Posts

Presentation

       The group I am writing about presented their topic as cybersecurity and cybercrimes. They defined cybercrime as a crime using a computer, these include phishing, hacking, spreading terrorism, child pornography or pedophilia. Apparently, the US has also spent $28 billion on cybersecurity showing its a big and threatening field. Consequently 66% of US citizens also online date which brings its own perils such as catfishing and crimes that come from meeting strangers off the internet. To protect oneself from this people should check if the person they are talking to is who they say they are because apparently also 81% of people lie about their identity online.       In general, to improve security online we should be aware that 1 in 13 emails sent contain malware and others could be phishing for personal information. Many government agencies still communicate solely through mail and face to face interactions because of these worries as a precaution. Warren Buffet was also quoted s

Artificial Intelligence

      In 1950 Alan Turing developed a test for determining if computing machines can be considered intelligent. While this may not fit any person's full definition of intelligence if a computer program can convince a human in a simple conversation even once that they were the same it is no longer a title only living things can be measured by.      Some top minds in the world of science like Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking have warned about the threats AI pose to humanity. The extents of human intelligence is already shown as dangerous and disastrous. What is so scary about artificial intelligence is how powerful and fast moving it is. Most computers can respond to a mouse click faster than a human mind can. So when computers can communicate with intelligence in the same way they do with their peripherals it will all happen way faster than humans can respond. In the same way the theory that only when and if time travel becomes possible the past and future will be completely changed

Movie

     In class the other day we watched the movie "Start Up Dot Com" set in the early two thousands during the dot com financial bubble. The characters document their experience raising capital for their internet start up GOVworks.com. Khalil and his friend Tom came up with the idea of paying parking tickets online and wanted to publish it to the world, and make millions off of it. Things got more hostile between them and the other investors however when they were trying to find backers and decide how much their idea was worth. I guess everyone was fixated on being a millionaire and that is what most of the movie was about. Their actual product turned out to be messy and filled with bugs in a competitive market and one of their original investors had to be bought out because they did not like him or his lack of contributions. Amid all of this their business is broken in to in what some would call corporate sabotage and to others a distraction. I did not finish the movie in cla

Dot Com to Dot Bomb

         From the late nineteen nineties to the early two thousandth century the internet went from being very privatized with only a few corporate networks in 1992 like Prodigy, Compuserve, Genie, America On-Line and Delphi to a public information super highway moving faster than any one business could keep up with. Microsoft wanted to expand from just being a software company to having a stake in the internet so in 1992 they teamed up CompuServe to connect users to the internet, this was put in direct competition by Dave Spool's creation of the Mosaic Browser for a graphical internet interface. The now three year old World Wide Web project and two year old HTTP language made the internet more accessible and diverse for all users. The dinosaurs used in your presentation represented the proprietary network businesses too slow to adapt to the changing times, plus they are really fun to play with and research! The company SPRY started only in 1994 to create internet accessible boxes

Guest Speaker Erik Hamberg

Erik Hamberg came to class to speak about what living and working in a virtual world means to him. He seems to be a theater geek as well but took that business off the ground by running it online. He is a self published author of many books some that he put out in the same year and a sci fi series that he has just completed. He made this all seem so simple to do until I thought of the prospect of actually writing a book, but both he and you seem to have done it. Some of the local involvement he is a part of really amazed me and how it was so impactful like running the Grand Cinema here for a few years and now the local parks of Tacoma as a commissioner. I visit both of these places regularly and so it amazes me how what he has done in his life has ripples of effect into my own life. The most interesting part of his talk for me was how he now runs a podcast network. He simply reached out to podcasts in the area and set up a network and advertising deals which he says make them much mo

Project Presentation

For the assignment to plan a subject to talk on and present in front of the class I have put a lot of thought. The main subject I'm focusing on is the case of identity in the virtual world. From the days of anonymous message boards made under screen names to now when we are giving away more and more of our personal information to the online communities we live in. Why should this be worrying you may ask? Well, we model all things virtual off of their real world counterparts with so many more possiblities. With this comes identity theft. I would like to present on how the features of personal identification are quickly slipping out of our own control on the web. From just using usernames and passwords to two factor identification is having to adapt rapidly to stay secure from hackers or scammers. New innovations threaten this and I would like to investigate them. One is adobe's new software that will allow you to edit and alter clips of people's speach to even make them say

The Future of Journalism

With new technology around us, everything is changing. One area affected by new inventions is journalism. From the printing press allowing the mass publication to radios providing live commentary to television bringing pictures and broadcasts from the world into our homes. The newest innovation seems to be the internet. Allowing constant contact to anyone in the world the World Wide Web is changing journalism. It is up for debate whether this is good or bad as it allows any person to publish anything without checks for factuality. A video published to Youtube with the title Epic 2015 is purely satirical in nature, but in the wrong context to any college tech class, it could seem like pure truth. The same thing is true about The Onion and their social media spinoff Clickhole which post parody news stories that can get quoted and passed on as fact. The question now is where is journalism going? My thoughts are that there will always be a need and a source for reporting, but some o