Firstly I'd like to get straight to the point. The video of the military gunner shooting down civilians in the street was absolutely horrifying. I had never seen the actual footage before when the WikiLeaks stories were all over the TV (how's that for media filtering), but to witness the slaughter made me realise something. Yes, I say, yes to this information being publicly released. Why was it confidential material in the first place? Because its a demonstration of wrong decision. Wrong decisions made by people representing an entire country, and governments don't want you to see that, do they?
Of course, its difficult to draw the line defining what content should remain private and what should be deemed as rightfully public. The solution? Make right decisions so you don't have to hide information. Easier said than done of course, but hackers are there to (ironically) snoop out the higher authorities and their books of shame.
I've always wondered what its like to be inside the mind of a hacker. I'd like to ask one some questions. What are your motives? How did you learn to do all of this? Have you ever been hacked yourself? What have you achieved in doing this? This week I was able to seek a form of justice written in short essay format by The Mentor. The Hacker's Manifesto appeared in the lecture this week, and is a great demonstration of how government power is much more unruly than that of a curious hacker. Governments lie, murder, cheat, yet individuals are getting thrown behind bars for 'stealing' information.
I liked Crabtree's emphasis on application in this week's reading. It's just simply astounding that the imagination of a student with a computer can come up with something that effectively "introduced file sharing – or peer-to-peer (P2P) technology – to a mass audience." A mass audience. Do you know how large the scale of P2P networking is today? It makes me wish I were born a decade earlier so I could experience this impact in full. Oh, also that I have been subject to much online reciprocity in recent times, and due to this, I actually do help those in need if I can.
Of course, because you were all wondering, I went home today and found that my Windows Firewall is actually turned on. Not sure whether I should download ZoneAlarm yet.
Have you ever been subject to a hacker attack, trojan, or keylogger? Let me know.
