Week 9

I have always been fascinated by hacking, and have always been curious about it. More often then not, I would assume that hacking is always an evil action. Such as hacking into governmental computer system to "steal" valuable information either for personal benefits or simply just to mess up the system. However, I guess if hacking to improve one anothers' system, and to notify others' of their security system would be helpful.The hacking world and the online multi-player game world has their own new form of language/terms. This is either to avoid other users from understanding their communications or it is just a simpler way of communication among their circle of friends. The term used for this 'language' is called leetspeak. If an average person uses leetspeak on a regular basis to others who doesn't, he/ she would come across as someone who is of a lower intellect, due to the liberal use of leetspeak.

Besides that, the hacking subculture has no authority, nobody has the control over what they would do, and basically noone looks forward for a hacker and would not know it untill your system is being hacked. This is very creepy and scary to me, because we don't know when to expect a hacker, therefore the question of whether your network is secure enough floats around. With my close-mindedness, I only knew that hacking was for personal gain and not for the sake of benefiting the majority. However there is another type of hacking which is called the "civic hacking", in which got me interested; it's done to benefit/ assitant a great audience. As Crabtree had defined it as "a process of designing software in an open collaborative way." Since it has been put it out in this way, it doesn't seem much like hacking to me. It sounds like it's just another platform where users could share and design new softwares/ information to be shared with other users."The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible." (Crabtree, 2003)
 
Not everyone who has the knowledge of hacking would play by the rules. Though, Assange who created Wikileaks, did the right thing. The world is full of news, everything from what you eat for lunch to global warming is considered as news, whether it be to your peers or to the society, it is still news. But it is impossible for the media to be able to get hold of every single news. Evenythough Wikileaks didn't come in to play the role of that, at least it did the nation good. To be able to dig out the dirty where it was hidden then to spread out on the World Wide Web, is incredible. Secrets like the Collateral Murder shouldn't be hidden from the public, eventhough it could potentially stir up some conflicts, but for the sake of justice, it should definitely be put out there. As Assange has described the site as "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis".