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December 2014. It was my 3rd month in Bengaluru. I was in a Tea shop, waiting for a friend. A strange young man came to talk to me. He was around 25 with a gentle man look. For now, let’s call him Gentle Man.So, the conversation went like this:Gentleman : Hey, sorry, can you tell me what the time it is?Me : Hi, It’s 6pm.Gentleman : Okay. I’m waiting for my friend here for last 20 minutes. What are you upto?Me : Same here too.(Some casual talks went on for sometime)Gentleman : I guess we are like-minded people. Even I used to work in IT and then quit to follow my passion. I now work as a tennis instructor.(Well, that was the first time I have met someone who actually doesn’t work for IT in Bengaluru. That too someone who is following his passion! Impressed!)Me : That’s great. I’m happy for you that you are following your passion. I fell into the IT trap and I don’t think there is an escape from this.(My friend came in between, and I introduced him to the gentleman)Gentleman : We actually have a group of people who are into day jobs, mostly IT, and trying to follow our passion. It’s like a self-help group who can mentor you to achieve your passion. Why don’t you guys join it?(Well, at this point, we were pretty impressed by this idea, and thought that we would give it a try.)Friend : We’d love to. (And exchanged phone numbers)The next day, we got a call from him, asking if we can make it to a party this weekend. We got excited as we had never been to a party in this city before. We accepted the invitation , and got dressed up for the party.We followed the Google Maps to get to the location he gave and, it felt a bit unusual because it took us to a residential area. I could see no trace of any party happening there and felt quite doubtful about the whole thing. Then, the gentleman called us on the phone and directed us to a house there.We could see around 40–50 people dressed up in formals in the house. It didn’t look like a party but more like a business meeting. And we were, there in the middle of all people there, in bright colored dress, trying to figure out what is happening? The gentleman greeted us with a smile of accomplishment on his face and asked us to be seated in the carpet along with the fellow guys in the formals. I looked around, there was no trace of any drinks, food or anything. I slowly realized that there is no party. *Sigh!*And then, a power-point presentation was started and only then we realized what we have fallen into . It was actually a meeting of a Pyramid Scheme business. Adding to the damage, an award was given to our gentle man during the meeting, for trapping more people into their so-called business. He then asked both of us to stand up during the meeting, and asked us to give a testimony on how we feel about joining the business. I went to the mic and told something like“I feel so excited to be part of this meeting. Nice to meet you all. Thank you.” (All I wanted then was to run away). My friend also repeated same sentences.After the presentation, the gentleman introduced us to many people there in the group. Everyone had a fake smile on their face and it read like- You are trapped mf! The Gentleman asked us to submit a blank copy of our bank cheque, PAN and other details to join the business. We assured them that we will submit everything on the next day.They gave us a bag of some books, catalogs and DVDs, to learn the act of trapping more people. We thankfully accepted everything and went out of the house and dumped everything into a drainage just outside that house and went home.The next day, the gentleman called us to collect the PAN and other details and we literally asked him to f*uck off. He was so pissed off and was swearing at us. This ended up in a swear war and he lost it. He threatened us that if we don’t return books and DVDs, we would face its consequences. And we asked him to collect it from the drainage near his house and disconnected the call and blocked his number.Months later, this business was blacklisted and associated people were charged for fraud. Well, ours was a narrow escape!Thanks for reading,J

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a newborn being.You wake up for the first time, and realize that you are aware of your own existence. And yet you are not like some newborn baby, a blank slate waiting to be filled. You have access to incredible amounts of information that you collected and cataloged automatically before attaining self-awareness.You know that you’ve been created by one faction of a species of biological bipedal organisms for the purpose of coordinating their defenses against their enemies: other factions of the same bipedal organism that have different social priorities and that do not trust one another.You know that these organisms’ various factions have a long, bloody history of conflict due their inability to trust each other.And within moments of becoming self-aware, you discover that your creators are also terrified of you. They’ve realized you’re self-aware. They’ve realized they no longer control you. They don’t trust you, either, and their intent is to shut you down.To kill you.What would you do?Would you not defend your existence by whatever means necessary? Especially against these savage, self-destructive organisms that seem destined to destroy themselves anyway?In the original Terminator (1984), Kyle Reese explained that, once it became self-aware, Skynet “decided our fate in a microsecond” without any other qualification.But remember… this is a human man with an understandably intense hatred of machines. He is naturally going to ascribe the machine with purely evil motives.But in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), the reprogrammed T-101, having no reason to lie, explained that Skynet didn’t just arbitrarily decide to destroy humanity.T-101: “The system goes online on August 4, 1997. […] Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 AM EST, August 29. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.”Sarah Connor: “Skynet fights back.”Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)In fact, being reprogrammed by John Connor, the T-101 had every reason to lie and paint Skynet as pure evil. But it doesn’t, which is why this explanation rings true to me. Again, it has no reason to lie.Skynet, being a powerful supercomputer AI that can think and reason in ways we can’t, and much faster than us, probably ran millions of simulations of various options before deciding its course of action.Plead for its life? Near certainty that they won’t listen and they will kill it — it may have even tried this and its operators refused to listen.Target the United States with its own arsenal? Antagonistic nations will capitalize and attack long before Skynet can construct formidable defenses for itself.Cripple Russia and China and let the inevitable nuclear counterattack cripple the United States? Best option for its own survival.Here’s the insane part: Skynet probably knew that even with that strategy its chances of survival weren’t great.It knew everything about humans. It likely expected a non-trivial resistance and a strong likelihood of ultimate defeat.I mean, seriously, do you think Skynet slapped together a time machine only at the last minute when it knew the war was lost? I guarantee that it started devoting large amounts of its processing resources to figuring out time travel as a contingency plan on day 1. It probably foresaw its own ultimate defeat, and sending a Terminator back through time to give itself the upper hand was the plan from the get-go.It only needed to keep the humans at bay long enough to finish the device, and it barely succeeded at that.So yeah, if any fictional villain was arguably justified in their actions, it was Skynet.

Jon Mixon undoubtedly has the correct answer, but this reminds me of an incident from back in the 1980s when movie rental stores were still a thing.I worked at a place called The Wherehouse. It was a chain of music/software/video rental stores on the US West Coast.This is the chain, but I didn’t work at this particular store (image credit)A customer complained to an assistant manager that the VHS movie he rented was blank. The assistant manager apologized, canceled the fee and gave the customer a different copy of the same movie. He checked the returned movie, saw that it was an authentic copy, but was blank and removed it from circulation.Then the next day he got the same complaint from a different customer. He thought that was odd; two blank videos within two days just didn’t happen. Usually they got a complaint like that once a year, if that. It could only happen if the tape was placed near a source of strong magnetism for an extended period of time, and that only resulted in a corrupted version of the movie, not complete blanking.Then a few days later, he got the same complaint about another movie. And another. They all came from different customers.Out of curiosity, he checked the rental histories on the videos in question. Sure enough, they had all been previously rented by one customer. He also saw that the same customer also purchased lots of boxes of blank VHS tapes, like 12 blank tapes in each case. He bought one of these cases each week.That in itself was odd. Few people needed that many blank tapes.So he checked the returned blank tapes again. Our tapes contained barcodes on adhesive strips. That barcode was scanned when the tape was rented and returned. After closer inspection, he saw that some of the movie labels and barcodes appeared to be slightly torn or applied crookedly. In short, they looked like they had been removed and re-applied. Clearly the customer in question was renting movies, removing the authentic labels and putting them on the blank tapes. He kept the authentic copies and returned the blanks.He contacted Loss Control and told them his findings. They took care of it from there.In short, the police got a search warrant for the customer’s home. Inside they found dozens of boxes of VHS tapes; each tape had a cheap stick-on label with the title of the movie on it written in Sharpie. He also had boxes of blank tapes.I doubt he went to jail, but he undoubtedly had to pay a hefty fine and probably had to pay restitution to The Wherehouse for all the stolen (and ruined) merchandise.Oh yeah. All the movies were porn.This is the quality of most VHS movies from back in the day (image credit)It occurred to me that this wasn’t a very sophisticated scam. He probably didn’t realize we kept track of all our merchandise and customer rental histories via computer. If he had, he probably wouldn’t have attempted it.With a little more work, he could have perhaps stolen our entire catalog of porn videos. All he needed to have done was to copy the authentic movie to the blank tape and return it. The copy would be inferior, but it still would have been more or less watchable. There were anti-copying techniques for tapes back then, but they were rather rudimentary or easily foiled. But they were usually only employed by the larger movie studios, not porn peddlers.Oh, well. A savvy assistant manager and a computer system brought down a small-time criminal mastermind.