A reporter for The Verge was thankfully unharmed after a white hat hacker seized control of a Yarbo lawnmower robot.
Original title, which I removed for being sensationalist:
Hacker Takes Over Robot Lawnmower, Runs Over Innocent Man
Noteworthy sections
Alarmingly, the Yarbo robots all had the same root password, Makris found.
Even changing the root password wouldn’t necessarily protect owners, either, because every time a Yarbo robot updates its firmware, it resets the root password back to the default, Makris found. And there’s a twist: it appears that this backdoor for remotely accessing the robots was intentionally created by Yarbo.
I appreciate the title change.
The way The Verge (the original author) has been selling this story is gross. “A Hacker Ran Me Over With a Robot Lawn Mower!!1”
I thought they were better than that but I was totally wrong.
General opinion I’ve seen online over the past year or two is that the Verge has started following the same downward trend as nearly every other online news source, unfortunately.
Based on my experience with how people respond to things I post I am not convinced at all this strategy even increases engagement.
Maybe you can show a number for a slightly higher click through rate, I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter since people so obviously tend to bounce off articles that fish for clicks in a condescending manipulative way that whatever the benefit is (if it exists which I am doubtful), it doesn’t remotely even make up for the greater number of people who just pass the article by because they felt they were being prodded by an emotionally manipulating headline.
To put it another way, I often change an overly clickbait article title if I share the article because I want people to actually read it.
I would rather 1 person genuinely read an article I post than 10 people vaguely interact with it, click through to read a sentence or two and then close out of it. The latter experience is a waste for everyone involved but the people selling ads between the articles.
Honestly I think the same holds for media entities like The Verge they just have convinced themselves with bean counting the wrong things that they are optimizing instead of undermining.
I will say the title used here did get me to click through because the way it’s worded made me wonder if there was a lawsuit being brought up. Obviously, since it was staged, that wasn’t the case. I wasn’t pleased at being tricked.
Honestly if they had used my title I still would have looked at the article, so my click would have been given anyway. I just now come away annoyed where I otherwise wouldn’t have.
I generally expect better from Futurism.
I saw that headline earlier this week and skipped reading it. I still skipped the source with this post, but at least you took some highlights out so I know more. Thanks for engaging with it and making it more digestible.