Safety and Hacking

I remember about seven or eight years ago, when our internet was still run on a dial-up modem, and Napster and Kazaa were the fad, computer hacking was something pursued by ecstasy popping, rogue cyber rebels and anarchists. If your computer got hacked, it was taken in stride as something part and parcel of being a member of the web. Indeed, it was a simpler time. Since then, I believe that there have been two large evolutions of the hacking culture. In fact, these two trends have been in completely different directions.

The first, which is the more unfortunate side of hacking, is that a majority of hackers have become part of a larger "organized crimes" community. According to a survey done by Verizon, organized crime was responsible for over 90% of web breaches in 2009. With information being much more valuable nowadays than ever before, and the criminal community recognizing this, the internet became a huge target for criminal activity.

I think this brings to a sad reality, the culture of hacking and what it has become. What was once a community of cyber ninjas, looking to always challenge and in a twisted way, keep the progress of the development of the internet on its toes, has now become a means for damage at a much more serious and superficial level.

The second trend, I feel, is the idea of using hacking tools to make complicated and restricted technology, much more useful and free. Some might say that this is some form of "life hacking". I would include in this, ideas such as "jailbreaking" a phone so that it can be used on all platforms, the same idea with gaming consoles and music systems. There are a lot of restrictions that companies set on tech products, for the sole purpose that the method of use is close streamed, and within their control. What hacking like this does, is that it brings back flexibility and a lot more potential of the technology that you can use. The legality of any kind of hacking is obviously debatable, and it would probably be a very short debate, but if I were to endorse any kind of hacking, I would certainly go with this one, mostly because it doesn't cause the use any harm and information is always protected. Obviously it does harm the corporations that want to maximize profits on their technologies, but sympathy is very rarely on their side.

I think that there is a very healthy side of hacking. True hackers are people that challenge systems and technologies. Without them, we wouldn't be near the sort of security standards that we are at now. With organizations such as Anonymous, hackers are becoming much more surfaced nowadays and they are less of an underground community. It will be interesting how the hacking culture will change in the coming years, and what will happen legislatively to account for them.

Media, advertising and the Internet

I recently wrote a paper that deals with how the internet is influencing the advertising industry, and I though it would be interesting to share a bit of insight and as a few questions.

The trends are obvious. Advertising industries are moving towards the WWW. It's the same story with written media, television, movies and music. The concentration of so much information in one place begs to question, what makes one stand out on the online platform? People are getting more and more creative with the ways that they are using social-media, with interactive fan pages, incentives and catchy hooks and stories. However, there is still a vast majority of the online world that is simply ignored.

I heard a neat statistic about twitter the other day. Apparently, roughly 75% of tweets and twitter users are completely ignored. This shows just how difficult it is to stand out on the internet. I recently founded my own Photography company, partly as an exercise on how to use online tools to get exposure, and what I realized is that there are two distinct trends. First, there is the meme trend, where a story is just that empathetic, that it explodes on the internet. The second is a grind of gradual pace and growth, until a critical mass is reached and you are established on the internet. The thing that is in common with both these situations, is that you need to always be active, fresh and moving. As soon as you become stagnant as a producer of content, you will lose momentum and eventually fade out.

I think that the field of media online is going to be something that is at the forefront of the coming generation, and hopefully it will provide for people to get the opportunity to be creative, and come up with new ideas to engage the target audience. I think it's an exciting time for creative computer scientists and engineers, and the true nature of creative design is slowly becoming prominent and only time will tell the direction it will take in the future.

Virtual Revolutions, Memes, and Mainstreaming the World

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine wrote an article for the Huffington Post about the meme craze and how it affected the culture of mainstream vs underground. It's a really good read and I thought I'd blog on a followup on what he was talking about. Do give the article itself a read.

If you are a college student, or a part of any social circle, big or small, that has a presence on Facebook or Twitter, you have come across something that looks like this:


Every big savvy college/student group/company has a page with thousands of these memes. If you're in csc300, chances are that you know what 9gag is.

What is interesting about these kind of memes, is that before they became so popular, they used to be a very nerdy trend that gamers would use to share inside jokes with their cyber friends. Before becoming "mainstream", memes were mostly an underground cyber-geeky thing to do. So the question is, what changed the meme culture to make it universal?

Another example is the music industry. We all know about the Justin Beiber story, and bands such as Walk Off The Earth and Lonely Island finding success through YouTube. Music groups nowadays, find it more effective to use the internet as their platform rather than playing small live shows and using the radio. The internet is convenient. You can create a mini-studio with equipment as simple as your iPhone and an acoustic guitar. It's accessible to the audience that you want to target. It's open to feedback, comments and hit-counters, which is the kind of statistics that are vital to the entertainment industry.

What we see happening is that music that was primarily shared only within certain circles
is now becoming widespread. Everyone with an internet access has become a potential celebrity, through video blogs, and twitter feeds. The 'niche' genres don't exist anymore because of how easily accessible stories become on the Internet, especially when they gain momentum.

So what does that say about the quality of information and entertainment surfacing today. It's true that certain talented people that would have gone unnoticed otherwise, are beginning to get 'discovered', but it's also true that anyone who has grown up in the era of 70's rock 'n' roll, are not shy with their opinions on Justin Beiber and Rebecca Black.

I guess it goes back to the idea of the world becoming more and more naked through the internet. Exclusivity and uniqueness is slowly disappearing and people are all beginning to fall on the same curb of labelled stereotyping. The Hashtag culture has only begun, and it seems like it's going to be around for a very long time.