As supplied to us by AT&T, the much more flattering "inspiration" for the prank:

[13:14:24]
Darlene: I apologize for the problem. Please contact an AT&T Wireless representative at 1.800.331.0500. Unfortunately I do no have access to that service.

[13:15:15]
robert XX: i'll just jump off a bridge.

[13:17:15]
Darlene: I'll be right with you.

[13:17:39]
robert XX: lol

[13:18:46]
Darlene: I apologize. They will be happy to assist you at that number.

[13:27:38]
Darlene: It has been my goal to provide you with OUTSTANDING service and that you are VERY SATISFIED with the way I've handled your request. In addition to the survey link at the end of this chat, you may receive a call asking about the level of service I have provided. I hope that you are VERY SATISFIED with my service today. Thank you for choosing AT&T!

[13:35:06]
Darlene: Thank you for contacting AT&T. Please use the CLOSE button when you are ready to exit our chat session.

[13:49:37]
Darlene: I haven't heard from you in awhile. Do you wish to continue this chat?

[13:56:58]
Darlene: I am ending this chat session since I have not heard from you. If you wish to chat with AT&T again, please open a new chat session. We look forward to serving your needs now and in the future.

[13:57:13]
info: Thank you for chatting with us. Please click the "Close" button on the top right of the chat window to tell us how we did today.

[Digg via Consumerist]

Take this bridge in Guangzhou China for example:

Government officials in Guangzhou in south east China ordered workers to smear butter on all of the climbable surfaces of the 1,000 foot long steel bridge.

Government spokesman Shiu Liang said: "We tried employing guards at both ends but that didn't work - and we put up special fences and notices asking people not to commit suicide here. None of it worked - and so now we have put butter over the bridge and it has worked very well. Nobody can get up there and anybody who tries either falls"

Apparently, they were fed up with traffic jams caused by motorists slowing down to watch people jump (or threaten to jump) to their deaths. Mmm...suicide butter jam. [Metro]

Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.

The family now gets $52,600 (up from $44,000) as well as $4,385 every year as long as one of the parents are alive. The Foxconn official that leaked this information to the press spoke anonymously since he wasn't a qualified press-relations employee. [Yahoo]

Sun apparently was given not just one, but 16 prototype iPhones on July 9 or 10 to deliver to R&D, and he reported one missing three days later. He committed suicide early in the morning on July 16, after allegedly suffering through brutal interrogations.

Foxconn's China general manager James Lee told the NYT that Sun had a history of disappearing products: "Several times he had some products missing, then he got them back," and that they "don't know who took the product, but it was at his stop."

The NYT closes with an episode that again shows the kind of people Sun had to deal with: Not long after Sun's father finished telling journalists Foxconn treated the family well, a security guard with two men in Foxconn shirts appeared and threatened to beat up a journalist's translator if they kept asking the family questions. Foxconn swears the guard wasn't one of their guys.

I'm sure he had nothing to do with Foxconn, and was just some dude who asked to tag along with the guys in Foxconn shirts. You know, for fun. [NYT]

Maybe some competing company or manufacturer hired someone to lift it. Maybe some kid picked it up off the curb and it's in his toy chest. Maybe it's under someone's couch cushions. Maybe it's lying in the middle of a street, being run over by hundreds of cars an hour, completely unrecognizable. Maybe someone reading this post has it in their hands. Maybe it never existed.

Where do you think the missing prototype is?

"My dear, I'm sorry, go back home tomorrow, something has happened to me, please don't tell my family, don't contact me, this is the first time that I have ever begged you, please agree to that! I am so sorry!"

And in what is reportedly his final online chat—supposedly verified as authentic—Sun tells a friend he never stole the phone, and thinks it was swiped. He also again implies that he was tortured, or at least forcefully detained and interrogated with physical force, clearly contradicting what Foxconn's security chief told a Chinese paper:

"Even at a police station, the law says force must never be used, much less in a corporate office. I was just a suspect, my dear head of security, so what reason and right do you have to confine me and use force?

If Foxconn is directly involved in his death, it and all of its executives could go bankrupt a million times over and that would still not even come to close to justice for Sun Danyong. [The New Yorker]

The latter report is the more interesting of the two, for the glimpse it gives into Foxconn's corporate culture: When Foxconn security manager Gu Qinming interviewed Sun, he says that Sun initially blamed the missing phone on a female colleague, provoking Gu to poke him in the shoulder and ask, "Are you a man?"

According to Gu, it was Sun who suggested that Foxconn search his house, to prove his innocence. Which almost sounds reasonable, insofar as Gu thought Sun was both incompetent and a liar—what else could Sun have done?

Yet, Sun was quoted as saying on a Chinese message board, "Even at a police station, the law says force must never be used, much less in a corporate office. I was just a suspect, my dear head of security, so what reason and right do you have to confine me and use force?"

Keep in mind as well that the latter report is based on the word of the guy who interrogated Sun Danyong before his death and works for a company so secretive it might have driven a man to suicide over a phone. [The New Yorker]

Analysts in the components industry tell DigiTimes that Apple won't switch to a different supplier because "product development involves collaboration on technologies that cannot be easily transferred to other makers."

So, for the same reasons that the stakes are so very high for Foxconn—the forces that essentially killed Sun Danyong—are the same reasons that Foxconn likely won't pay very dearly for their role in the tragedy. From a business perspective, one life is not worth years of secrets, hundreds of millions of dollars.

Which makes his death even more senseless than it already was. He didn't die over a phone, but for something more, and at the same time, far, far less. [DigiTimes]

First, a recap: Sun Danyong's death came after a case of prototype iPhones he was charged with shipping to Apple's headquarters in Cupertino ended up short by one. Sun couldn't produce the device and claimed not to know what had happened; security officials at Foxconn, the manufacturer of Apple's iPhone and Sun's employer, didn't buy his story. At all.

In the days following the incident, Sun quite possibly went through hell. He confided in his university friends—he had just graduated—that his house had been searched repeatedly and without announcement, that he had been endlessly interrogated, that he'd been held in solitary confinement, and even that he'd been outright tortured by security guards. Soon after, he was found dead at the base of his apartment building, having fallen 14 stories. He died, one way or another, for a phone. Yeah, no, you're right: This is fucking crazy.

A common snap response is that this is just symptomatic of poor labor regulations in China, a sentiment seemingly backed up by Foxconn's tellingly honest statement on the issue:

Regardless of the reason of Sun's suicide, it is to some extent a reflection of Foxconn's internal management deficiencies, especially in how to help young workers cope with the psychological pressures of working life at the company.

They've since suspended one security guard without pay, and turned over the investigation to police. But to put this incident in that broad context isn't useful, either to explain what happened or to know how to deal with it. To a certain extent, Apple does own Sun's death, and it's almost shocking that something like this hadn't already happened.

Apple's history of secrecy is long and storied, but hardly seen as scary by itself. We spend a lot of time trying to crack it for stories, and just as much laughing at how extreme it is—even Apple's office employees in California are constantly monitored by cameras, forced to pass through absurdly complex security gates on a daily basis, carrying prototypes in black cloaks and flipping on warning lights in rooms when the cloaks are removed from the devices of idolatry.

But there's a lot at stake for Apple, so to an extent their paranoia is understandable: keeping a device like the iPhone secret keeps their strategy out of competitors' view, and more importantly ensures an all-out media eruption when it goes public on schedule. There is no more secretive company in tech, and there is no device more important to keep secret than the iPhone.

Apple's also had, since the early days, a punitive attitude towards those who betray them. Stories of Steve Jobs not giving his best friend and early employee Dan Kottke pre-IPO stock because of disagreements, or banning difficult journalists from having access to the company's products or briefings come to mind. (Disclaimer: But not all.) I'm hardly saying that killing is in the character of the company, but there has sometimes been a price to pay for crossing Apple.

This ethos becomes dangerous when combined with billions of dollars and the dubious values at Chinese manufacturing companies like Foxconn, which've placed profit above human rights in the past. —Note: Foxconn is headquartered in Taiwan, but does the vast majority of manufacturing in China—specifically at the 270,000-employee plant in Shenzhen.

Foxconn may be huge, but they're not unique, and if they can't keep Apple's hardware plans quiet, it's easy to imagine another manufacturing conglomerate stealing their contracts worth untold billions. It's a scary and very real threat to a solid business relationship, and a subtly tyrannical one.

But the stakes are much higher at Foxconn's campus (to use a generous word) than at Apple's. If an Apple employee leaks a product, he could lose his job, and Apple would lose what amounts to some free advertising—after all, leaks aren't a bad way to build buzz either. If a Foxconn employee does the same, he endangers thousands of jobs, billions of dollars in contracts and a vital relationship for his company. That's an unrealistically, recklessly high responsibility to ask each employee—Sun and his alleged torturer—to shoulder. Imagine yourself in Sun's shoes: You have just lost a prototype of the world's most coveted gadget, built by the world's most unforgivingly secretive electronics maker. Would you like your life to be hung against the balance of billions of dollars, in a country with lax labor laws and a history of running its citizen over with tanks?

But wait, Apple says, let us be clear:

We are saddened by the tragic loss of this young employee, and we are awaiting results of the investigations into his death. We require our suppliers to treat all workers with dignity and respect.

They require every last line worker to keep secrets worth billions of dollars; they require Foxconn bosses to make sure these employees keep their mouths shut; they require that suppliers treat their workers well. Of those, requirement they're most willing to talk openly about also sound the most like an afterthought, and to "require" something doesn't necessarily mean you really expect it.

(As an aside, who's to say that the case didn't leave China with all the devices, and through the many handlers in the shipping and airline companies, ahem, lose a little weight during the complicated transit? And why weren't such valuable prototypes delivered by hand? Art museums do this, and they don't even have industrial spies to deal with.)

Rightly or not, Sun was the only guy Foxconn felt it could hold accountable for the mess it found itself in, a judgment which probably cost him his life, and which his employer felt tremendous pressure to make. But this scenario could have easily been foreseen, and the matter of how much human risk Apple calculated it could take before a 25-year-old man ended up dead is at least as important a question as how they respond to it.

[Photo from Southern Metropolis Daily and The Brisbane Times]

It may have been a very special phone, and it may have been a phone that would have cost a company and its shareholders maybe upwards of billions of theoretical dollars if it had leaked out into a competitor's hands, but really, it's a phone. Is it worth a life? No. I think this secrecy thing has gone far enough. Especially since nothing stays unleaked ever anymore!

What caused the death? An overzealous security official who used "interrogation methods" to find the phone. A fucking phone. Going to extremes like putting the worker into solitary confinement, searching his house (illegally? legally?) and possibly beating him isn't the way to go about things. I know, the employer probably put a lot of pressure on the security chief to find that phone—maybe even threatening the chief himself with termination if the missing device wasn't found—but he's a grown man. He can make his own decisions about right and wrong. Torturing a guy over a phone is not right. It's just a job. Is it worth a life? No.

But of course the blame doesn't lie only with the security guard. The company Foxconn and its parent company Hon Hai aren't pillars of the Chinese community when it comes to placing the welfare of its employees above how much yuan they squeeze out of them. Foxconn admitted to breaking Chinese labor laws. CHINESE labor laws. If they don't care about their workers under normal, everyday circumstances, how much do you think they'll value a man's welfare if they think a little roughing up will save a multi-million dollar contract and secure future dealings with Apple? It's just money. Is it worth a life? No.

And was this method of interrogation even such a smart idea in the first place? If you're just so compelled to torture someone (which you shouldn't be) don't do it over shit that would be leaked three months down the road anyhow. Think about the last two years: do you remember any Apple product that hasn't had spy shots leaked beforehand that turned out to be real? It's now become inevitable. The CIA doesn't torture someone to stop the sun from coming up. That's fucking retarded.

As for Apple, are they blameless in this? No, of course not. They know exactly what kind of people they're dealing with. Remember that Chinese labor law story linked above? Apple sent a team to investigate Foxconn before the manufacturer admitted to wrongdoings, yet found nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, you could come to the conclusion that having an insanely locked-down company do your manufacturing is the situation Apple prefers, so they can use fear and intimidation tactics to maintain their culture of secrecy. But really, it's just a product. Is it worth a life? No.

This may have started about a missing phone, but in the end, it all boils down to being about money. Someone was indirectly killed, through a sequence of sad and unfortunate events, over money. You know who kills for money? Criminals. So please, Apple, stop doing business with criminals. And get your own priorities straight. A phone is not worth dying, or killing, over. [iPhone leak suicide coverage @ Giz]

Reports say that 25-year-old Sun Danyong was subjected to brutal treatment—including torture—by Foxconn security after a shipment of prototype iPhones turned up at Apple's door one device short. A few days later, he plummeted 14 stories from his apartment, dying instantly—an event that was apparently caught on camera.

The murder investigation and treatment of the case as an "apparent suicide" is probably just a formality, since the circumstances of the case—which, if they've been accurately represented—haven't changed, but to hear that Chinese official actually have footage of the incident and are still cautious to call it a suicide is strange, to say the least. Foxconn's alleged poor treatment of its workers, and by proxy, Apple's incredible demands for secrecy, are under tremendous scrutiny as—needless to say, if this turns out to be anything worse than what was first reported, it'll be huge. [Register]

Leave it to the nation who contrived Russian Roulette to come up with rope jumping. It looks totally simple and straight forward, until you just think for a second about the physics involved. If you jump straight down, you could dislocate some important part of your body, or worse, you could snap the rope and keep on falling. The key is to jump so that you swing across the underside of the bridge, and to trust that your rope is attached to something that ain't going nowhere.

And you'd better be coordinated when doing it in groups of, say, 54—like above—lest someone on their backswing hits you as you're heading down.

Still not dangerous enough? Well, according to English Russia, rope jumpers like to up the ante by jumping...

...when there is no water under the bridge but raw firm ice, also they use to jump at that same moment when the train is going thru the bridge.

None for me, thanks, but good luck to you. [English Russia; Russos]

The unemployed, depressed 24-year-old left his roommate a suicide note containing hazy details of his location along with personal information (like his SSN and bank account). And then he went into a meticulous set of instructions regarding his PS3.

You know my ps3 is special. Similar USED ps3's go for AT LEAST $450-$500. Our landlord guy wants a ps3 like mine. Let him know that $400 would be a GOOD deal. If he doesn't want it, format the drive by going to Settings>System>Format Utility. You can say it "comes with the latest firmware software" to help market it on the internet. In case you don't know, it's the special "100% backwards compatible" (60 GB) ps3.

An awkward moment of kindness preceding the most selfish act of murder. It's hard to understand, but that's probably a good thing. [KATU via Kotaku]

Sadly, this isn't the first time something like this has happened. Followers of internet lore are surely familiar with Brandon "I told u I was hardcore" Vedas, who overdosed on drugs live on a webcam after having given his personal information out to the viewers in case something went wrong. All were too afraid to get in trouble to call the authorities.

There's definitely something about being on the internet that makes you feel cut off from and not responsible for the people you're dealing with (see: YouTube commenters), but when you're watching a real, live human on video doing something obviously damaging to themselves, it's completely inexcusable to do nothing. And to egg them on, well, that's something those people will have to deal with on their own. A sad story all around. [NewTeeVee]

Super Bowl Ad Watch: GM Forces Robot To Kill Self [Jalopnik]

One use only [WMMNA]