Monday, June 06, 2005

pod people

So this guy walks into a shipping warehouse... and talks the clerk into giving him $2.6 million worth of iPods, and then he disappears.

I'm thinking someone asked what his all-time top-five desert-island MP3 song list was and he just couldn't make up his mind.

'Safety' is a big buzzword these past few years, but safety is always going to fail, because while you are busy locking all of the doors all it takes is one person to open one door and your security is worthless. It doesn't take Jame's Bond's toys to commit a crime when social engineering works just as well; many people in the workforce are treated so poorly that they'll go out of their way to help out a kind stranger. And trying to stop this from happening by making a visible show of defensive force just shows the enemy where not to go.

As long as people trust other people there will be room for someone to take advantage of the situation. But it's a big mistake to think that this means "never trust anyone"... you can't keep all of the doors shut forever, and your paranoia will freak out your neighbors. If you make it a policy to shoot the messenger, eventually you just stop getting mail.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nice analysis of a con job. Some people are dumb to fall into the silliest traps. In my city, we had a spate of thefts with the active participation of the owners of the property. The modus operandi was simple: A well-behaved man approaches a middle aged/old woman and tells her that there is some scuffle going on at the far end of the road, and it is not safe to move with so much jewelry. He helps the woman in tying up her jewels in a cloth and takes her leave. The grateful woman later discovers that by some sleigh of hand, he replaced her jewels with stones.
These incidents were reported in the newspapers for months together. Still, people refuse to learn and the modus operandi is repeated.
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