Ticketmaster admits it hacked Songkick before it went out of business
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,[15] carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release.
Perhaps some exceptions for people who could not be expected to understand the law, for example an untrained retail staff being tricked in to violating laws usually only understood by management or legal teams.
It's their job to know. Only if they are a victim of a genuine criminal conspiracy performed by other employees and it can be shown without the CEO's knowledge should there be any defence.
CEO's are quite happy to tell people to do things without telling them to do the thing. That has been going on for centuries. Shakespeare wrote whole plays about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
Any level of management with a direct responsibility is where blame should lie.
If the organization is so big that the CEO believes that, it shouldn't matter. They should be ultimately responsible for the entire organization. No one forced the company to be that big and no one made them take the job.
Funny then how the CEO is the right level to take that high pay, which is generally defended as compensation for the ultimate responsibility.
Either the CEO is responsible for what happens under his reign, or he isn't. If he is, why shouldn't he shoulder the blame for the bad parts; if he isn't, why should he be paid for the good parts?
It strains plausibility they didn't know, they're just punting to a time they aren't under oath.
Anti trust hearings of 4 tech companies at once... ridiculous... All 4 of you have a monopoly on... something!
Bullshit politics. You aren’t being forced to use ANY services from big tech in the US there is HEAPS of competition. Just US lawmakers shoring up constituents
It follows from VC efforts that market dominance produces massive profits. That money comes from somewhere. Anti-trust enforcement is way too weak in the US. Congress's motives in going after the tech companies is decidedly mixed, but given decades of laxity, I'll take it as a good start.
I've seen it happen, or what probably was retaliation, but how do I know for sure? They said the person wasn't competent or doing their job when they got fired. I don't know for sure if that was true, but I do know they reported significant theft that would likely have involved someone higher up, and not long afterwards he was fired.
I find it obvious that such retaliation happens, otherwise it would be strange to have such laws.
The US is left leaning compared to the majority of all nations.
Besides that, the US is far more progressive than eg Europe in many respects (and that's ignoring parts of Europe still ruled by actual fascism and dictatorship, countries where it's perfectly legal to beat your wife if you so choose and being gay is practically a crime). In the majority of Europe gay marriage is still illegal. How much more regressive and backwards can you get? The US is at least a decade ahead of Europe when it comes to gay rights and identity / gender matters.
In Denmark they're committing vast human rights violations against minority Muslims while the world looks the other way. Is that left by US standards? I don't see the US forcing cultural eradication upon Muslims or taking their children away from them and indoctrinating them with nationalistic propaganda.
Across Western Europe de facto Neo Nazi parties hold immense political power.
In France Macron has practically declared open cultural war against Muslims.
Formerly open immigration nations like Sweden have become hyper xenophobic and have locked down access. Neo Nazism is rampant in Germany and so is xenophobia. Meanwhile the US is one of the few affluent nations on the planet that still welcomes the poor and the non-skilled, you don't need to be rich or successful to immigrate into the US (and that's before Biden's Presidency begins, in which the Democrats will dramatically liberalize immigration).
Progressiveness is vanishing from Europe, while the US is becoming more progressive by the decade. So where are all these nations around the world that are a lot further left than the US? There are maybe a dozen, tops.
The US now spends more on its welfare state as a share of its economy than either Canada or Australia. In the next 10-15 years it'll catch up to Britain on that point.
The US is also progressing much faster on drug decriminalization and legalization than Europe is. And half of Europe is guaranteed to remain backwards, regressive, on all of the previously mentioned items.
By design. The corporate structure of plausible deniability protects executives, and ultimately shareholders, when lower level actors are subtly "encouraged" to commit criminal behavior which advantages the company — and then cut loose if they get caught.
The incentives provide a strong force ensuring corporate criminality in the aggregate which completely overwhelms the weak force discouraging it at the individual level.
That person would often be paid minimum wage, have at best a high school education and so on. That may not exactly be fair in all cases.
If a superior gives you an order that violates set rules or laws (e.g shoot civilians). You HAVE to obey and BOTH parties will be accountable.
It's crazy how severity of ignoring an order can be worse than tribunal. However I totally agree with accountability.
Though corps would figure out a way to weasel past this regardless.
Senators make millions on insider relief package info? Who cares. You challenge the powerful by revealing embarrassing secrets? Enemy of the state, you're gonna lose everything or at the very least many years of your life in legal limbo.
The power balance in many cases could be the real issue, everyday people just need to (somehow) get way more empowered.
The power of individuals with the right idea to change the world (often running circles around the 'powerful') is the foundation of the technology behind most people's jobs here. How do some people can work in the IT industry and promulgate the parent's fatalistic outlook? Internet Explorer would be the dominant browser, Windows the only operating system, and we'd be discussing it in an MSN forum.
If people believed in this outlook, there was would be no democracy, human rights, and rule of law (in countries around the world), everything would be corrupt and would be the same everywhere, women and minorities would have made no progress, etc. To say it has no effect and nobody cares is edgy and cool these days, but obviously wrong. If your predecessors believed that, I can't imagine how our lives would be now.
The fact is that individuals and groups of individuals, if they act, can and do change the world - and change their communities. Ask any leader; the problem is not lack of power but lack of action. Corruption will fall or not based on you, personally, on what you do. Look at what prior generations did for us; what are you doing for the people who follow us?
I don't think this unbalance is baked into humanity, I 100% agree people collectively taking a stand (unions, mass actually effective protests, etc) would lead to far better systems.
We generally do not punish corporations harshly for criminal wrongdoing because (1) punishing the corporation mostly harms the shareholders, who aren't responsible because they only have indirect control over the corporation, and (2) the individual employees who commit crimes face criminal prosecution and punishment.
[Edit]
I regret that my comment was taken as one endorsing corporations or their shareholders profiting from crimes. That was not my intent.
That's crime-laundering. Whether it should be punished by criminal prosecution is dubious, but whether it should be punished by investors losing money is not. Otherwise the system manifests a perverse incentive to invest in corporations which commit crimes.
Then again, facilitating criminality by the investor class is the whole point, isn't it?
1) it’s rare, if ever, that a CEO, CFO or COO faces jail time for crimes the company committed that are similar or worse compared to jail-able offenses by individuals. So your second point doesn’t really happen in practice.
2) shareholders SHOULD be punished for the actions of the company. If my dog maims you because of my negligence to control it, I’m liable. If a corporation knowingly commits crimes, then the CEO (and everyone in the chain down to whoever performed the criminal action) is a criminal, and the board and the shareholders should be liable for not exercising proper control and guidance. When you own something you also take on responsibility for that object. Stocks are no different.
It happened in this case. From the article, "Zeeshan Zaidi, the former head of Ticketmaster’s artist services division, pled guilty in a related case to conspiring to hack the rival company..." Anyone else who conspired with him could be charged with the crimes.
> shareholders SHOULD be punished for the actions of the company.
The entire purpose of the corporate entity is so that investors can share in the ownership of a business that they do not manage without risking personal liability. Shareholders can completely lose their investment because of liabilities of the corporation, but they usually don't face personal liability.
Advantaging criminality to this degree is a choice. Our economic institutions did not have to be designed in such a way that criminality is rewarded so highly. We could architect them differently — but then it would be harder for a small number of people to make a great deal of money ripping off the rest of us.
There is no advantage to criminality. It is a general rule of law that no one should be able to profit from his crimes. That rule applies to corporations as well as individuals and there are many ways to hold corporations and their managers and employees accountable (civil and criminal liability are two of them).
My point was that passive investors shouldn't be criminally liable for criminal actions of employees of the corporation that they knew nothing about.
Executives involved in crimes can face personal liability for those crimes. The corporation can also be wiped out and the shareholders can lose their investments.
Shareholders lose their investment
Investors that didn't invest in the criminal corporation get to buy the assets for pennies on the dollar.
Perfect harmony.
Then why should shareholders get the profits from the work they don't comtrol?
> the individual employees who commit crimes face criminal prosecution and punishment.
Do they?
Because they invested money into the corporation when the corporation issued stock.
It seems like you're arguing that shareholders should reap rewards for actions that a company takes but be shielded from negative financial repercussions that result from criminal actions it takes.
This creates a moral hazard similar to to the "too big to fail" situation of banks. It incentivizes risky and potentially criminal behavior because ownership is able to capture the value of any upside and is shielded from the downsides of the behavior.
I agree. That is part of the risk investors take.
> I regret that my comment was taken as one endorsing corporations or their shareholders profiting from crimes. That was not my intent.
Regardless of whether your intent was angelic, devilish, or neither, rampant corporate criminality (such as TicketMaster's) is the obvious consequence of building a system according to principles that advantage criminality so baldly.
As I wrote elsewhere, there is no advantage to criminality because there are many ways that a corporation can be brought to justice.
TicketMaster is not an outlier — corporate impunity is the rule, not the exception. The incentives you advocate have proven utterly inadequate to ensure either "justice" (for those who care about justice) or economic efficiency arising from legitimate competition.
Shareholders are responsible, albeit indirectly, for the corporation they've invested in. If shareholders have a reasonable chance of signfiicant loss of value, then they're more likely to require the company take steps to mitigate that (i.e don't do shady stuff).
As for prosecution of employees for crimes - that, too, is often rarely done, or focuses on the wrong people. Plenty of cases where it was the whistleblower, or someone who was raising red flags that gets the harsher penalty, rather than management who deliberately ignored it and has better paid lawyers to go for some light-weight bs
But, in terms of environmental crimes as discussed in these comments, the reason corporation dump toxic waste in the river is to avoid the clean-up cost - it's an economic crime.
So in that case, it's an appropriate solution to fine a large multiple of the total clean-up cost plus damages. The point is to not make it an affordable option, no matter how rich you are.
Separately, fines which rise in proportional to wealth can work in a progressive way, e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8446545.stm
Stealing is also an economic crime then, as they are stealing it because they cannot financially afford it and no one should go to jail but only pay a fine.
Of course not, the reason might be economic but the crime is against much more than the economy and the punishment should be even greater still. Fines do not even register.
I completely agree?
The only thing the sufficiently rich can't call-and-raise you on is time. Fictional sums of money, sums that may be less than likely to ever really be paid, are more easily reckoned with than jail time.
Suffering based punishments hurt everyone equally, they don’t waste a person’s time they could be contributing something positive to the world and can be scaled to fit the crime. One hell of a deterrent too.
Because, candidly, the poor aren't dumping toxic waste in factory quantities.
Psychology says no.
Things that would be absolutely miserable but I would do.
* Physical exertion like having to run suicides.
* Being forced to stand in an uncomfortable position hours.
* Being belted/caned/shocked so many times.
* Forced labor.
In the US, especially during this new gilded age, I'd probably change that to be a percentage of total wealth or a percentage of annual income, whichever is larger.
The prosecutors had offered Aaron 6 months, he could’ve got less.
The prosecutors office was working to pile on even more charges for a theoretical max of 50 years. The offer was a plea deal which the prosecutor thought was an appropriate sentence yet she hounded him with as many charges as possible anyway guaranteeing him years in jail if he did not accept and waive the constitutional rights he'd have during a trial. He declined and his counter offer was rejected.
This illustrates how it is a legal fiction that plea bargaining is a voluntary negotiation between the prosecutor and defendant
Why? What does she get out of it? I honestly do not understand. It is one thing pile charges on a violent murderer - not that it makes it right, at least it is debatable. Why would she think decades in jail makes sense in this case?
I honestly do not understand. How do these people sleep at night?
The theoretical maximum is utterly irrelevant.
> guaranteeing him years in jail if he did not accept
So you acknowledge that he definitely did violate the law, no? Sounds like the prosecutor was very generous with their plea deal offers.
“According to Swartz’s lawyers, the prosecutors in the case offered two different pleas. First, they would agree to a sentence of four months if Swartz agreed to plead guilty to the felonies. And second, they could agree to a deal in which Swartz agreed to plead guilty, the government would argue for a 6 month sentence, and Swartz could argue for a lesser sentence (presumably including probation). In all likelihood, the judge would have then sentenced Swartz to 4 months under the 1st plea and whatever the judge thought appropriate, up to 6 months, under the second plea.”
If the proper fitting punishment for his crime was 4 months or 6 months or what have you like that should be the kind of punishment that's on the table and expected during a fair trial. Not something that's achieved outside of court trough deals. Looking from the outside in from a western European country it's hard to see why this is such ingrained concept in the US.
You could walk into a liquor store - pistol whip a clerk then rob the joint and do less time. AND at least if you pistol whip a clerk you get parole. You wont get federal parole if you try to guess a computer password [1].
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/is-federal-parole-sy...
"The charges against Ticketmaster come 26 months after Zeeshan Zaidi, the former head of Ticketmaster’s artist services division, pled guilty in a related case to conspiring to hack the rival company and engage in wired fraud."
[1] 2 years of net profits? 50% of gross revenue? IDK. It has to be meaningful amount to truly deter criminal acts.
I am not saying that our system doesn't work. It just feels that there is so much left to do.
Live Nation is worth $16 Billion. This is like a person with a $100k net worth having to pay a $62 fine, basically an expensive parking ticket.
They might as well tell them to write "I will not hack my competitors" on the blackboard 100 times.
Match Group owns Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, Hinge, and PlentyOfFish as well as a metric fuck ton of niche sites.
> The Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Commission was set up on 1 January 1949
was for, now the Competition Commission. How well that works is debatable.
The entire point of capitalism is to acquire as much capital as possible, not to be the best at what you do. It's not a meritocracy. The best idea doesn't win - the best FUNDED idea wins, which means whichever dumb idea that benefits the rich the most is what you're going to get.
And if the rich people who own Match.com decide that buying up every competitor and rolling them into their platform is what's going to make them the most money, that's what they are going to do.
Don't view it as a flaw of capitalism that needs to be fixed, think of it as a feature of capitalism that necessitates a conversation about alternatives.
How about this: Improving what is there IS an alternative, and one that must be seriously considered.
LYV had $2.6b on hand last quarter.
There's prior art, this is what the IRS makes folks who are attempting to renounce their citizenship (or give up a green card held for over 8 years) do for illiquid assets when paying the expatriation tax.
"Uh, no Judge, I don't think I should be forced to go to prison, that's hard"
[edit] Maybe this is controversial, I dunno, I might just be old fashioned that way, but my opinion is if you find the punishment too onerous maybe don't do crime.
If people/organizations are committing a crime, then one reason may be that the punishment/deterrent is too lax.
(There's of course other reasons, like the law making the act a crime is bad in some way, or the individual/organization has no, or knows of no, alternative.)
The agreement might state what Ticketmaster must do or refrain from doing after the effective date to avoid being prosecuted in the future. Paying a fine might be only one part of the agreement.
One can only make assumptions about what the court might have found regarding the CFAA claim. The fact is, it did not get the opportunity.
The other side of the coin is quite damaging to our society as well - a defendant being judgement proof (having nothing to penalize or fine) can deprive claimants of funds needed to repair the damage of the crime - this, again, is a case where the government awarding funds and then regaining those funds from the defendant independently would be quite beneficial.
Debt is ahead of stock. The stock is now “worth” a few billion. No new stock issued.
The Nobel prize in economics was won for this concept in 1990 iirc: the value of the firm is independent to how it’s financed. Just like how the value of your house has nothing to do with what interest rate you pay in your mortgage.
I'm not sure I follow the logic of looking at the net worth of a conglomerate when assessing a fine. If someone parks the corporate car in a no-parking zone, or spits out chewing gum on the sidewalk, you're not going to fine them x% of net worth. At least in terms of consequences for the corporation, you'd they would be (punitively) proportional to the economic impact of the criminal activity.
What was the impact of this conduct? It's not mentioned in the story. If they paid a $10 million fine on criminal activity that gleaned them a $1 billion advantage, then yeah this is a slap on the wrist. If it's a $10 million fine on something that gave them a $10 advantage, it's arguably overly punitive.
> They might as well tell them to write "I will not hack my competitors" on the blackboard 100 times.
Not even. I bet a person with a $100k net worth will probably rather pay $62 than have to do the blackboard punishment.
If Massively-Evil-Plan™ increases profits from 10% to 20% then even after a 4% fine on revenue, real profits are still 15%. A company only motivated by profits and fines (which seems like a reasonable assumption if we're using laws like GDPR to deter "heinous shit") would be crazy not to continue with MEP™.
It's really the same kind of calculation as with fixed fines or fines based on damage done. When profitable, they're still written off as the cost of doing business. The only material difference would be that a fixed fine effectively allows large companies to do "heinous shit" while imposing fines so large that a small company can't compete, whereas with a revenue calculation you instead just need to make sure that your "heinous shit" is scalable. That doesn't apply in practice though, since GDPR has an alternative €20M fine which would go into effect, so in reality GDPR just says that to do "heinous shit" you need to be able to do a lot of it scalably and profitably.
The natural direction one might take this is just to say that the fines must not be big enough, but until you approach 100% of revenue the potential always exists for a new form of profitable "heinous shit" to crop up. If fines of that scale are on the table then that brings us to the other side of the coin: A single violation of any anti-MEP™ law will nearly certainly end the business. If a violation of an anti-MEP™ law necessarily meant that a corporation was doing "heinous shit" then that could plausibly be acceptable (definitely up for debate), but merely not appointing a data protection officer in the EU violates GDPR and potentially subjects a business to a 2% of revenue fine. The law will not perfectly align with what a reasonable person would consider "heinous shit," and too severe of a penalty in such situations seems prone to abuse.
Corporate crime needs to be prosecuted like personal crime, with 20-year-jail sentences in a jail full of Crips and Bloods and Aryan Brotherhood. Your Harvard MBA dude truly knows that he doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of surviving a place like that.
It's up to the judge whether he sees the inside of a jail cell.
"Ticketmaster" didn't do anything. Ticketmaster is a company which cannot make decisions or take actions.
- An employee at Ticketmaster stole a password (and financial documents)
- Multiple other Ticketmaster employees abused that stolen information to actively attack a competitor.
- Ticketmaster management was aware of this and rewarded that employee with a promotion and additional responsibilities.
Both the thief and the managers who rewarded the the thief should be going to jail. Instead the company is paying a small fine. I guess at least someone is going to prison, but I doubt all of the parties who were aware are. As usual, the executives in charge walk away.
Hopefully there is a class action lawsuit by the shareholders/ owners of this company against Ticketmaster.
IMO both the individuals and the corporation should be held responsible.
Corporations can't act, people inside the corporations act. If laws get broken, the individuals who made that choice should pay the price. This wasn't a defense of the company, I'm fine with the company getting fined here, so long as the people who did this get penalized as well.
So long as we let companies be a sort of shelter for the people inside the company, this kind of activity will continue.
There should be at least 15 conspiracy charges in addition to the CFAA violation charge.
Examples:
Mike Tomlin fined for blocking an on-field player, the team may have been penalized by forfeiting draft picks: https://www.nfl.com/news/mike-tomlin-fined-100-000-for-actio... They weren't: https://www.nfl.com/news/steelers-won-t-lose-draft-pick-for-...
Coaches fined $100k for not wearing face masks, teams fined $250k: https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-fines-broncos-49ers-seahawks-fo...
Saints fined $500k and stripped of draft pick: https://www.nfl.com/news/saints-fined-500k-draft-pick-patrio...
Controversial team fines: https://www.nfl.com/news/draft-picks-that-have-been-stripped...
- Falcons for fake crowd noise
- Patriots for "deflategate"
Saints were fined as a team, head coach suspended, players suspended for "bounty gate": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans_Saints_bounty_scan...
Team sports can be lost by a player, but must be won as a team. E.g. Kyle Williams of SF 49ers muffing two punts in the 2012-Feb-22 game against the Giants (off his knee, and the strip).
Through symmetry if a player is expelled from a league for doping, a manager who arranged/encouraged it should face the same, probably.
That's all I'm looking for here.
> "As a result, Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow and field manager A. J. Hinch were suspended for the entire 2020 season for failing to prevent the rules violations. The Astros were fined the maximum allowable $5 million and forfeited their first- and second-round picks in the 2020 and 2021 drafts. No players were punished because they had been given immunity by MLB in exchange for their cooperation.[1] The Astros subsequently fired both Luhnow and Hinch on the day their suspensions were announced"
The individuals who made the decisions were held accountable, or at least some of them.
Andrew Fastow committed suicide
Ken Lay died of a heart attack before his trial
Lou Pai walked away with $250 million and disappeared
The litany of charges that were brought against the rest of the people involved have not been very successful:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/sns-ap-enron-trial-glance-sto...
All of those sentenced in the above article were for reduced sentences since many of them testified against Skilling and others in order to get a shorter sentence.
The only one who served any real prison time was Skilling.
The important point to me about the company being liable is that a) the company itself benefited from the crime, and b) management knew about the crime happening; this wasn't a single rogue employee who did crimes and hid that fact from everyone else. (Contrast this to an employee using company resources, in secret, to commit a crime that only benefits the employee.)
And no consequences for the people involved means there's no deterrence. In the future, employees with unethical management will realize that they can do this sort of thing with little risk to their own livelihood, so why not give it a try?
I'm not really sure why you think this distinction is important. If a sufficient enforcement/punishment was laid on a company you can bet the employee responsible will feel it. Rather in this sense because there was no real punishment the employee was commended.
The employees most responsible are the executives who signed off on, were aware of and/or managed the criminal activity.
What they felt was a gentle caress across their wrist, which some may pretend was a slap.
The fine was likely less than the cost of the C-Suites annual bonus package.
As usual, the DoJ has little appetite to prosecute non-weak people.
It is the most maddeningly predictable outcome of every DoJ action against a corporation (w/ well funded lobbyists). We can thank every administration ever for this.
Ticketmaster did do something. They clearly broke the law. So did the individuals. All should be severely punished this is egregious behavior.
At some point the employees involved were fired. So there was some short term reward, and long term... I don't know.
Also, the article says that Zeeshan Zaidi, plead guilty to 26 months ago. So obviously this is the last in a series of consequences.
What the hell is the app installed on my phone, then?
The bit that Ticketmaster/LN 'acquired' in 2018 was, by then, just a vehicle for the lawsuit related to this hack/other anti-competitive/monopolistic behaviour.
A person doing the exact same thing would be heading to prison.
Seems like the same crime has a very different outcome when a corporation commits it.
You can read the criminal complaint: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.439451...
Aside from the usual explanation (white collar crime), any idea why someone can be found guilty and then still not given a sentence for more than a year. AFAICT he isn't even incarcerated at the moment.
Why can't we have our own personal corporations, which can stiff our creditors, cheat customers, etc etc with impunity? Surely all the social benefits of allowing this behavior from groups would only multiply if these liberties extended to individuals as well.
>Factors that a court may consider when determining whether or not to pierce the corporate veil include the following
>[...]
>Was the corporation being used as a "façade" for dominant shareholder(s) personal dealings; alter ego theory;
Doing this allows them to effectively engage in the same bad behavior an individual can, but without the risk associated with a single individual doing all of those things themselves. It also may allow them to scale better too. :/
But I think the Feds are pretty good at building cases. Since it's a crime to lie to a federal investigator, all they have to do is find some fact they can prove about you that you'd be likely to lie about, and get you to lie. (Technically the lie has to be material to the investigation, but in practice any vaguely related lie seems to do.) Apparently it's often not that hard to do; they're trained to exploit the psychology of the situation to their advantage.
And once you've lied, they have something on you, and they can use that as leverage to get more.
Reality doesn't fly out the window just because they want something to be true.
I kind of agree with Plato that a society with too many laws ends up becoming tyrannical because it's impossible for the average person to keep up with them all. Also, in our modern society every wrong thing you do follows you around forever, and our bureaucracies tend to be Kafkaesque (also due to stupidity rather than malice). While I do not agree with the trope that 'most people commit three felonies a day', simplicity and clarity would be a good foundation for better civics education.
With fully automated driving the number of crashes (and therefore injuries & deaths) will go down -dramatically-. So you can argue all you want about the ethics & morality of the ~100 deaths/year or so from automated car crashes. But that's far preferable to the current situation. Even if we still have 10-20k deaths/year from automated driving systems, that's still a large improvement.
This argument about the ethics of contrived car accident scenarios totally misses the boat. In my opinion the only ethical argument is to move over to fully automated driving systems as soon as -safely- possible.
But I don't. I don't care about 30k deaths a year if I'm killed by a floating point exception or an image reconnaissance glitch making my car think the truck in front of me is part of the sky.
If you die from a car crash it doesn't matter if it was from a drunk driver or an ai glitch. What matters is which is more likely- and humans are assholes. It will be orders of magnitude more likely to die by a human's hand than a random glitch.
> "But I don't"
I'm glad. Crashes still happen even when 1 party practices defensive driving techniques. Driving sucks.
At what threshold should one be willing to bet their lives in this probability every time they drive?
Right now we are speculating what the odds a self driving car has to make a mistake. But there aren’t any truly self driving car out there. So how do you determine the actual odds? If you replaced all the cars with self driving cars how many accidents would we have?
If 1,000 people a year die from software glitches, that's still a 30x+ improvement from the current situation.
I really don't see how people focus so much on "potential glitches" and not the current reality: drunk drivers, angry/hostile road-ragey people, people on the phone, people texting while driving, people on medication, people driving while sleepy, etc. A few glitches here and there is objectively superior to the current state of affairs.
As much as I dislike the term "accident" when talking about car crashes (because, to me, the implication of the word is no one has to take responsibility), sometimes things just happen, because we are imperfect beings with imperfect nervous systems and imperfect perceptions and imperfect reaction times.
Self-driving cars will be better at a lot of things, but, yes, possibly worse at others. They have the potential to eliminate many causes of crashes, but might add a few new ones.
When you're on a plane, you're trusting not only the pilots, but a ton of complex avionics software. Why is that ok, while trusting self-driving isn't? I get that the two tasks are very different, and self-driving will require more sophisticated, nuanced software, but in both cases you're turning your safety over to a computer. That didn't work so well with the 737-MAX, but no one is talking about scrapping modern aviation because a bunch of people died due to bad software decisions.
The problem is the illusion of control. People think that driving their own car means they're in control of nearly every possible outcome, but in reality, they're not. Plenty of things can happen in a car that are out of the driver's control, even without another vehicle involved.
Another part of it is that people (Americans especially) can be excessively individualistic. Many people will balk at a solution that will result in (just making up numbers here) 25% fewer deaths if it means they personally will have a 0.001% greater chance of dying. Frankly, I find that mindset really worrying in a society, even if it can be understandable.
(Somewhat relatedly, I recall an episode of Star Trek TNG where one possible solution to the problem du jour was to give the computer full control over propulsion in order to save the ship. And we're talking about a futuristic computer that could probably flawlessly simultaneously self-drive every car currently on Earth without breaking a sweat. But in the end, blatantly pandering to our "human control is always superior" biases, the computer was found to be not good enough, and humans saved the day. Even more telling, I believe it was Captain Picard who took manual control; they didn't even have Data, the android, do it!)
Why do people (in particular people without robotics experience) keep assuming this will happen any time soon without any evidence whatsoever? "We must move over to self driving cars as soon as they are safer" is fair but it's almost tautological.
The only numbers we have so far show that despite only testing in near ideal conditions (e.g. Waymo choosing to test in suburban Arizona rather than Manhattan or rural snowy Midwestern areas), the accident rate for autonomous vehicles is actually significantly higher, not even counting "interventions" which every company measures in its own inscrutable way.
What I was discussing was the supposed ethics of fully automated driving vs human driving when crashes happen.
I'm tired of seeing these contrived, hypothetical examples about what an automated car may or may not do in a very specific scenario, that completely ignore the fact that crashes & deaths will go down by orders of magnitude.
Maybe crashes and deaths will go down by an order of magnitude one day. But my point is that that’s hardly an argument in favor of not worrying about the ethical implications of self driving cars today.
My view is that even if self-driving car corporations kill people with zero consequences (due to poor laws and poor oversight), as long as they're doing so at lower rates than human drivers are, that's still a net win. It's still not an ideal scenario, because those deaths could be further reduced under the threat of real consequences. But by and large, it'd still be better than what we have today.
If they're killing people during testing of experimental tech that hasn't been approved for general use (like the Uber case you mentioned), they need to be smacked down hard. If they're killing people at a higher rate than human drivers, they should not be approved for general use in the first place. If they're approved, but release an update that ends up killing more people, they again need to be smacked down hard, with the update immediately reverted.
As someone who spends more time cycling than driving, watching videos like this[1] give me more confidence in today’s self-driving technology (assuming good conditions) than in most drivers on the road, even knowing that any internal video is bound to have a dose of propaganda. It’s not entirely even that drivers are to blame; our infrastructure puts cyclists at risk as does the human limitation of only having two eyes.
The outcomes of those choices are known and have causes which are preventable; they are by definition not accidental in nature.
I know it's not intentional but words matter. Crash is a better word 99% of the time than "accident".
This post addresses "The Semantics of Intention":
https://laist.com/2020/01/03/car_crash_accident_traffic_viol...
excerpt:
Drivers aren't out there aiming for pedestrians and cyclists, so how does intention factor in?
UCLA's Madeline Brozen argues it can be traced back to both failure to follow road safety laws and a lack of understanding about how dangerous driving a car is — especially since unsafe speed is the top contributing factor in L.A. traffic deaths.
Research shows that a pedestrian struck by a driver going 20 mph has an 80% chance of survival. If that driver accelerates to 40 mph and hits a pedestrian, the victim's chance of surviving drops to just 10%.
"The act of going above the speed limit or going fast [in unsafe] road conditions...that is an intention," Brozen said. "When someone is driving in a way that can kill someone, they are creating a risk."
According to John Yi, another "degree of intention" in traffic deaths falls on car-centric society and L.A.'s leaders, who are "intentional about what we're building and what we're not building."
City officials have stated clearly that L.A.'s mission to eliminate traffic deaths is informed by the fact that "underserved communities are disproportionately killed in traffic crashes." But Yi argues that the historic neglect of those communities can be viewed as intentional.
"To take that away, I think, is really not looking at some of the most disinvested communities and what they're going through," he said. "To put it squarely on the shoulders of drivers and say it's their fault and they're the ones who should be moderating behavior is overlooking the situation altogether."
If only the people who get outraged about self-driving cars were as outraged by this fact and applied pressure to improve street design and speed limit enforcement.
One time I lost control of my car while driving on the highway and hitting a patch of black ice. Luckily, nobody died. But that happens all the time.
Presumably, a self-driving car will drive slower in adverse weather than a human might, as well as being able to control the car if it hits an ice patch better than an untrained human can.
Also, the car can notify other cars on the same road of the ice patch, instantaneously.
...except the corporation being fined and/or sued in civil court, along with the executives/engineers responsible facing criminal charges.
Look at the GM ignition switch scandal where executives knew explicitly the likely consequences of their decision and yet no real punishment was enacted even after repeatedly lying about the death toll (initially by at least one order of magnitude) that eventually officially reached 124 deaths and likely much higher in reality.
Look at Boeing's 737MAX scandal where executives also knew the likely consequences and worked to go around rules, regulations, certification in order to pretend those consequences won't happen. Both Boeing and authorities either buried or turned a blind eye to reports that this happens. No real punishment here either.
Autonomous cars or not, as long as corporations pay for your laws you will always be on the lower rungs of the ladder.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54175359
> Ms Vasquez was charged on 27 August, and made her first appearance in court on 15 September. The trial is now set for February next year.
> Despite the decision not to levy criminal charges against Uber itself, the company did not escape criticism.
> Days before the crash, an employee had warned his superiors that the vehicles were unsafe, were routinely in accidents, and raised concerns about the training of operators.
> Following the crash, authorities in Arizona suspended Uber's ability to test self-driving cars on the state's public roads, and Uber ended its tests in the state. It received permission to carry out tests in the state of California earlier this year.
So despite all the safety failures by the company, just the hired driver was charged...
>So despite all the safety failures by the company, just the hired driver was charged...
A thought experiment: if a municipality was warned about safety failures about its streets (high speed limits, poor lighting/signage, lack of pedestrian crossings), and some kid got killed in a car accident, should the municipality be liable? What if everything that uber/the municipality did was within the law, and the only thing they're guilty of is not taking additional safety measures? eg. dropping the speed limit to 20mph in suburbs will probably eliminate all pedestrian deaths, should the municipality be liable if it set the speed limit to 30mph and the kid died?
"Tragic. Thoughts and prayers. Software problem. Nothing we could do."
Of course it does. There's a separate justice system for the rich and powerful.
Tesla may do any number of shady or illegal things but without Musk and his vested interest in the company it would probably be a footnote in some corporate obituary.
Otherwise you incentivize hiring fall guys to do a crime and go to prison, while the shareholders profit off of their crimes
Take your bank as an example. You gave them the money they used to commit whatever illegality and you profited from it. Now imagine the state takes over and only pays you a fraction of your deposits.
Worse yet, it incentivizes the shareholders to try to keep things hidden where today they would likely sue the company or CEO.
Otherwise the argument "companies need free speech and rights because they're just extensions of the owners few speech and rights" makes no sense, because the owners have no actual say in what's going on
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Why would investors sue the ceo when nothing bad will happen to them? How do they even have standing when the ceo does wrong if shareholders are indemnified?
In this banking example, it would be my fault for picking a poor quality bank? I'd also expect that the fine isn't going to be that much more than double the profits I made, so maybe $100-$1000? It's not like im making much money on my savings in a bank.
- The shareholders shouldn't necessarily be held responsible because most have no input or knowledge when it comes to any shady business.
- The company would perform worse because without the drive for profit (and whatever gray means they use to achieve them) that most private entrepreneurs have, the company would almost definitely perform worse. Privatized companies usually run better because the state might be a good minority shareholder but not the best when it comes to driving a company.
That would sting about as much as me getting a parking ticket. So somehow hacking a competitor is on the same level as parking on a wrong side of the street.
> Third-quarter revenue was about $154 million in 2020 compared to over $3 billion in 2019, with the company — which operates both Live Nation and Ticketmaster — reporting a $173 million loss for its concert business and a $142 million loss for ticketing.
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/live-nation-revenue-dr...
He appears to be awaiting sentencing.
For this to be proportional, ticketmaster should lose either 2 full years worth of income, or 5% of all profits in perpetuity. The amount they were fined for actually doing the crime was a rounding error by comparison.
I would gladly give up say 10% of my lifetime earnings for all sorts of things, but I wouldn't trade 4.5 years of my healthy adult life for anything.
But you probably do, just not on purpose. It's smaller decisions that you don't realize involve trading 'healthy adult life' for money/convenience/pleasure/release. And of course, the work hours you put in are very directly trading healthy adult life for money.
Opportunity cost is not something that we, as humans, are particularly good at. It is of course possible that you are exceptional, in which case you can assume I'm speaking from my own fallible experience of existence.
The larger point I intended was that for most people (especially handsomely-paid professionals like software devs) time is a more constrained resource than money.
Lastly, time lost all at once is worse than time loss incrementally, i.e. if I could serve my 4.5 year sentence 40 hours a week, that doesn't sound so bad, or that unfamiliar... ;)
While I'd be willing to do my current job for X, if you wanted to double my hours, you'd need to pay me than 2X.
I think 15 conspiracy charges are appropriate, bare minimum.
You mean the way Amazon does it every day to successful, independent small sellers, copies their products and bans them from Amazon without providing a reason why? The way Google removed Tutanota from search results? Microsoft spread FUD about open-source? Or like Oracle acquired MySQL?
How is this not a criminal conspiracy engaged in by the CEO (either before or after the fact) resulting in Jail time for the CEO?
Is it just because "with a computer" that the CEO isn't facing charges? What crimes committed and prior or subsequent knowledge of and then profit from those crimes would qualify in the CEO being charged with being involved in a criminal conspiracy? Does it have to be something that reads dramatically in a newspaper like armed robbery or assult or murder? Do the victims of the crime have to be elderly? Or are those crimes also fine as long as your title is CEO rather than "Don"?
Is this fixable?
Are you commenting on the disparate sentencing for the company versus an individual?
It is a deferred prosecution agreement, which is definitely an aspect of corporatism: that is the pre -eminent rights of corporations over natural people.
However there was a criminal conviction of a natural person as well. The DPP was the criminal conviction of the corporation that benefited from the underlying crime.
DPPs exist to avoid collateral damage to innocents dependent on the corporation, whilst still criminally convicting the corporation itself. It’s a balancing game.
With it a bit nuanced I am curious to understand better what you meant by your comment.
Has the CEO been charged? How bad does the crime have to be before the CEO being involved in it before it happened, or becoming aware and profiting from it after without informing the police before the CEO is themselves charged for the CEO's criminal behaviour in engaging in a criminal conspiracy with respect to that crime.
I'm hoping if the crime was murder, conspiring by the CEO would result in charges. Yes?
What level of crime is sheielded? Should any crime be sheielded like this?
However, I would wager that the CEO would have to have intentionally and actively cooperated with the criminal act; merely benefiting from it indirectly by running the corporation is insufficient. Hence they indicted the corporation which is directly benefiting.
Even if the CEO was aware and conspiring the prosecutor would still need to prove it. They may not have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.
All that being said it is possible prosecution was pro-corporate biased and refused to burn down a company. I am not discounting that possibility. Regardless it is difficult to win convictions so it is also plausible this is the best win prosecution believed it could get.
I mean, I guess maybe there could be and we don't know.
The charges against Ticketmaster come 26 months after Zeeshan Zaidi, the former head of Ticketmaster’s artist services division, pled guilty in a related case to conspiring to hack the rival company and engage in wired fraud. According to prosecutors, the former rival employee emailed the login credentials to Zaidi and another Ticketmaster employee.
In case anyone was wondering, who, specifically went out of business:
> Court documents didn’t identify the rival company, but Variety reported it was Songkick, which in 2017 filed a lawsuit accusing Ticketmaster of hacking its database. A few months later, Songkick went out of business.