Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

> The restaurant starts getting a lot of unusual phone calls... An employee asks the man if he is Paul Denino. He says yes, but then explains that the callers are pranking him. He is live-streaming through the camera on the stick, and some of the thousands of people watching are trying to fuck with him. The calls grow more disturbing... The restaurant manager asks Denino to leave. Almost immediately, the restaurant’s rating on Yelp begins to plummet. Dozens of one-star reviews flood the page within seconds.

It's hard for me to see things like Ice Poseidon's stream as media or entertainment, really. If this is a predictable consequence of streaming which restaurant he's going to, then Denino is basically just ruining someone's day (and possibly much more) because he thinks he'll make money off of it. Nor is this anywhere near the bottom of the pile. Trollstation has picked up jail time over three different 'pranks' - a bomb threat, a fake armed robbery, and a fake kidnapping. Which puts "fire in a crowded theater" to shame, honestly - waving a fake gun around specifically to frighten people isn't even something that gets considered in most free speech debates, and rightly so. (I shudder to think how that prank might have ended in the US.)

My favorite example, though, is still RossCreations. Whose idea of a prank was... taking down stopsigns. Just that, going to an intersection and taking away stopsigns so maybe some people would get in a car accident. He was apparently charged with felony grand theft (stop signs aren't cheap), but I'm a bit surprised no one threw in a public endangerment charge alongside it.

I guess I don't understand how we got here. I know people doing stupid stuff and misjudging pranks is nothing new, this isn't a "kids these days" complaint, but where did people get the idea that "it's for my channel" changes the ethics or legality of things they know will go wrong?

I never even heard of this guy until I was in a bar in Phoenix Arizona and listening to a flight attendant tell the story about how her plane was raided by SWAT armed response earlier that day, because of him. It looks like that was April 28 last year.

She was absolutely terrified and all of the passengers were asked to keep their window covers shut while armed personnel surrounded the plane and prepared to board from the rear entrance and take him out of there. It's a predictable consequence of him going places and streaming. He'll even say things like "I hope nobody figures out what plane I'm on and calls in a bomb threat" but honestly what actual law is being violated and by whom in this situation?

I mean I can personally see he knows he has antagonists and he is specifically egging them on, and he is profiting from it, but I don't know the specific actual law that he'd be breaking in this case, as much as I'd like for there to be one. Ruining dozens of peoples' day just isn't a violation of the law in and of itself.

Terrorism "conspiracy" charges can be pretty wide-ranging. It sounds like that incident alone would have incurred tens of thousands of dollars of costs for both law enforcement and the airline.

Actually, terrorism is really not a bad description of trolling, if hyperbolic. But these pranks seem to go beyond trolling, too.

Yes but how do you prosecute someone because a bomb threat was called in against them?

Which part of what he was doing should he not be doing? It was all external parties that caused the kerfuffle. He's obviously a successful broadcaster, and he's making money at it without himself breaking the law, so you can't tell him not to do that anymore. (That's a prior restraint, no?)

I agree that it's problematic and it's costing money, but if those trolls that called in the bomb threats cause his show to be closed, isn't that basically the end of free speech? The fraudulent reporting caller should be prosecuted, sure.

Anyone can call in a SWAT raid on anyone else. I myself haven't watched the show, so I don't know to what extent a conspiracy charge would stick, but ...

If I go somewhere and start a Live Vlog, and someone watching figures out where I am and manages to put the police onto my camera, "for the lulz," and that's the whole story, then why should my "broadcasting license" be revoked? Never mind no such license is required, just hypothetically.

If I remember correctly, he wasn't even streaming during the whole thing. The fans simply pieced it together by things like departure times and roughly where he's going etc.

A conspiracy requires that two or more people agree to commit a crime. How would this apply to Ice?

RossCreations also had a "prank" where he put a "Hit me with your bumper, I like it!" bumper sticker on a guy's truck, then followed him and intentionally ran into the back of him in his truck at a stop. Complete idiocy and he's lucky the guy just got out, looked at his bumper, and drove off.

His "sneaking hot dogs into people's pockets" is actually funny though, I'll give him that.

Isn't that assault with a deadly weapon when you intentionally hit someone with a vehicle?

It was a light tap, but maybe in the strictest reading of the law it could be. Honestly if he had gotten unlucky and did that to the wrong person he could have easily become a victim himself.

>> I know people doing stupid stuff and misjudging pranks is nothing new, this isn't a "kids these days" complaint, but where did people get the idea

Back in 2005 I was at school when a local radio station had a water drinking contest. A woman died. Just yesterday I was watching a video about how airliners don't really use hydrocarbon fuel (another global warming conspiracy). There are plenty of morons out there.

Someone, many very smart people, thought this was a good idea: https://miepvonsydow.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/uz3wiuk.png

(The cat is fine. It was a zero-g experiment. Didn't go so well for the human.)

>Back in 2005 I was at school when a local radio station had a water drinking contest. A woman died.

You're really oversimplifying this, the contest was to drink as much water without peeing so you could win a Nintendo Wii ("Don't pee for a wii"). If you don't pee you offset your body's electrolyte balance and can die. It's not reasonable to expect most people would know this, and the woman that died obviously did not.

It's totally reasonable to expect someone to know that not peeing for an extended amount of time is not healthy. It's common sense that most bodily functions happen for a reason, and stopping the function could be dangerous.

It's even more reasonable to expect that a business running a contest would do their due diligence in assessing the safety of their contestants.

> It's totally reasonable to expect someone to know that not peeing for an extended amount of time is not healthy.

'Not healthy' and 'cause immediate death' are vastly different.

Doesn't matter. Just knowing that something could be very harmful should give any business pause before including it in a contest. This business acted recklessly.

I don't think "it's my channel" changes the ethics or legality. It's just young men have been doing dumb shit for decades.

The only difference between then and now is they're filming it because filming technology is ubiquitous.

And they can get the dopamine hit of fame and thousands of likes

Meh, if anything, Denino's stream exposes how poor our systems are in general.

For example, how trivial it is to leverage our militarized police with a fake call. With no effort to vet the call, they'll happily drive over to your house and shoot your dog or ground the plane for five hours.

Or Yelp where anyone can organize to nuke the ratings of a single place. (Yelp and Steam, two examples I know of, have recently put systems in place to filter out mass 1-star spam)

You're barking up the wrong tree if you think this is a "people will do anything for views" problem. And the examples you cite of people getting criminally charged for stealing stop signs and brandishing arms sound like system successes. They don't seem relevant

It's like getting upset that people use CloudFlare instead of realizing how hilariously vulnerable our internet still is to things like IP address spoofing and the fact that your IoT toaster can be nuking a website without you, the owner, realizing it. I bet you'd notice if it showed up on your bill. Maybe you'd think twice about buying in to IoT devices next time (incentives are now aligned!).

Maybe it's time to ask why our systems are so vulnerable to abuse. Getting mad at abusers and their incentives isn't going to fix the problem because they will always exist.

To suggest otherwise is to suggest that our systems should depend on the Deninos of the world not existing, and that should give you a good, long chuckle.

Historically, human beings have kept people like these pranksters in check by heaping shame and guilt on them along with a punishment. This is just how all societies have always worked. Your attitude that shame and guilt don't work and that we should drop this strategy in favor of something else is what is concerning to me.

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