as us. (If we're the best the universe can do, how sad is that?) That doesn't mean that we'd automatically know if they were around, though. We're probably going to ahve to get lucky to find them, given the vast distances between planets (let alone inhabitable ones).
You don't think the Palm presenting itself as an 'iPod' device in iTunes is hijacking Apple's tech? If the experience isn't up to Apple's standards, then it just makes the 'iPod' brand look bad.
How does it make the "iPod brand" look bad? I would assume that the vast majority of people who bought a Pre realize it's not an iPod. The remainder probably can't even spell iTunes. I suppose it depends on what your definition of "tech" is, but a Pre identifying itself as an iPhone is no more sophisticated than a Pre announcing itself as a Pre, as far as I can tell. It might be a hack, by some definitions, but, as hacks go, it ranks somewhere just below "hacking" the tags off of someone's web page to achieve a certain effect. And it's probably quite a bit less of a hack than that, actually, since you're using the ID tags as-is. It's just very hard for me to see the duplicity in it, when the information is out there openly, by definition. It's like announcing your password to everyone you pass on the street, and then being surprised when your machine is "hacked". If it was that important that no Pre could sync with iTunes, they could've made iTunes/iPod communication a little more sophisticated than just, "Hey, I'm an iPod!". The only reason they do care is because the Pre is plausible competition for the iPhone. (No, I'm not saying it's an iPhone "killer". The iPhone doesn't have to die for the Pre to succeed. If it gets good reviews and can make Palm a strong player again, that's a success.)
And is anyone surprised ? Really ? It's Apple's tech, they put the work in, they deserve to reap the rewards. Coming along late-to-the-party and just trying to muscle your way in without an invite just shows a lack of class, at least IMHO. I can't see it really affecting anyone though. As any fule know, iTunes just sucks so badly at managing music that the alternative (what Pre owners are left with), the ability to "just drag files to it as a disk" ought to be a liberating breath of fresh air - at least going by /. comments in the past. Wonder how that'll work out in practice ? Guess we'll see :)
Simon.
Hi, Simon. I certainly agree that no one should be surprised. And I mostly agree that most Pre users won't miss it much. What I question is the idea that Palm hijacked any of Apple's "tech". All Palm really did was take information which iPhones broadcast over USB and mimic it. And even that is done at a pretty minimal level. It's just surprising that it took this long for Apple to issue the update, since it was pretty clear what the syncing method was. Anyway, I'm sure the homebrew community will step up to the plate, for those who do miss the iTunes sync functionality.
There are lots of disorders that are simple point mutations of a single gene. Fixing those won't have any bizarre results. None whatsoever.
Don't take this as an attempt to contradict you, because I'm simply trying to understand your point. How do we know there won't be any bizarre results? Sure, we can't see any right now, but how do we know it? Sure, we see a defect, we find a gene, and in some cases, when you turn that gene off (or on, as the case may be), the defect goes away, and the person appears fine -- even lives their entire lives with no seeming ill effects. All of that being true, how do scientists know that changing one gene won't a) ever have an effect on that person (in, say, a different point mutation that's changed, or b) not have some impact in combination with other genetic mutations in future generations? (The point of the article, after all, was the ability to pass on genetic changes. That's a whole different situation than making single changes that only impact one individual.) Again, this isn't a criticism of your statement. I'm simply trying to understand how such things are known, in such a complex system. By way of background on my question, I have spina bifida, which is a condition that scientists now believe is caused by genetic and environmental factors (primarily, a folic acid deficiency in mothers). That's one reason why I'm a bit wary of thinking that mutations can be entirely known quantities, and that scientists can know exactly what a given change will do.
A dead or retarded baby is hardly the worst-case scenario. In fact, harmful genetic mutations are pretty much inevitable in the beginning, which is one of the ethical dilemmas. The bigger problem is, what's being changed that we're not seeing right away (i.e., in the first generation)? What vulnerabilities are created when you change a given part of the genome? Such tinkering could very well create a recessive "time bomb" that takes several generations to show up. And then there's the whole question of who decides what gets "fixed", once we do get the technology part down. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done at all, but it shouldn't be a matter of, "If we can, we should...".