from Hacker News

Prison Company Patents VR to Give Inmates Brief Taste of Freedom

by zachguo on 9/11/21, 4:13 AM with 69 comments

• by danShumway on 9/13/21, 1:52 PM

  Holy crud, literally everything about this is terrible, from the motivation/phrasing, to the "market" it's a part of, to the followup research about using VR to torture people, to the technical merits of the patent itself.

  Rare to find an article that so efficiently touches on so many simultaneous points of awfulness.

  I realize it's only one aspect of the article, but it's tough to talk about patent reform when stuff like this that is so obviously not a real invention is still so regularly slipping through the system. There's a real conversation to be had about how much of a patent monopoly we should be granting businesses for legitimate patents, but there's an even bigger conversation to be had about how we ended up with a patent office that's willing to rubber-stamp everything they're handed. Under the current system we have today this patent shouldn't have been granted, it's not a novel invention. That's not even a reform problem it's an... I don't know, caring problem? A lack of review problem?

• by mchusma on 9/11/21, 1:19 PM

  What a crappy patent. We really need patent reform. This is basically a patent troll (or they plan to be a gatekeeper and make money from the companies that make VR).

  This company has about a 0% chance in the next 20 years of producing high quality VR. There is already prior art here.

  So many ways to make patents better, including: - making it more expensive, with annual fees - increase the cost over time - just generally setting a target to reduce acceptance by 50%

  Patents are ok in theory, when they promote true, material innovation via government enforced monopoly. However, the cost to society is high, so the cost should be high. And patents floating around more than 5-10 years are the ones with the most damage.

  The only main counterexample is pharma. But here, it's also broken because most patents are not for groundbreaking drugs. We can also incentivize in other ways, like grants and contests (e.g. first person to cure X disease gets $1B, second person $500M).

• by ermir on 9/13/21, 2:32 PM

  Sounds very cruel, another sign that we can't control our technological growth at all. I have a friend, a former FAANG veteran that has dedicated his life to destroying what he calls "techno-Satan", maybe he's on to something.

  I have also noticed that programmers have a tendency to sometimes distrust the stuff they make. I for one will never install "smart" home devices, I'm happy with my classic light switch that won't spy my on/off status and send it to China, or my toaster that needs a monthly subscription.

• by hirundo on 9/13/21, 1:46 PM

  A brief taste of freedom may be more cruel than kind, though I doubt it's cruel enough to trigger the eighth amendment. On the other hand, it does meet the standard of "unusual".

  The Pythons pioneered the "comfy chair" torture technique, which was supposed to be a joke. But if got the brief use of a comfy chair then had to go back to a hard bench it would be worse than before.

• by BlameKaneda on 9/13/21, 1:25 PM

  I can imagine Charlie Brooke frantically taking notes for the next season of Black Mirror.

• by tablespoon on 9/13/21, 3:04 PM

  I don't recall exactly where I saw it, but I remember reading something where some tech guy "solved" the problems with prison with some nightmarish scheme of solitary confinement, Soylent(tm), and VR that he probably spend all of then minutes thinking through. That was held up an an example of how clueless and unintentionally malevolent tech people can sometimes be when they let their enthusiasm for technological solutions go unchecked by anything else.

  So now that might become a real thing, brought to you by one of the shittiest and exploitative companies in existence.

  Edit: here's the original article https://medium.com/@shanesnow/how-soylent-and-oculus-could-f... and this might be the critique I read: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2016/06/22/the-worst-thing-i-read...

• by TheCondor on 9/13/21, 2:21 PM

  Is there anything redeeming about “for profit” prison? At its most fundamental, it has no incentive to actually rehabilitate

• by elliekelly on 9/13/21, 2:52 PM

  This reminds me of one of the most heartbreaking projects I've ever stumbled across: http://photorequestsfromsolitary.org

• by AlbertCory on 9/13/21, 3:56 PM

  This is your regular reminder about Preaching To The Choir.

  Telling each other about the evils of software patents might be satisfying, but it has zero effect. The proof is that they're still there after almost 30 years, and programmers have hated them from the start.

  Here's the problem:

  (1) lawyers, as we know, don't want to solve problems -- they want to make them part of their practice.

  (2) your corporate managers have already spent millions on patents, and they listen to their lawyers.

  (3) your professional associations (ACM & IEEE, looking at you here) are not on your side either. I don't know enough about their reasons to speculate here but you're free to.

  Do a search on "abolish software patents." There are organizations devoted to doing that. Join one.

  The EFF has a lengthy article [1] and note the date: 2012.

  When I was at Google an engineer / lawyer (yes, there are a few of those) wrote up a one-page bill for Congress, declaring all software patents obvious. I picture you all asking a Congressional candidate at a town hall "Do you support abolishing software patents?" and watching him or her panic and stall, and direct their staff to look into it.

  Finally, I got the "file wrapper" for this patent. It was amazingly quick: less than two years. The PTO rejected it and then they amended it, and that's pretty much all there was. These things are incredibly boring to read and I can't summarize the details in any quick way.

  [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/06/want-abolish-software-...

• by aurizon on 9/13/21, 1:32 PM

  LOL, I suppose that if I send an inmate a FB VR computer(if allowed in) I will soon join the inmate for infringement? It it has been tried before, patent any old thing -'with a VR helmet', or 'with a computer' is not patentable. Sadly many of these bad patents are granted and the patent troll ecology flourishes on...

• by bgro on 9/13/21, 4:31 PM

  I haven't looked into this specifically... But anytime some new prison tech or "service" comes up, take a look at who the inventor / investor / company is or belongs to. It's usually the warden or someone similar.

• by Railsify on 9/13/21, 4:08 PM

  Can you really patent the reason you are using an existing technology?

• by ChicagoBoy11 on 9/13/21, 1:58 PM

  There is a movie called "Otherlife" available on Prime that explores a bit of this question of using alternate realities in a prison context. It is slightly DIFFERENT in that the premise there is that VR can serve as the prison itself, rather than a supposed escape from it. An enjoyable watch if the premise sounds appealing to you.

• by FooBarBizBazz on 9/13/21, 2:49 PM

  This is pretty much the plan with Facebook's "Metaverse", right?

• by tekromancr on 9/13/21, 3:35 PM

  This is evil, and everyone working on these sorts of things are irredeemable.

• by btbuildem on 9/13/21, 1:43 PM

  That's disgusting.

• by giantg2 on 9/13/21, 3:38 PM

  So bassicaly GTA (without the crime) on an Oculus? How is that patentable?

• by bserge on 9/13/21, 2:28 PM

  Too late for the lockdowns, too early for the climate catastrophe, just in time for private prisons.

• by ballenf on 9/13/21, 1:42 PM

  The patent is little more than VR call in "controlled environment". Which presumably would also apply to schools. Or bowling alleys (been to several with VR setups). Or anywhere other than in homes.

  1. A method for personalizing a virtual reality session, the method comprising: receiving, from a device located within a controlled environment, a request to initiate the virtual reality session, wherein the request includes user information for a user associated with the device; receiving a second user request for a second device to join the virtual reality session; responsive to receiving the request, initiating a registration process for registering the user to participate in the virtual reality session; responsive to completing the registration process, retrieving a profile associated with the user information, wherein the profile includes first user preferences for the virtual reality session; retrieving a second profile associated with a user of the second device, wherein the second profile includes second user preferences for the virtual reality session; retrieving session initiation information and the first user preferences from the profile; detecting a conflict between the first user preferences and the second user preferences; determining, based on the conflict, a higher priority preference between the first user preferences and the second user preferences; and initiating, based on the session initiation information and the higher priority preference, the virtual reality session.

  => A VR call in a "controlled environment" using shared hardware.

  ...

  11. A method for initiating a virtual reality session within a controlled environment, the method comprising: receiving, from a device located within the controlled environment, a request to initiate the virtual reality session, wherein the request includes user information for a user associated with the device; responsive to receiving the request, initiating a registration process for registering the user to participate in the virtual reality session; receiving a second user request for a second device to join the virtual reality session; responsive to completing the registration process, retrieving a profile associated with the user information, wherein the profile includes first user preferences for the virtual reality session; retrieving a second profile associated with a user of the second device, wherein the second profile includes second user preferences for the virtual reality session; retrieving session initiation information and the first user preferences from the profile; detecting a conflict between the first user preferences and the second user preferences; determining, based on the conflict, a higher priority preference between the first user preferences and the second user preferences; transmitting authentication information to a monitoring system; receiving, via a network, an approval message from the monitoring system based on the authentication information; and initiating, based on the session initiation information, the higher priority preference, and the approval message, the virtual reality session.

  => A monitored version of 1.

  ...

  19. A non-transitory computer-readable medium having instructions stored therein, which when executed by a processor in a wireless device cause the processor to perform operations, the operations comprising: receiving, from a device located within a controlled environment, a request to initiate a virtual reality session, wherein the request includes user information for a user associated with the device; responsive to receiving the request, initiating a registration process for registering the user to participate in the virtual reality session; receiving a second user request for a second device to join the virtual reality session; responsive to completing the registration process, retrieving a profile associated with the user information, wherein the profile includes first user preferences for the virtual reality session; retrieving a second profile associated with a user of the second device, wherein the second profile includes second user preferences for the virtual reality session; retrieving session initiation information and the first user preferences from the profile; detecting a conflict between the first user preferences and the second user preferences; determining, based on the conflict, a higher priority preference between the first user preferences and the second user preferences; and initiating, based on the session initiation information and the higher priority preference, the virtual reality session; transmitting session information to a monitoring center; and receiving, from the monitoring center, an alert associated with the session information.

  => Monitoring system plus alerts.

  Here's the patent:

  https://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=...

• by snikeris on 9/13/21, 3:29 PM

  Simple Rick's!

• by Ajay-p on 9/13/21, 4:44 PM

  This seems cruel.