This, technically, isn't illegal. It's immoral and unethical but if you play it right (vague terminology, play to people's paranoia about Windows machines having viruses) then all you're doing is taking advantage of someone's gullibility.
If you deliberately infect their machine with a script which transmits their data for profit then you're doing something stone cold illegal, and it may never acquire the data you're looking for. You then have to exploit it which means selling it on the deep web or (worse, time-wise) criminal black market, which is again illegal, and also a massive chore: you're doing something illegal but then making yourself highly visible/traceable and connecting with the wrong kind of people in order to profit from it illegally (sorry if this seems tautological, but it's worth repeating that it's two distinct acts to acquire the data and then to sell it). Yuck.
You're far better off playing the odds: each employee can call 60 people per day. Even if 1/200 signs up what are these people making? $25 per day? If you've got 5 people in the call centre nailing 1 in 200 customers then you've got a business, provided your overheads are low enough and you're using signed-up customers as a platform to sell to (referrals & 'security' software).
It's not going to make you rich quicker than a legitimate (and I use that word advisedly) botnet or key logger / zombie script, but you're pretty much on the right side of the law and there's very little downside if you're unscrupulous.
(The massive moral downside is that you're an utter cunt, of course.)
The thing which is strange to me here (or perhaps indicative of the fact that they're a useless outfit) is that they don't have the script nailed.
We're all (presumably) relatively proficient with computers here. I don't think I'd have any trouble at all in convincing someone that there's a virus or malicious code on their computer, if I wanted to. There are enough confusingly named but benign processes on OS X and Windows and enough ways to dress up a script to turn them off at launch and "fix" the computer. How many times did that guy stumble over his story? Malicious code; Windows licence; you pay; you don't pay; can we call you back; let me speak to legal; I can see your screen; I can't see your screen.
A more efficient scam would be a slicker script, a 10 minute process, and less deviation. The guy Troy spoke to sounded, to me, like an IT guy more than a sales guy, which is very weird. Kinda like in Armageddon when they train oil drillers to be astronauts rather than training astronauts to use a drill: you don't need IT expertise because the people you want to be speaking with are those who expressly do not have any IT expertise.
I agree, but in this case I can understand his hesitancy. I think he's closer to nailing "now" when he says that Apple is treating press events with more respect. No more introducing three new products at an event. From now on, only major product releases will be given the Jobsian pitch. Anything which isn't in the same league (shifting millions of units) is going to be a smaller affair, to keep the big events fresh.
> Apple has an established track record of not getting what people want from a TV. Ala carte TV shows and a crippled set-top box is not very inspiring.
Disagree. TV is not a TV set. You may as well argue that the Macintosh TV from 1994 is indicative that Apple doesn't "get" television.
Apple TV is a hardware extension of iTunes. It is not a profound re-imagining of the TV, which is what we are expecting the Apple TV to be.
And I'd suggest that TV has been pretty popular.
"Apple sold more than 3 million units of the device last year, marking seemingly strong demand among customers for the small box that plugs into high-definition TVs to stream music, movies and photos from computers, mobile devices and various websites."
"Cook didn't say what that "something" was, but did add that "for those people that have TV right now, the customer 'sat' (satisfaction rating) is off the chart…""
> Palm wasn't exactly a superstar before the iPhone's launch.
Palm's marketshare in Q1 2005 was 17.9%. Back then when there were several goliaths (Nokia, RIM, Sony-Ericsson) that's a huge fucking deal.
Samsung's marketshare of the TV business in 2010 (only data I could find)? 17.2%
Believe me. This is a very apposite comparison. I'm bookmarking this thread to revisit in 5 years.
> Responding to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff at a Churchill Club breakfast gathering Thursday morning, Colligan laughed off the idea that any company — including the wildly popular Apple Computer — could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone sector.
> “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
But, really, what does anyone expect incumbents to say? They know that they can't compete with Apple on the ecosystem. They know that they can compete with Apple on the quality of the picture, because that's the part that they will likely be supplying to Apple anyway. It's clever to try to shape the direction of the discourse away from the stuff Apple will be trying to compete on and back to what Samsung try to compete on.