Editing 1494: Insurance

{{comic
| number    = 1494
| date      = March 4, 2015
| title     = Insurance
| image     = insurance.png
| titletext = 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!
}}

==Explanation==
[[Cueball]], apparently having just purchased a new insurance policy, is given a document explaining the policy terms. As is often the case, he's presented as 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 tend to look for loopholes in programs, code and system architecture, and treat finding them as a challenge (either to exploit them, or to prevent such exploitation by other parties). The fact that Cueball is trying to discuss his findings with the agent suggests that he's trying to prevent it from happening, rather than planning to do it himself. 

In this case, the obvious "loophole" in a fire insurance policy is that the customer generally receives a large payment in the event of a fire. This means that a person could make money by insuring a building or other property for more than its actual value, then deliberately setting a fire. Alternatively, someone could set a fire and claim that more valuables were destroyed than actually were. In either case, the customer would effectively receive free money for their troubles. In principle, this could be done repeatedly, resulting in an unlimited source of money.

All of this is implied simply by Cueball reviewing the document, starting to ask a question, and being cut off by the agent, explaining that this {{w|Life hacking|"cool hack"}} is actually just an instance of {{w|insurance fraud}}, which is a) well known and b) highly illegal. In practice, insurance companies are constantly on the lookout for such forms of fraud, and attempting to do so in real life would be more likely to land you in prison than to enrich you. 

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 often result in some sort of legal repercussions. Moreover, most such exploitations that involve money have usually been figured out already, and systems changed or laws passed in order prevent them from happening. When they do occur, the exploiter is subject to legal punishment. 

Cueball begins to ask how the agent knew what his question was, and is again cut off by the agent explaining that he sees a lot of programmers, suggesting that Cueball is not the first to consider that particular loophole. 

The title text provides another example: US airports typically place passengers' luggage on carousels, and leave it to the individual travelers to find and retrieve their own luggage, which would seem to make it easy to take luggage that's not yours (even "all the luggage"), but that's less of a 'hack' than a crude form of petty theft, which contravenes both the law and normal social and ethical expectations. 

It should be noted that there are places in which it's typical for airports to verify luggage ownership before allowing people to take their bags. In most wealthy countries, this practice has largely been abandoned, because other peoples' luggage isn't typically very valuable, airports are generally fully of security cameras, and walking off with a random piece of luggage creates a significant risk that the actual owner will see you trying to take it. For these reasons, the risks associated with such theft generally outweigh the rewards. A single person trying to remove "all the luggage" would be particularly impractical. Even if they could contrive a method to transport it all, their actions would be so obvious that they would almost certainly be caught immediately. 

The core point, in both of these cases, is that theoretical loopholes, which might be easy to exploit in computer code, are usually wildly impractical in reality, and often carry both moral implications and the risk of punishment. 

This relates to [[1469: UV]]

==Lifehacks vs. IT hacks==
The term hacking in IT is ambiguous and goes from code development (in particular in the opensource community) to the fact of "using a {{w|Hack|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. To the general public, 'hacking' a system would normally refer to some illegal way of achieving 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, but a more distinctive term for such an exploitation (maliciously or after an invitation to perform legitimate penetration testing) would be 'cracking'.

This comic is making fun of what IT hacks would look like in real world. Surely, taking lots of luggage 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.

It is worth noting that it is currently popular on social media sites to share small tricks to make one's life easier.  This is called {{w|Life hacking|"life hacking", or "hacking your life"}}.

==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.

:[Zoom in on Cueball as he reads the paper.]

:[Cueball starts to ask the insurance agent a question when he hands Cueball yet another 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.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
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