Blog 2 - Erik Fillner

Weeks 5-8 met my expectations of good content and discussions while I was looking ahead at the material to be covered. Being a Management Information Systems major and working in the IT field, I have read many articles that pertain to what we have covered these past 4 weeks. The week of material that captured my attention most was Week 6, about hackitivism and the group Anonymous.

The reason I find this particular topic so appealing is because I see the potential effectiveness hacking could eventually have. It provides an interesting separation of viewpoints. This class being an ethics class, it is interesting to see how many people view this type of "ethical" hacking as being ethical in the sense that it is being done for the good of the common citizen, and those who view it being bad all together. The discussions make one question their own views as they read about other people's views. As Anonymous get more media attention, I think Anonymous will become more and more active in executing hacks. It will be interesting to see how Anonymous will evolve over time. I believe future wars will have an increasing cyber presence. The next breed of soldiers may very well be cyber soldiers!

Another topic I found very interesting and relavent for this class was the impact social media has. We saw uprisings and an overthrown government in Egypt happen due to the use of social media. These uprisings in northern Africa and the Middle East are all a chain reaction that can be derived from social media. We can see how powerful social media can be, as Mubarak of Egypt actually made the huge effort to shut down the Internet in Egypt, isolating them from the rest of the world.

The past four weeks of class provided interesting and exciting content and discussions. Everything we have covered has been good to think about. Tavani and Ess provide some good insight on discussed topics. We can think about things that have recently happened, things that are happening, and things that could very well happen in the future. With the extent we currently use technology and covering these topics that technology exposes us to, it is both exciting and potentially frightening to think about what could happen in the future.