1494: Insurance

Insurance

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Title text: LIFEHACKS: You can just take all the luggage off the airport conveyer belt and leave with it. They don't check that it's yours at the door!

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Explanation

Cueball in this comic, as is often the case, is some sort of programmer or at least logically minded person. He reads through the terms that are handed to him, and finds some sort of loophole. This is a play on the fact that programmers often find loopholes in programs and code, and exploiting them is nothing more than a "cool find" or an interesting idea.

The insurance agent foresees this, and explains that this "cool hack" - which is known as insurance fraud - is illegal. The comparison here is that exploiting a program's faults can be regarded as interesting or fun, while exploiting the faults in a legal document will most certainly result in some sort of legal repercussions.

The insurance agent is also already prepared for the following question - how he knew Cueball would be looking for loopholes, and it's because many programmers visit him.

The title text provides another example: While airport luggage security certainly is exploitable, walking out with every piece of luggage from the conveyor belt would be easily noticeable and would result in being arrested for theft.

This would appear to be a sequel to 1469: UV

Lifehacks vs. IT hacks

The term hacking in IT is ambiguous and goes from simple code development to "using a hack". A hack would then refer to a tricky piece of code doing the intended job in a way that the framework or project in which it is inserted was not intended to. Hacking a system would also refer to some illegal way of acheiving a goal against the will of the original developers of the system, like getting a copy of all the data available or taking advantage of some unwanted behavior.

This comic is making fun of what would IT hacks look like in real world. Surely, taking many luggages from an airport is technically possible and probably not so difficult, but first, it looks weird, and second, it's also obviously illegal. The weirdness of such behavior is more obvious in real life than in IT.

Transcript

[Cueball is standing in front of a desk, which a man sits behind. The man is presumably an insurance agent, and is handing Cueball a paper.]

Insurance agent: Here's a page explaining the terms of your new fire insurance policy.

[Cueball reads the paper.]

Cueball: Hey, what if I -

Insurance agent: And here's a page explaining that the "cool hack" you just thought of is called "insurance fraud". We already know about it and it's a crime.

Cueball: Oh. Right. How did -

Insurance agent: I see a lot of programmers here.

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Discussion

Well...suck for you. 108.162.215.57 05:17, 4 March 2015 (UTC) RobotGoggles

Incomplete tag? I know it's pretty early, and the explanation is bound to be rewritten, but the current explanation is a little confusing, and makes a couple jumps that I wouldn't necessarily make. Maybe the incomplete tag shouldn't be removed yet? I'd do it, but I don't really know enough about actually editing the explanations to feel comfortable doing it yet. ARoseByAnyOtherName (talk) 08:52, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

I mean, I had written an explanation I'd say was a bit clearer (if a bit more complicated), but some unregistered user removed most of it... Makes me a bit grumpy. The newly added Lifehacks vs. IT hacks section brings up most of the things that person removed, though, so this should be complete enough. Obskyr (talk) 09:44, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Well, for what it's worth, I liked your version better. --RenniePet (talk) 10:47, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Not only that. The new version was so bad I decided to revert to Obskyr's. [1] 108.162.221.201 13:54, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Any meaning to conveyer?

The spelling error in the alt text seems like a simple typo.

Lawyer? I assumed it was a salesman or HR guy. --RenniePet (talk) 08:50, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Insurance agent. Not exactly a salesman; agents have multiple hats. You don't get fire insurance from HR.Taibhse (talk) 09:34, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

So you're saying the agents are TF2 players. 108.162.237.161 04:45, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

This is probably a reference to those youtube videos of life hacks of questionable legality. Eg signing up for one flight to take another108.162.219.100 16:44, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

I guess this might also relate to that (from my experience) programmers tend to like to break things (anything claimed to be "secure" seems to attract lots of people wanting to test out how secure) or find workarounds for things? Pinkishu (talk) 10:11, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Hacking

Please read On Hacking. I think the term you're looking for is cracking, or at least black hat hacking. Hacking a system would mean getting a system to do something unique and/or interesting. Or interacting with the system in a way that wasn't predicted. 108.162.238.191 10:19, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

You're right. But there is at least a second common usage for the word hack that is described by wikipedia as "an inelegant but effective solution to a computing problem". When the insurance guy speaks about "cool hacks", he's probably not refering to Stallman's definition. Nytux (talk) 09:41, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Hard hacks

Things like lock-picking is often also seen as physical equivalents of hacking, not necessarily illegal but still something most people would look on with suspicion.108.162.254.98 10:21, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Agree, this is excellent example on "hacking the computer": there is nothing illegal on lock-picking itself. Even if you use it on someone's else door without permission, it would not be crime unless you actually ENTER the door (or damage the lock). Locksmiths MUST know how to do it. But ... first thing you think about when hearing lock-picking is that thiefs do it. -- Hkmaly (talk) 11:37, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Before coming down into the comments, and seeing the last set of comments, I felt it necessary to make an edit to highlight just such an issue regarding the confusion about 'hacking'. As a historical s