The Next Wave – A Conversation With John Markoff | Hacker News Reader

The Next Wave – A Conversation With John Markoff

edge.org

33 pointsethana6 comments

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?

I don't think it will ever clear.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com