On an unrelated note, you highlight something I’ve been thinking about–how common is usage of the word “guys” as a generic, non-gendered colloquialism for a group of humans? Phrases like “Hey guys, check this out!” or “Can I help you guys?” is kind of ingrained in my speech pattern, but it has nothing to do with the actual gender of the people I’m addressing… still, there was one time, recently, where someone corrected me on it. Curious to hear others’ take on the matter.
Just gonna leave this here…
<img http://www.gratuitousscience.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Clippy-bastard.png>
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I thought the whole 2015 let’s-hate-on-April-Fool’s party was overblown before, but now I’m not so sure.
That’s just beautiful.
Even as a software developer who is very comfortable with CLI, I do quake in my boots just a little bit every time I use certain commands where I know a single wrong character could really fuck up my day. Or week.
Probably once a week, I’ll be doing something like deleting files within some deeply-nested folder, and have a moment of panic thinking “wait… rm -rf * can’t go up the directory tree, can it?”
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Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”
If the camera had gone BSOD once, and then been OK for the rest of the day, it would have been merely a (bad) joke.
Even then, it might have been a criminal act. This was intentional, and I am not sure how anyone can claim to have had the camera owner’s permission to do something like this. Somebody who tells you “This might crash”, and gives you code that is written to do this, is a liar and possible fraud.
In the UK, it comes under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, amended by the Police and Justice Act 2006, and the lawyers would argue about whether hidden code such as this was unauthorised. But it need not matter if the perpetrator was not in the UK. And it was certainly something that impaired access to data on a computer.
Though however much we might gloat about the prospect of seeing the coder banged up in the Scrubs, it is maybe a good thing this law seems to be so little used.
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They should have added laughing man to all the images http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughing_Man_(Ghost_in_the_Shell)#/media/File:Laughing_man_logo.png . That would have been hilarious.
I’ve worked in both software development and QA on one of the world’s largest software projects and I can certainly attest that the man-hour is a myth. But some things are just so mind numbingly boring that they don’t get done unless people are getting paid. You don’t see any open source feces-shovelling projects and you don’t see as much open source QA.
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As far as I can tell it was inserted not into the standard build but into a clearly-labeled-as-dangerously-unstable nightly, and the error message displayed isn’t what real ML errors look like which (along with 0xdeadbeef &etc.) I suspect they were hoping would tip off anyone who saw it.
Also, remember that ML is a temporary thing run from the memory card, just swap cards and boot without ML if ML is misbehaving; the very worst that could have done is spoil a shot by crashing immediately before attempting to shoot.
As for the people talking about “Alienating their audience”: From my experience, many of the ML contributors couldn’t give a fuck less if anyone uses what they make, and would almost rather the users not contributing go away. They’re sincerely just doing it for their own amusement, the usefulness is a pleasant side-effect; many of them participate in other fun reverse-engineering projects that are purely exploratory or only directly useful to a handful of highly-technical people.
It’s absolutely in poor taste, but I can’t read the criticism as anything but intentionally overblown, in the “offense-seeking behavior is exactly as bad as offensive behavior” sense. I think people are mostly mad because it points out all our tech is a house of cards that some people built for fun, then a swarm of connmen convinced everyone was ready to stake our lives on without developing any understanding or control over. Look how many computer folk have survivalist tendencies and refuse to use popular technologies - it’s because they know what a shitshow things are behind the curtain, and you can either laugh or cry at that fact.
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“Yous Guys” is perfectly normal and gender-neutral (to me at least). Drives my wife crazy. I blame it on my French-Canadian, East-coast (PEI, Canada) mother and ALL her relatives.
That!!!
In some states signing a EULA doesn’t mean you sign away your rights to sue…even if the EULA says so.
State law trumps the EULA…especially if the EULA was purposely concealing a malicious act.
I would suggest the owners of the ‘pranked’ cameras contact their state AG office.
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I don’t think you get it. Magic Lantern doesn’t have a EULA. It’s a custom firmware given away freely with the caveat of “if you install this of your own accord it’s your fault if you brick your camera.”
The AG isn’t going to do anything because nothing has been bought or sold. If you pick up a rock and hit yourself with it the AG isn’t going to care.
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However the intent of the code WAS to brick the camera.
There’s no amount of ‘not my fault’ that covers your ass there. Especially when it was pretending to be one thing and it did another thing that’s covered under cyber crime law. (IE: Intentionally causing damage)
Your analogy fails because YOU didn’t hit yourself with a rock…THEY hit you with a rock.
We have laws against that type of thing.
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Can you damage a ‘period of expected operation’?
Bricking the camera would be making it as useful as a brick. To the best of my knowledge, you cannot reset a brick (without a kiln or a volcano or something).
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Then why are they actively soliciting donations?
Hmmm… shouldn’t that be something like “Caveat teleonerator”?
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But they didn’t brick it. It only required a restart. Bricking means it’s damaged forever, it’s now a brick. This is the same as the firmware crashing and required a restart. Their camera can be reset to standard firmware with zero damage or loss of usability.
Again, it’s a shady hobby, it’s why I don’t bother mucking about with ML, but laws don’t allow you to claim damages when you jailbreak something in a way never intended by the manufacturer. Custom firmware by strangers on the internet is about as caveat emptor as you’re ever going to get. It’s like claiming damages from when you installed a virus on your machine by running some .exe you torrented thinking it was a keygen.
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Because everyone wants to make money on the internet from dunderheads?
Except his bad-roll-of-the-dice (since the “joke” was not one-and-done) had him get the same BSOD after 4 or 5 reboots. Closer to “bricking” than “witty joke.”
I’m pissed off over this because it paints all OS developers with the asshole-brush.
Again, using the manufacturer-supplied firmware would have fixed his issue. Not bricked.
I’m willing to bet they lost at least one user over this. Not that they are going to care.
