SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A French teenager has been jailed after buying a PlayStation 4 for under £8 by weighing it as if the games console was a huge bag of fruit.
The 19-year-old man, named in the French media as Adel, picked the device off the shelf and took it to the fruit section and weighed it.
He then put a sticker with the heavily reduced price tag on the expensive console and went to the checkout.
Adel paid £7.86 (€9) for the 6lb bag of 'fruit' at a self-checkout at a supermarket in Montbeliard, eastern France, last September.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Teenager Jailed After Buying PS4 for £8 by Weighing it and Paying for it as Food
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 86 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
-- H. L. Mencken
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 06 2021, @04:22PM (5 children)
It's a hack. Back in the day many lionized Captain Crunch [wikipedia.org]. Admittedly the guy in TFA is far less sophisticated, but he did find an exploit and used it.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday October 06 2021, @04:39PM (4 children)
Different times. While Draper whistled tunes to the phone didn't Woz and Jobs sell blueboxing (and other colours) devices etc while also building what would eventually be Apple? Nobody really cared. I guess AT&T might have cared but apparently not enough to actually bust them for it.
Same thing with a lot of underground scene related things and computers. Just look at the crack information (cracktros) etc for various cracked software and you'll find post addresses and phone numbers there just listed. All easily connected to actual people. Nobody cared at the time. Nobody cared until the mid-late 90's and that just went away. It was illegal or in a massive grey area at the time. It was just that nobody cared.
That said I would not put the dude in the article on the same level as Crunch, Woz or Jobs.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday October 06 2021, @05:12PM (2 children)
The usual dodge here is to mix a bag of a few potatoes and avocados and scan it as potatoes. The avocados are usually much more expensive, but near enough in colour that there is no way the camera can tell.
As an aside, potato - potatoes, avocado - avocados. Why does potato get an e when pluralised but avocado doesn't?
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday October 06 2021, @07:05PM
It's something similar here except they like take the fancy expensive apples in their bag but scan the cheap but similar looking apples.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @07:45PM
apparently it can also be avocadoes. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/avocado [merriam-webster.com]
there was a stackexhchange and other links going into usage and reasons, not helpful reasons but who ever blamed language of being logically consistent. if only we had invented computers before writing, we might have more logic embedded in it's use.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @07:22PM
People are still selling all kinds of custom 'pentesting' devices, and no one cares. Data is for sale, no one really cares except paranoid techies.