Socio-political rants.
I was having dinner with my friend Maggie, and she said how she thought there were a lot of weirdos “Over there” as in the Internet. I then replied, “Actually the internet is not, not-real, the people that are strange on the net exist somewhere. They are part of the world here, not just over there.”
We went to talk about hackers, virus writers, why people go on the net and how much we rely on computers nowadays, and that sometimes I think, it’s completely possible that someone will eventually write a virus that can wipe out everything at once. Something we can’t imagine now, or don’t have the technical knowledge to ever understand, but we would suffer under the results, as we would lose a whole chunk of our lives or work in one go.
Most of us have so little security on our computers because we simply do not know how to protect ourselves or exactly the capabilities of people want to do harm. Most of us, right now metaphorically leave our doors unlock, just like people used to in the past and it will be a while before people learn that it’s not such a good idea.
The evolution of viruses and hacks has gone so many leaps and bounds in the last few years. At first you have to open an attachment, then after a while you don’t even need to do that through holes in your browser, and now things can come through your server. People already can borrow your computer to make it into a remote server to send spam, my email address has been over taken so long ago, I have just simply given up trying to get yahoo to do something about it. It’s possible to steal your credit cards by sending trojans to take possession of your functions, and even copy your type strokes. And as the net becomes more sophisticated, as with the users, the proportion of people who has the ability to break it, and break into it, increases also.
We already put so much of daily human activities onto our digital devices, our lives so reliant on it. We already use it for communications, artistic endeavors, information, shopping, as well as dating, and even sex. Everything is getting more connected, my phone hooks up with my computer, my stereo hooks up to my computer, and eventually my phone will hook up to my stereo, also my fridge, my air conditioning, possible my electrical circuit in my house. Its such a reality, I visited a friend who is a programmer and much like he showed me the capabilities of the internet nearly ten years ago, beyond what I could imagine then that we are now experiencing, he showed me how connected one’s house could be, from the telephone, to the television, to the dimming of the lights.
And humans in general are not always good creatures, and all the problems we encounter in life will appear on the net. So cyber crime is on the rise. Child porn is on the rise. Eventually cyber terrorism, where these groups are willing to target innocent people physically, they will in time target innocent people’s information, to make a point, and in retaliation, governments could return attacks on computers that run infrastructure in countries they do not like, making it into cyber warfare.
There is a consistent myth, that government employs people to hack into other government’s system or prepare for cyber attacks onto other countries, and much like nobody really knew about all the nuclear, biological and chemical weapons experiment done in the fifties, we do not know the kind of technological warfare they are preparing for and experimenting with now.
The information age is not just a hyped up concept, we are in it right now, where intellectual property is a currency we rely on. The skills most of us have, do not translate to real physical things, it’s all up in our minds, and what we can do with the knowledge and experience we have is all simply information. And eventually attacking the storage vaults and back ups of information of individuals, corporations and governments will have more devastating and long lasting impact than bombing bridges, power stations and water lines, which can be rebuilt, compared to re-amassing generations of information and knowledge.
And although there are some closed systems out there, where servers are not connected to the normal internet, that is only safe if they remain land lines. But in the future much of the connections will become wireless, I can send emails and surf on the net on my phone anywhere. My mac has blue tooth, has a built in air-port (if I sit in a café with that function with my lap top, I automatically get online) where both can be connected to different systems as long as I am in the area of a facility that is compatible and it is turned on. But that control could be subverted if someone knows how to force open the connection or I happen to just be using it. That could so easily happen in the future where people can hack into different internet frequencies and intercept and get into any system that uses wireless communications.
I guess it will be sometime yet before all this appears, but it will, in our lifetimes or not. As people once had to imagine machines that flew, places where nights can look like day, and bombs could evaporate humans. The possibility was there, but the technology was not. But if it can be conceived, it can eventually be done.
Yan Sham-Shackleton Online 