The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

The Good

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22381046

Above is an article about the good effects of the internet. The article talks about an "underground" website that was created to sell drugs. The website, however, was targeted by hackers and was attacked with a denial of service. The attack left he website down for about two days and while it is back up they have acknowledged the fact that they will probably be targeted again in the near future.This is just one example of the internet community coming together and trying to rid the internet of harmful and illegal sites like this. While politicians have called for something to be done about the site and ones like it no action had been taken.The online community took it into their own hands to try and clean up their community.

The Bad
http://www.ted.com/playlists/45/alexis_ohanian_9_talks_about.html

For the bad I chose a Ted talk that we watched in class, Drew Curtis How I Beat a Patent Troll. This talk goes into detail about how Drew Curtis and his business were being sued for patent infringement by a patent troll. A patent troll is someone who will try to sue you for infringing on a patent that they claim to own. This causes many problem for the business and most of them, while never having done anything wrong, will settle the law suite to make it go away. Curtis fought it and won his case because he made it clear he had no money to lose. These types of things that show us the bad side of the internet and that there are bad people out there trying to take advantage of people and companies.

The Ugly

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22398484

Above is an article about some middle school students in Alaska that hacked their school computers using administrative access. This is just one example of the ugly reality that we have to live with. Hacking has become some prevalent in our society that kids as young as middle school are now being taught how to hack into computers to gain access to sensitive material. If its something that you agree with or not we have to acknowledge the fact that hacking has become a very big problem for us. Whether these students were doing it for good or bad is not important, when you are that young you shouldn't be worrying about hacking computers. The amount of technology in our society has become detrimental to all of us.

Prepaid Phones

I don't think that the government should be able to outlaw prepaid phones because although they are used by criminals sometimes there are many people with legitimate reasons to use them. Many low income families use them along with people who travel to other countries and many other people with good intentions use them. I think that they can be controlled to help fight against the criminals by having them be registered with a phone company so that they can be tracked if it is needed.

Tracking Your Kids

Implanting tracking chips in your kids is a invasion of privacy for the children because they it would be forced on them. The rewards are obvious in being able to track you child if they get lost but the risks are also very high because other people would be able to know exactly where the child is to. If congress were to try and pass the bill supporting it I would have to vote against it because it is just to much of an invasion of privacy to me. The idea to put them in shoes is less worrying to me but I still see it as an invasion of privacy.

Big Brother

 

Is the government taking it to far and invading our privacy with all of the call screening and things like that or does national security take precedent?