Two current news stories have a lot of people thinking about that age old question involving ethics and integrity: "What would you do?" The first is the less technical than you'd think hacking scandal that brought down the British tabloid News of the World. The second is the amazingly classy choice made by a New York Yankees fan at yesterday's game.

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In the case of the newspaper, it's become common knowledge that employees of the 168 year old publication hacked into the cell phone voicemails of thousands of public figures. From royals to sports stars and other celebrities, they got the scoop through this illegal method of investigative reporting and no one (except maybe the celebrities) really seemed to mind until it was discovered they used the same technique on the voicemail account of a British schoolgirl who went missing in 2002 and whose murdered body was discovered six months later.

The hacking story has been widely publicized leading to the closing of the best-selling paper in the UK by owner and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. What has been less publicized is that the hacking was not some high-tech, black hat operation performed by uber-geeks with years of computer science experience, state-of-the-art gadgets and code cracking software worthy of a summer blockbuster spy thriller.

In fact, at the time News of the World was doing its hacking, it was easy to gain access to voicemail since the default password that came with each account was most often 1234 or 0000 and most account holders didn't bother to change it. Service providers stopped supplying default passwords years ago, but the fact that they once did begs the question if it was so simple to access information and seemingly everyone was doing it and it was really the account owner's fault for not changing the default password to better protect their privacy, is it more forgivable that a reporter would take advantage of the situation? We all know it's wrong and definitely illegal but what would you do if faced with the same temptation, a looming deadline and never ending pressure to beat your competition?

Before you answer, think about what happened at a baseball game yesterday afternoon. In his second at-bat, Yankee superstar Derek Jeter reached the rare career milestone of 3,000 hits. Number 3,000 came in the form of a homerun he hit into the leftfield bleachers and, eventually, into the hands of 23-year-old cell phone salesman Christian Lopez of Highland Mills, New York.

It has become common practice when such a trophy comes into the possession of a fan that a team representative will negotiate with that fan for some reward in exchange for getting the ball back for the player. If the ball is part of a relatively minor accomplishment - say a player's first major league hit - the fan will usually ask for and receive autographed memorabilia and/or tickets to a future game as compensation. But in the case of a 3,000th hit (only 27 players in major league history did it before Jeter), the fan will most often sell the ball to the highest bidder. In anticipation of yesterday's feat, experts had estimated that particular ball to be worth at least $250,000.

So what did Christian Lopez say he wanted when Yankee officials caught up with him? He wanted to return the ball to Derek Jeter saying, "He deserves this, he's worked hard for this...I'm not the type of person to take this away from him." (source)

The team decided to reward Mr. Lopez anyway; he was given high-end tickets for the rest of the season as well as an assortment of bats and jerseys. He also got to meet Derek Jeter. When asked if he ever thought of demanding a million dollars as some fans in his situation have, our hero responded, “It didn’t cross my mind until they asked me what I wanted. The only thing I could think of was a few signed balls would be nice, and to meet him. It wasn’t about the money. It was about a milestone and I wasn’t going to take that away from him. Money's cool and all, but I'm only 23 years old. I have a lot of time to make that." (source)

The question "What would you do?" has certainly become more complicated than it used to be. No longer is it just a choice between right or wrong, good or bad, even legal or illegal. More often than not these days, it is a choice between what everyone else has done for extreme profit or being what many would call foolish. There has been a shift in our collective morality and it's not one to be proud of. Perhaps one way to shift it back is to ask ourselves a simple question when faced with these types of decisions: What would Christian Lopez do?