This is probably obvious to anyone but there isn't anything "good" about this, I expected this to be something along the lines of a crypto donation to GiveDirectly but this is just a sick wannabe Blackmirror power play.
It's the specifics that give it away. "Take 5 poor children from your neighborhood to Pizza Hut."
Screaming kids at Pizza Hut aside, we can't make other people have empathy. They have to find it and explore it themselves, perhaps by seeing others do the same.
It's especially ironic that someone with lowered empathy would be demanding someone else show fake empathy publicly before giving them back control of their own computer.
Convince or not, I'm thinking you might attract some really personal attention from law enforcement by the time you made your pitch to the 5th kid.
Or maybe you happen to be a 97-year-old retired nun, who everyone in your neighborhood knows, and it'd be fine. Not trying to be judgemental or anything.
The demand is indicative of where the author lives: think where in the world it would be acceptable for a stranger to approach children under 13 and invite them to lunch at a restaurant.
Not necessarily even a stranger per se, but poor communities are often "closer" to each other. They (sometimes) depend on neighbors for help more than rich neighbors do. Many of the kids play outside because they don't all have ipads and playstations keeping them inside, many adults walk to the bus/subway and interact with the kids in their neighborhood every day. So, I can see how a well known neighbor might splurge on a treat for some of the kids in their neighborhood to brighten their day.
I think the approach is clumsy and overly constrained, but I would hope the idea was that by being forced to actually interact with neighbors and their families it would increase social cohesion and empathy.
I don't think that's particularly incorrect, isolation from neighbors and the invisibility of the poor makes it a heck of a lot easier to ignore their problems.
I'm not sure in this case it's sympathy or empathy, it sounds like mere facilitation of the potential for future relationships and dialog between poor kids and people well enough off to own their own computer.
Imagining these hackers trying to individually determine whether someone has done a good enough job of pretending they're nice and whether a victim is themselves too poor to do this stuff... pretty amazing that they'd declare themselves the arbitrators of whether something is sufficiently repentant.
And posting it on social media? What, are we doxxing ourselves now to get out of ransomware attacks? I don't even have twitter or facebook or instagram or whatsapp... for good reason! Why make it performative, someone could just send them receipts if the goal was to help regardless of publicity.
Sure, sometimes. Certainly against the people applying force.
I am definitely not suggesting this approach will help, it seems like a ridiculous solution that's all about exploiting performative compassion for the sake of the hacker's egos...
But I also disagree with your statement as a blanket claim. Kids are forced to go to school and while they'll be resentful of the system or their parents or their teachers I haven't really seen kids being resentful of each other and certainly their peer group develops social cohesion and empathy for one another.
Everyone forced to do community service doesn't necessarily resent the people they are helping, they resent the judicial system.
At least, that seems like the rational response to me, it would be incredibly petty to resent some kids you take to dinner just because you're doing it due to blackmail. Resent the blackmailers...
Yes, an act can be empathetic even if the person doing it doesn't feel empathy. For example, smiling at another person is an empathetic act. Sociopaths do this all the time without feeling actual empathy for people. It makes it easier for them to blend in if they seem to have empathy via empathetic acts however disingenuous they may be.
-- to nitpick -- empathy is the ability to put yourself in someones position & truly feel what their reality must be like -- compassion is acting on that empathy --
It doesn't actually require having empathy to commit empathetic acts which are acts that display empathy. For example, smiling is an empathetic act, but it doesn't require having any actual empathy to do it. Sociopaths can smile and commit other empathetic acts to appear to have empathy without having any true empathy behind it.
I can see a scenario in which a "chaotic good" hacker uses a customized form of ransomware on some large corporation or extremely wealthy person in order to force them to make a donation or do some majorly positive action for the world.¹ Pulling this off without going against the "good" qualification would require appropriately selecting the target and files to encrypt, and appropriately phrasing the demands made to that target: you want to choose a target that has a lot of unused money to give, you have to make sure that the files tied up are not things that other, more disadvantaged people would need, and you want to make sure that the requested positive action is both positive and not reversible by the other party after the fact.
Needless to say, deploying the ransomware discussed in the link would not be a chaotic good act. More like neutral or chaotic evil.
¹ And just to be clear, don't actually do this. I'm never going to do this, never have done this, certainly am not doing it at the moment, and I advise that no one else actually do this. There are better ways to use your time.
Maybe it's not about "creating something like Amazon" but rather helping people. There's more to "positive creations" than companies, in fact, if you asked a random person to rank "making Amazon" or "donating to charity" in terms of positivity, 9/10 would choose charity..
I do understand that. You asked what more could he do. It is factually true that donating would be an additional positive impact that he would have on the world. If you don't understand that, this discussion is pointless
A "sick wannabe Blackmirror power play" is a little much.
This is probably the cheapest ransomware unlock that's ever been put out there (unless you're based in the US, then good fucking luck on the medical care clause). If you're a company whose security policies are too terrible to survive a ransomware attack, then you'd rather be hit with this one than any of the others.
Right. Picking up random children from the street and taking them to a restaurant comes at almost no cost. In fact if anyone sees this and calls the authorities they are likely to give you free lodging and food at a state owned facility top of it :)
Again, this is mostly an American problem. In other countries you know your neighbours and local community and wouldn't have a problem feeding hungry kids.
> In other countries you know your neighbours and local community and wouldn't have a problem feeding hungry kids.
This is probably only viable in smaller communities where people know one another, which may or may not show something about the authors of the malware. It's not just a social "issue", but rather one of population density, where you end up not knowing almost anyone around you personally.
Approaching random people, worse yet, kids, with promises of food in any metropolitan area or even moderately sized city would be viewed as exceedingly weird and creepy. Source: Eastern European country.
I get what the malware authors were trying to do, but it sounds like a somewhat naive and perhaps detached from reality implementation of a "sort of positive" idea.
It would have been way more viable to understand that payments for scammers work because they don't take hours or days of mucking about, but rather a payment through whatever means are available - which could also be applied to making the people affected donate to any number of charities of their or the authors' choice.
