How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code • Hacker News Board

Re: How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code

#111

Post by sokoloff » Tue, Apr 14, 2009, 12:32 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #97

sokoloff wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be clear here. Weev didn't censor Amazon listings. If what Weev claims is true, the most you can say is that he helped trick Amazon into choosing, via automated means, to censor those titles. But ultimately, it was Amazon who took the action to remove the listings. (Unnecessary disclaimer: I'm a huge fan of Amazon, and hardly a week goes by that I don't buy something or other from them.)

Your logic simply doesn't hold. If some guy repaints highway signs to cause a car crash, then, if anyone dies, he should be up for murder, not the driver. The guilty party is the vandal in both cases, not the driver or the computer operator.

I'm going to take one last stab at this, and then let it go:

But he didn't repaint the signs. At worst, he convinced a few other people to call up the DOT and say "That stop sign shouldn't be there, please change it to a 55 MPH speed limit sign." If the DOT then goes and changes the signs without appropriately verifying, then it's on them...

I realize as programmers that we might think Weev's (purported) actions are directly responsible for the de-listing, but they aren't. It's ultimately Amazon's code that did the de-listing.

Re: How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code

#112

Post by tjic » Tue, Apr 14, 2009, 1:16 PM UTC

sho wrote: post #65

tjic wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well then, unless your actual name is "tjic" then we are both criminals right off the bat. Under US law, there is no such thing as a sole "actual" name. Any name that you use for non-fraudulent purposes is a legitimate name. TJIC is my initials: Travis James Ignatius Corcoran. I have been using it as a legitimate name for 15 years. My mom addresses emails and letters to me using that name. So, no, I'm not a crimina…

Cool name! : ) "but if someone signed up for an account at Amazon using 500 different names, and one of them was "TJIC", and the intent was to inject bad data ... yes, that person would be a criminal." No way. Guaranteeing the integrity of Amazon's Customer Review data is not the job of the state. Guaranteeing the legitimacy of the name(s) used to sign up for accounts is not the job of the state. Assessing the state…

> No way. Guaranteeing the integrity of Amazon's Customer Review data is not the job of the state

According to many theories, much of the point of the state is to lower transaction costs.

That's why states get involved in things like creating default rental agreements, setting up standards of weight and measure, inspecting pumps at gas stations, stamping out ponzi schemes, running courts to enforce slander laws (even when the target is a corporation), etc.

I'm a pretty extreme libertarian. I'd like 99% of the government to go away. Maybe more.

...but I'm going to assume that we're holding this debate in the real world, not in a science-fictional Heinlein-esque anarcho-capitalist moon colony. ...and if that's the case, then 99.9% of people think the job of the state DOES include stopping people from intentionally gumming up third party transactions.

Re: How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code

#113

Post by gojomo » Tue, Apr 14, 2009, 5:29 PM UTC

tdavis wrote: post #108

cduan wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we are forgetting that Amazon is a victim as well. If Amazon is unable to seek punishment against malicious users of its site, it is forced to spend its time and money patching security holes and preventing future attacks, in addition to repairing lost good will from customers and authors. It always surprises me how quick people are to jump to the conclusion that the website operator is at fault for these sor…

Even if one could accept that Amazon cannot possibly plug all vulnerabilities and should not be expected to do so against all attacks, we're still left with the obvious mistake of implicitly entrusting their users with the ability to -- automatically and without proper vetting -- alter whether or not certain items display on certain areas of their site. This fact, given automation via a bug or not, means that the tac…

But what if trusting users works 363 days a year -- it helps users find and buy more books, it makes authors and Amazon more money. Every once in a while, it causes an embarassing screwup that can be reversed in 1-3 days.

Is having that system in place a mistake? What if the alternative system, that never has a 2-day-screwup, also means fewer lehappy customers and less-profitable operations the other 363 days?