Presentations - Cyber Security

I decided to make a blog post on the group that presented cyber security. Cyber security has been really interesting to me, and it's actually the area I'd like to work in for my future job. I decided to present on a different topic because I already know a lot about cyber security and I wanted to explore something new. Despite this, I was actually surprised to have learned a decent amount from the presentation. I think was due in part by the fact that each group member could take a different approach to the large umbrella categories that we chose. I was interested to hear that the first virus was called a worm and began on Arpanet. Then, of course, came the email viruses which launched cyber security into what it means today. As it was mentioned by the presenters, the demand for cyber security will constantly grow and grow and most likely will continue to do this throughout our lifetimes, in any foreseeable future. When one presenter brought up the idea of webcam hacking it reminded me of a time when I actually decided to explore the very thing. After poking around in areas of the web that I'm not even sure should exist, I was able to see through everything from street cameras likely there to show the weather, to classrooms of students in other countries, to seeing out of the webcam at a desk in somebody's house. Although I hate the idea of looking through random cameras around the world I think the only reason I explored them was because I was so amazed that it was so easy to do and public for anybody to see. The only other thing that stood out to me was the idea of flash drives being used as hacking tools. To me, it seemed like something you may see in a movie or maybe a kid from my middle school would bring some basic script file to run on the school computer in order to call himself a "hacker", but I hadn't really considered it to be a serious threat.

What Makes a Community - Can Technology Provide What it Takes?

To me, there are only a few things that are essential for a community. The first is people. There needs to be a group of some intelligent (or at least somewhat intelligent) beings for a community to form around. For our purposes, human beings will be those living beings. The next is communication. There needs to be some way for those beings to understand that there are other beings that exist. The communication doesn't even necessarily have to be complex. The last thing is some kind of reliability between the living beings. I believe there has to be some common ground. This can be a similar interest, a cultural connection, or anything along those lines. With all of these things together, we're able to have a community. Say there's a group of people living in a neighborhood. They can be a community since they are a group of human beings, able to speak to each other, and their common ground is the fact that they live in the same area. Now, take a group of people who, for example, all see online that there is a concert going on in their area. They can all meet up regularly at the concerts and their common ground could be that they all enjoy the same artist playing at the concerts. In this situation, did technology create the community, or did it simply help the creation process? What if there's a group of people who log on to a video game's forum site. Many people post topics and talk with each other daily. Here, we again have a group of human beings communicating with the common ground being they all play or are interested in the same video game, except this community exists purely online. I think this is a great example of how technology can provide what it takes to create a community, and as you can see, its not much different than a community outside of technology.

Dot.Com to Dot.Bomb - My Thoughts

It seems that as the world wide web began, it was thought to be a ground breaking invention. People were excited about its existence and what it could be used for. Although, it quickly became a grounds for competition. Just like advertisement on radios and over television, the internet became an additional place for competing companies to battle for control over the consumer market. Because of this, many companies began and many companies ended. Fortunately, a lot of the companies ended because they were bought out and re-branded or re-purposed into something new. Essentially, many companies and businesses were spawned, some ended but many merged, and we ended up with the big names we have today, such as Microsoft and Amazon. What's interesting to me is that so many businesses began, yet only the ones with promising futures snowballed into the large corporations they are today. However, there were even many promising internet start-ups that ended when the dot com bubble burst. So many people saw value in internet-based start-ups, that their stocks began to increase, only by too much. When the collapse (the dot bomb) hit, many companies outright ended, like I mentioned before, while some companies that survived (specifically Amazon and eBay) were  able to grow to stock value higher than the value during the dot com "boom", as it's called. It's interesting to see such a ground breaking invention cause such influence only to crash and burn in a relatively short time. Luckily, the world wide web and dot companies were able to stabilize into what they are today.