

The Next Wave – A Conversation With John Markoff - ethana
http://edge.org/conversation/john_markoff-the-next-wave

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lloydde
Anytime I see John Markoff's name, I think of the ethical issues in Kevin
Mitnick capture, case and book. Has that air been cleared? Time for me also to
move on as Mr Markoff work since then has cleared that shadow?

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kyledrake
John Markoff exploited his privilege as a New York Times tech reporter and the
general public's ignorance of computer hacking for personal gain, creating the
infrastructure that tortured another human being for what ended up being not
much more than e-graffiti tagging, trolling a few people, and having access to
code that ended up being open sourced anyways.

He laid the framework for the ridiculous idea that Kevin Mitnick could "launch
nuclear missiles by whistling into a phone", and as a result Kevin was thrown
into solitary confinement for 8 months, and then after that he spent the
remainder of 5 years in a prison cell without being given the due process of a
fair trial:

`Mitnick served five years in prison—four and a half years pre-trial and eight
months in solitary confinement—because, according to Mitnick, law enforcement
officials convinced a judge that he had the ability to "start a nuclear war by
whistling into a pay phone"`

As this process unfolded, John Markoff did nothing to attempt to correct for
the consequences of his actions, unpollute the public's understanding of
hackers, apologize, or do anything. Instead, he continued to defend what he
had wrote, knowing full-well that it was completely false information, and
signed a book deal that ended up further polluting the public's knowledge of
the situation (and being a terrible book, 2.5 stars on Amazon and I'm amazed
it's even that high).

The shadow is still very much there, and it will continue to stain
journalistic ethics for many years to come.

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nightski
It's interesting how we have written off all of computing's current problems
as solved and are seeking the next big thing. I'd hardly say the world's
information is organized, universally accessible, and useful. In fact, while
the Search Engine concept has served us well, I really hope it is not the last
word on making information accessible and useful. There is so much room for
innovation here it is sad, really.

Computing leaves so much to be desired.

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Udo
Riding waves is a good analogy for what's going on with Markoff and similar
people. They take the ideas that came out of transhumanism and cyberpunk
futurism, and resell them as their own work.

On the one hand it's probably a net-positive that these concepts remain a part
of public discourse, but on the other hand it's a bit painful to watch these
self-referential imposters get rich and famous for re-packaging ideas mined
from subcultures, passing them off as revolutionary concepts they came up with
on their own.

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earljwagner
I disagree that we're underestimating the time to automate human tasks with
robots. Speaking of the failures of humanoid robots at the recent DARPA
robotics challenge, he notes "We're at that stage, where our expectations have
outrun the reality of the technology."

Sure the robots were awkward and performed poorly. The situation was much the
same at DARPA's autonomous vehicle grand challenge in 2004 that he mentions.
Then, none of the robots finished the 150 mile course. CMU's vehicle traveled
the farthest, 7 miles. Now Google and others are pretty far along with self-
driving cars.

