Drill a 3.5mm jack into the iPhone 7? Why we keep falling for pranks and hoaxes

This video of finding a hidden 3.5 mm audio jack in the newly launched iPhone 7 is going viral. The hack apparently involves drilling a hole through the speaker grill, and plugging a headphone into the “jack”.

This is a fantasy, but shows an alternative version with elements that many would really want to believe. We want to believe that Apple is an evil and shoddy company, that wants to make money by selling a converter, as well as easy to lose airpods. The lightning to 3.5 mm converter is included in the box, but never mind that. We also want to believe that iPhone users are dumb idiots with too much money who are thick enough to fall for the prank and drill a hole in the iPhones. This is tendency is called confirmation bias, where we interpret pieces of fresh information as added evidence for our pre-existing thoughts and notions.  BSNL giving out 20 GB of data for Rs 50  is another classic example of this kind of a hoax. Welcome to the information age.

Recently, there was a story that a man deleted an entire company with a line of code. It circulated for a while, before security experts noted that there were safeguards in the Linux operating system that prevented such a thing from happening. The owner of the company agreed later that it was just a joke , which just goes to show that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Scared of Facebook abusing all your data? The fears were that content you posted on Facebook was public property , or owned by Facebook. Yes, Facebook has a lot of user data, no we don’t know exactly how they use it, and yes their privacy policy can be an obtuse read. Such pranks use a lack of clear information to push out fake information. A real breakdown of Facebook’s content policy would be complex, nuanced and boring. An image macro saying “Everybody Panic! Facebook owns all your Posts!” is much more shareable and digestible, even if it not true. Trolls exploit this gap in simplicity between real and fake information.

A bunch of cell phones popping kernels of corn kept between them is another example of this. Cell phone radiation has been a persistent fear, and refuses to die as a myth. Even so, this prank, like many of the more successful ones, has a kernel of truth in it. The electromagnetic waves used by mobile phones for communications are in the Microwave range, and Microwave ovens are also used to pop corn.

These are methods of social engineering. The thing being hacked here is the human psyche, and that is easier to get into than machines. You don’t need technical wizardry to compromise someone, you just need to know how to be persuasive and exploit gullibility. One method of gaining access to accounts is through phishing emails , where users receive electronic communications from seemingly official sources. The call back scam , where users are informed of winning lotteries they never got tickets for, also fools people into handing over money. The danger with these kinds of scams is that once a person is exploited, the scammers can continue to exploit, getting more and more money from that one person. A person may fall for such scams repeatedly as well.

Other hoaxes may walk on the thin line between fake and real. The Freedom 251 is a good example. Even though the company was known to circulate fake information, changed the phones at least twice, gave out devices to journalist that were approximations of the product instead of the final product, and changed the release date multiple times , in the end a few devices seems to have reached users. This was a number that reduced from 25 lakh devices to 5000 devices . There is no independently verifiable information apart from the claims of the company.

Some pranks though, don’t remain hoaxes. Google has a habit of coming up with creative April Fools Day pranks. In 2014, the prank was the demonstration of an augmented reality Pokémon game . Fast forward to 2016, and we have a similar game in our devices. Apparently, the original hoax video inspired the creators to make it into a real game.