I'm sure I when I first read this story, I thought it was hilarious. But since then, I've gained at least little bit of empathy. Think of this story from the perspective of the other people. Woz is being a total piece of shit, wasting their time being intentionally as suspicious as possible, just to waste their time and then pull off a "a-ha, this is actually some really obscure legal tender that I as a rich guy can afford to spend to have a cool story to tell about showing up a casino security guy".
I agree with the GP that this kind of thing should be celebrated on HN and we should encourage the next generation to continue hacking.
While people did debate the ethics of it, the hacking was admired because it was someone not in a position of power hacking an entity that was. It also illuminated a massive security risk which could now be fixed.
Something that drastically limits and can be used to oppress people like a nation-wide travel restriction should be public and require due cause. Not a mystical list where one day you realize "wow guess my life is fucked"
Now, Woz was obviously an amazing hacker back in the day and has a reputation of being a good person. So one would imagine there are stories that show him being really clever that are, you know, actually clever rather than just showing off an information asymmetry about trivia (re: these sheets of $2 bills). Where the punchline is something wholesome, rather than him humiliating strangers who have done literally nothing wrong.
Seems to be an opportunity if good faith predicts that they won't do him any serious wrong.
> But I had got a big point on him and I was quite satisfied in that
Like, I can sort of understand the humor value of giving away $2 bills as a tip since they're rare and some people don't know about it. But there is literally no value in baiting people as to whether this is legit money or counterfeit, except for Woz to feel superior to them. And it's not an isolated occurence! He clearly does this all the time, so often that he has multiple variants of the script.
This is not a story to celebrate. It is not challenging the status quo, it is not rebelling against authority, it is not a smart hack, or whatever y'all are describing it as. It is an ugly story of a man with a lot of wealth punching down, playing games using the little people as a prop purely for his own amusement, repeatedly, and then bragging about it.
The nasty act here, and possibly criminal, was the security guy calling the Secret Service and reporting on someone he knew wasn't actually guilty of anything.
> It is an ugly story ...
Of tedious security people inflating themselves by bothering normal people.
> it's not an isolated occurence! He clearly does this all the time
Thankfully, if these people go unchallenged then when they go off it's on a random unsuspecting person. He's prepared and can take it in stride.
The mistake was to engage with the SS agent without his lawyer. He pretty clearly wouldn't have been arrested but because he essentially volunteered for this fishing expedition they'll perform it.
Yes, trying to hurt somebody's ego would indeed be a pretty good example of humiliating them.
Look, if you think that the bound booklet of $2 bills is a fun gag, there's a humane and lighthearted way to do it. You use the bills as described, but if somebody seems even a bit uncomfortable with them you volunteer an explanation for what's going on. That way they actually have a cool story to tell. And the joke's on you, not them.
But that is not what Woz did. He intentionally made himself as suspicious as possible, in multiple ways, just to try to force people to investigate. It was all about showing his superiority over this sad loser working a 10-hour shift in a suit, who thought he knew a thing or two about counterfeit money. Well, he wasn't all that, and Woz sure showed him who the smartest guy in the room was.
> Thankfully, if these people go unchallenged then when they go off it's on a random unsuspecting person. He's prepared and can take it in stride.
No unsuspecting person would have this interaction in the first place. They would not have gone through the trouble of arranging for legit money to look counterfeit. That is not what normal people do. They would not have a script to follow to string people along, and carefully consider just what the optimal level of dodgy behavior would be. They would not waste others' time for their own amusement. Because that's not what people with even a pinch of empathy would do.
Put yourself into some work situation. I don't know, maybe you're a engineer given this is HN. And you get this bug report from a customer. It's really well written, has a screenshot showing the issue, and includes reproduction steps. You try to reproduce it, and can't. So you ask some questions from a customer, iterate a few times, add some logging statements and ask them to reproduce the problem. etc. And then finally the customer smugly says that there never was a bug. They photoshopped the screenshot, and made everything up. If you'd actually known how this program works, you'd have known that this bug could never exist. It's a hilarious gag, what a prankster! And you were paid for this work, no harm done, right?
No. Fuck that. I would be furious at having my time wasted like that. And this is what Woz did. Not just once, but probably dozens of times. That's just outright sociopathic behavior, and I cannot believe how many people here are defending it just because he is a member of your tribe.
If someone's ego is tweaked when they find they're wrong then perhaps that's a helpful thing to do.
> Look, if you think that the bound booklet of $2 bills is a fun gag, there's a humane and lighthearted way to do it. ... if somebody seems even a bit uncomfortable
They're for tips. If someone is uncomfortable they don't have to take them.
> It was all about showing his superiority over this sad loser working a 10-hour shift in a suit, who thought he knew a thing or two about counterfeit money. Well, he wasn't all that, and Woz sure showed him who the smartest guy in the room was.
That guy had already tested the bills and knew they were legit. If he was honestly curious how Woz got the bills he could have just asked. Instead he decided to fish around for anything he could try to rat out an innocent person for.
> No unsuspecting person would have this interaction in the first place.
But their cases would be identical from the PoV of the security guy. Some thing would "seem off" and the employee would follow them around or harass them over some legit thing that he didn't like and maybe even call the police about it.
If they think that some customers are playing games they might be a bit more on their toes and think about what they're doing, so as to not be caught in a prank. That will have a good impact on innocent people they interact with.
> [Scenario with fake bug report] then finally the customer smugly says that there never was a bug. ... made everything up. ... It's a hilarious gag, what a prankster!
That's nothing like this scenario. To try to correct it, Woz was happily using their app on his phone when an employee noticed what looked like an error. They stopped him and called him a hacker, tried to trick him into admissions, and when they finally reported and tracked down what he was doing it was just hitting back at the right time to avoid an interstitial, or whatever. The joke is that he was trying to say "it's fine" the whole time and everyone assumes he's a hacker so nobody listens, finally ending up with egg on their face when they wasted their own time.
> And you were paid for this work, no harm done, right?
Well, some to the company. I assume they'd say "maybe in the future, don't go wasting time pestering customers for something that we already knew didn't impact us." It's a teaching moment. It could save them from a lawsuit in the future if that guard thought he had the right to detain people.
> No. Fuck that. I would be furious at having my time wasted like that. And this is what Woz did. Not just once, but probably dozens of times. That's just outright sociopathic behavior,
You're overreacting. This is a perfect example of someone I'd feel needed to be pranked, because it sounds like you're ready to snap on anyone you think is mocking you and you're vastly more likely to do it to someone innocent than either a criminal or a prankster.
When it's the Secret Service, that's not "normal people", and their job is to figuratively or literally stomp anyone who doesn't sufficiently respect the immensely powerful people they insulate. Portraying them as regular Joe victim here is nonsense.
You know who's really wasting peoples time? Secret Service and a casino security guard because he tipped with legal tender that they haven't seen before, so they think he's some counterfeiter or something.
I'd fuck with authority who was too stupid to realize that $2 bills are very much legal tender.
Standard caveat of being a middle class white dude makes this easier.
Don't try to be too curious then, or you will be prosecuted.
I used to ride fast motorcycles. I know people who ran from the police for fun. Better camera tech in recent years means nobody gets away with that anymore. And when caught, your life grinds to a hault.
They key concept here is 'trickery', and how 'tricked' someone is on a spectrum. Society trusts our authorities to give their best efforts to keep our daily actions within the realm of 'the law'.
There is a spectrum of what one considers a 'joke'. If you tell an authority a dad joke, when they ask you a serious question, that is a fine place on the spectrum to joke with authorities. If you are giving them fake IDs to _trick_ them (and thus, trick society at large, who have delegated power to the authorities by vote etc...), that is not a good thing, to trick others you are living with, at the far end of the 'joke/trickery' spectrum.
Probably because the number of instances of people with real bombs has gone up. It’s not a joke any more because the real bomb isn’t the exception.
Can we stop being so obtuse and only look at the letter of the law and think about the actual practical real-life consequence as a measure of severity? This was a joke, and no harm was done.
Are you really advocating for a felony offence here?
This is the same line of thinking, just reversed, that people use to say "well it's not illegal" when someone does something super shitty that actually has awful consequences.
You can argue that 'well it was a joke!!' but if you were to joke around to your nearest FBI officer about how you have a bomb in your home and you're going to use it I imagine they wouldn't find it very funny.
Agreed! Joking about a bomb is a much more serious and very different situation than showing a joke ID (when you probably have your real ID in your pocket).
In your scenario, would you actually be ok or understanding if the "angry officer" made an example of you for this harmless joke? Or would you maybe protest that it was a bit disproportionate or unnecessary?
And finally, hearing people say "jokes are dangerous" in a serious manner makes me very sad for our society. The level of unconscious mass conformism seems to be growing fast, and historically that never leads to good outcomes.
Is there an ‘unless you’re Woz and it might be funny’ exception to that rule?
The fact is there is, and always has been, a ‘wealthy white guy’ exception to that rule and these kinds of shenanigans just draw attention to it.
A healthy society both has rule following and rule challenging. Sometimes there’s too much rule following, sometimes there’s too much chaos, and then things balance themselves out ideally.
If anyone says only one side is the right one, they are ideologically captured. It’s like saying only left or right is the right way to govern a country. It’s both and neither. We need this conflict within society to arrive at healthy decisions.
Get rid of one side at your peril.
Because police rely on technology committing a crime without your cellphone means you most likely will not get caught. We live in an age where wearing masks is acceptable. Where people let you steal from stores and where crime is ignored unless it's on twitter.
You can get away with so much more today.
Depends if you have something to lose. I suspect a lot of readers here are in the middle ground, where their net present value (including career/family/political/etc opportunities) is not high enough where they can afford to shield themselves without big sacrifices. But it is also not low enough to worth risking losing it all.
For example, they might be able to afford a house in a nice school district, daycare, saving for retirement, paying for healthcare, and taking care of elderly parents, but a job loss from one spouse could easily derail this train, and certainly legal expenses would.
This 'time machine' feature of ubiquitous surveillance is going to be a brave new world.
Well ngl, you sound like you could use less time on the internet yourself. This statement is just preposterous unless you spend hours of your life every day obsessing over twitter drama.
Amusing story tho.
No idea what kind of high profile business owners you know, but in my circle in Belgium, most are small business owners. In my experience, employees like to follow rules, business owners like to push their boundaries.
I agree that what you are talking about applies to scrappy startup types, the same people that eventually stop breaking the rules once they have enough power not to need to.
Please tell me you see that. Or at least, are not personally ultrawealthy yourself.
Right now you’d have to be worried they draw a gun and shoot you, or arrest you and jail you for life. Zero tolerance!
Maybe it's good if the industry has ceased having such a teenagery view of things. The article won't load for me, but it seems there was no meaningful protest against some illicit government abuse of authority here. Dude was just printing and using fake IDs because he could.
As a millennial who used to be much more simpatico with your way of thinking, I would say I've become very against it because it is exactly the sort of attitude that I have seen lead people to Trumpsim, anti-vaxxing, etc. It's just irresponsible and arrogant to think that authority/government = bad and that any sort of finger to the man is intrinsically worth celebrating.
People are frothing to frame this story with 2023 glasses and, to me, this reaction makes it all the more clear how today’s culture is so corrosive. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s not about privilege of rich white men. Maybe it’s about the rigid conformism that the tech industry has imbued in its people in this past decade. The screams of people glued to Anki preparing for leetcode interviews, not understanding why someone would dare challenge the status quo. Regardless, it’s a sign of the times.