I, as an engineer and a programmer can understand why people hack. An engineer asks ‘can it be done’, and probably before they have finished another engineer is asking ‘can we break it?’. I remember back in about 1985 my company getting a computer phone exchange which could allow you to forward calls from phone A to phone B. Within 5 minutes we had found you could not forward calls from phone A to Phone B, and from phone B back to phone A. Within five minutes we found you could forward calls between three phones in a loop, and there was no way to undo this other than to reboot the exchange. There was no real malice in this - just an itch to see what happens. It takes a different sort of person to want to do this to get money or do harm.
Printers have a similar itch. They want to know how well they can copy a banknote. They work on it in their spare time. As they get good at it, they think of new ways to do it better. In the end they try passing some of these notes in shops to see whether other people are fooled. They are not trying to make money - probably the notes cost more to make then their apparent worth. Professional forgers are a different breed.
It would be nice to believe some of these people are just innocent hackers in human behaviour. This guy might have been…
Somehow, I feel the guy in this story is doing it, not because he wants to know if it can be done, but because he wants the result. He’s like the professional hacker, or the professional forger. No, I have no rational basis for this feeling, but there you go.
Ugh. Dunno what you mean by “innocent” in this case. When #gamergate swatters turn out to be adolescent boys out for the lulz, does that make them “innocent”?
It seems to me that literacy itself is evolving. We learned to use the printing press and ever since words on a page have an authority that rumors on the street somehow dont. And then suddenly not so much. With your example, the syntax involved uniforms. In The Diamond Age, theres a bit where chinese calligraphy carries the essential aurhority.
Fot the world to funcrion at all, there muat be trustworthy signals. But when its simply that they’ve never been questioned that makes them trustworthy, I think its time for a fire drill.
The ones based evidence! That’s why a culture of “trusted roles” always degenerates into BS. So long as people assume that their place in society matters, they try to game any such system of organization. It is a different kind of incentive for people to know that what is actually happening is more significant and valuable than whatever one’s biases appear to be.
And who don’t, in general have the privilege to be anti-authoritarian, and thus have been well trained to follow orders and jump through degrading hoops to get anything.
This may raise controversy, but I actually class scum like this in the same class as rapists: getting off on the outright humiliation and control of another human being.
No, I completely agree; someone capable of doing this is probably capable of rape, because he (I’m guessing it’s a he) gets off on having power over and humiliating women.
I wouldn’t put it down to greed on the victims part - we have no idea how convincing the prankster sounded, what sort of questions the victims asked of the prankster. Also, in these times where many struggle to get by, the thought of 3000 pounds for doing something silly probably sounds good. I’m not saying you or I would fall for it, but a large enough portion of the population would that it couldn’t be considered a personality flaw.
See also ‘Bavarian Fire Drill’ - and half of Derren Brown’s entire schtick.
There are a well known set of psychological ‘glitches’ implicit in our brain-wiring and learned socialisation.
But yes, humiliation of the desperate and bottom of the social order (customers and shop staff, both) and playing on their need for money, and need to remain employed, respectively is just evil. You want to play head games? Go try it on someone with actual authority, who can actually punch you back. Otherwise you’re just punching down on the desperate.
As per @Enkita and @MalevolentPixy, I truly hope the bastard gets caught, and charged with something creative.
