Blog 2- Sami Atari

I think this class is very influential in encouraging intellectual debates. We have covered a lot of topics that get brought up in many of my IT classes, but I never had a chance to give put more thought into them until now.

One subject I enjoyed discussing dealt with the social media affecting the Arab Spring. In my Global Information Systems class, we constantly were looking at the ICT rating of many countries. We would compare old rankings with new ones to see which countries are developing their ICT. When we came to the Middle East the rankings were scattered, with some countries having rating on the high end and other on the low end of the spectrum. A big topic that we focused on was how the social media became the faceless leaders of the revolution taking place. I strongly believe that social media made a big impact on the revolution, due to the fact that the government shut down the internet.

Another subject I enjoyed was about hackers and hactivism. I personally believe there are good hackers and bad. Hackers seemingly have a bad reputation, but to me there are more true hackers that actually help us than hurt us. What I mean by “true hackers” is that true hackers don’t hack to hurt people, but instead to discover new capabilities and share them with others. Everything we use when it comes to technology has been affected by hackers. They take what we have and improve it. The video “The Secret History of Hacking” did a good job of showing how hacking got started and showed how some hackers can be our best inventors, for example, Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of apple. I watched an interesting documentary on hackers call “Hackers are People Too”, and they bring up a good point that even Thomas Edison could be considered a hacker, since he took ideas that were already out there and improved them.

Having said that, I still think that there are definitely some hackers that don’t have justified means for their actions. For example, the group Anonymous is now what people think of when hackers are mentioned. These are the hackers that take part in cybercrimes, and are the ones giving “hackers” their bad reputation. These are the type of people who interfered with my PlayStation Network in the spring, along with the people who hacked UW-Milwaukee database.

It was great getting feedback from others on the discussion board. It helps give me another perspective that I would have never thought of on my own. After taking a step back and thinking about our topics, I almost feel that one of the first forms of social media was phone phreaking.