ONLINE PRIVACY

ONLINE PRIVACY

Social media has taken the world by storm and has provided the powers that be, the ideal way to hack you and me.  Adult dating sites, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, YouTube, Google+, Meetup, Disqus, Medium, Renren, Pinterest, Instagram, Secret, Vine, WhatsApp, Flickr, Qzone, VK, Tumblr, and the rest of the social media slice of the Internet can be equated to a  global collection of profiles, admissions, personal ledgers, or even diaries. It constitutes the largest collection of volunteered personal information ever and the greatest incentive to would be hackers to mark you. In days gone by, personal ledgers were kept by many in which to tabulate their thoughts, record their ideas and purposefully expose their fears to a book. A  book that played the role of a non-human psychologist, if you like.  It merely acted as a wall to bounce ideas off, tell your secrets to, share you deepest thoughts, reveal you innermost desires, even talk to if needs be, though never expecting a reply. 

Personal diaries and personal ledgers helped many people to retain their sanity and deal with their demons, but as personal ledgers slowly died out, it was replaced by the psychologist and his couch. For many a "would be patient", bouncing the mental anguish off a quack was often a futile and expensive exercise, whereas for many a physiologist, a very lucrative money spinner. The more people who thought they needed the help of a psychologist, the more psychologist brain washed them into using their services. 

I don't deny nor dispute that there is a need for psychologist in society, but they tend to diagnose everyone with  some sort of schizophrenia or the other. Prescribing the same regimen of drugs to everyone from Retalin, to Adderall, to Concerta, to Vyvanse, to Imipramine, to Inderal, to Invega Sustenna, to Ambien, to Celexa, to Prozac, to Thorazine, to Valium, to Zoloft, to mention but a few, even  though we all have a biochemical individuality, in fact and absolutely  unique biochemical individuality.

Some parents even felt the need to send their children to psychologist for evaluation who then became regular couch subjects. This turned out to be an ingenious cash cow model that kept psychologist near the top of the food chain for some time and also kept the masses sedated and conditioned to be perfect zombies. But the psychologist are being phased out by the social media networks, where the masses are comparing notes,  with fake  friend discussing their personal issues, their mental issues, their health issues, their psychological issues, etc...  entrusting their deepest and darkest secrets to strangers, and others soliciting commentaries who are as effed-up. Besides bolstering their own achievements and lying through their teeth about it, exposing themselves, divulging personal data and volunteering way too much information about themselves. So much so, that the bullshit on the social media networks is fast replacing the bullshit that their patients construed as insight. 

As if it's not bad enough that everyone out there have their own share of problems, be they chicks with daddy issues, or guys with mommy issues, sex addictions, drug dependencies, need for acceptance, dependency syndrome, peddling drugs, kleptomania, alcoholism, prostitution, bullying, theft, lies, cheating wives and sugar daddies, etc. The NSA and the FBI are also added to this mix. Yes, the NSA has been pushing for cooperation from Google, Yahoo and other search engines to feed them with profiles of "misfits", suspect offenders, pedophiles, etc... This means that you and I and everyone else we know, are being poured though a sieve, being judged for what we say or do online, for what we buy and sell online, and the websites that we visit. 

Google is god of the internet and stores all your search history and I'm not talking about your browser history that is stored on your computer which can easily be erased or configured by selecting the paranoid tick in your control panel  Control panel \ Internet Properties \ General \ browser history \ settings \ history \ 0 days. Here I'm referring to your Web & App Activity that may go back several years and can by found in the settings menu in the bottom right hand side of Google's search page. Why you may ask, why does Google do this?  Because governments compelled them to do so. Google and Yahoo have maps on their sites that you can visit to see how many of your fellow countrymen or women is in the NSA's spotlight, all thanks to social networks.

The Tor browser is an option  if you feel that its best to surf anonymously but the FBI is trying their utmost to get the profiles of people who surf anonymously and wish to enjoy some privacy. There are rumours that the FBI hackers are too lame to do it themselves, so they agreed to pay Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, USA, $1 million to hack the Tor network and deanonymize its users.  So who’s hacking who? However, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation)  is doing their level best to get court injections against the FBI and the NSA's abuse of power and save us all from becoming suspects or victimized for what we say online..  



Meanwhile, a type of malware known as ransomware has been restricting users from accessing their own website or computer system by uploading the above notice, locked by the FBI or Justice Department on their systems. It forces   "offenders" to pay a ransom / fine in Bitcoins via specified online methods before they can  get your own systems or data back. The hacker known as Slavik  who also wrote the Zeus banking trojan, is responsible for the   CryptoLocker Ransomware Virus and has been using the FBI  to extort money from victims. 

HACKER MENTALITY

HACKER MENTALITY

Hackers are thinkers. They visualize what others can't. They see the world differently. They are super curious. They tinker with things in order to understand them.  They hunger for knowledge that interest them. Einstein was a tinkerer, a preoccupied thinker, so much so that his teachers said that he won't amount to anything. Yet, we all know what his intellectual contribution was to the global society. He saw the world differently and he could have been absolutely wealthy but his interests weren't monetary.  Likewise Tesla a was a tinkerer totally preoccupied by his interests having time for nothing else because he saw the world differently. He could have been stinking rich but be chose the art of tinkering over money. They wanted to empower the masses and create a better future for all. They were eccentric men, yet there are loads of people today that are wired like Einstein and Tesla, even share their eccentricity, though they may not be as intelligent or perhaps even more so.

Albert Einstein, tinkerer, hacker, scientist.

 The masses call these people hackers and nerds. Yep, Nerds...  a derogatory term used by the masses to talk down on them as if they are inferior. But quite the contrary. These hackers and nerds are the ones who brought them the bicycle, the internal combustion engine, electricity, the telephone system, the computer, the internet, the smartphone, satellite TV, and so much more. Without the nerds where would the masses be technologically?  Professor Tim Berners-Lee conceptualize URIs, HTTP and HTML the invented the World Wide Web. James Gosling developer of  the Java Programming language. Linus Torvalds  is the creator of the Linux kernel and its principal developer, and the list goes on. Realistically is was never about the money for them  but rather the sharing of knowledge to empower others.

Nicola Tesla ... whose ideas were usurped by Edison, much like
Zuckerberg usurped Jarkko Oikarinen's IRC and turned it into Facebook.

Admittedly some of these master minds opted for the money. Wasniak didn't but his partner Jobbs did. Tim Paterson the inventor and originator of MSDOS didn't but Bill did, making him one of the riches men in the world. IRC was an amazing app designed by Jarkko Oikarinen which since the days of inception  was free, gratis and verniet. A sucker like Zuckerberg copied IRC added some bells and whistles called it Facebook and became stinking rich in the process. These are the sellouts. Money motivated them above the art of hacking  and sharing,  not desiring equality but disparities in wealth, to the point that the world's wealthiest 5%  is sitting with 95% of the global wealth and the remaining  95% of the masses share in the 5%. Disgraceful! Many of them having made their fortunes on the backs of child labour (Apple, Microsoft & Samsung) in their supply chains, adding to the already enormous Third World Debt Crisis.

The above passage gives the impression that hackers and nerds are all male, but this is certainly not the case. I have encountered that "chica" who could show me a thing or two when it comes to high-tech. As a whole, hackers are rebellious by nature, non conformists, often loners preferring the company of computers over people. They prefer  to do their own thing, and not be bogged down by a 9 to 5. They cannot see themselves as obedient Zombies who conform to the system by subjecting their income to the trinkets of society. You know... that prestigious car that gives others the impression that you are "all that", though they are knee deep in arse mousse because of debt. That pretentious house  with the swimming pool and entertainment area with which to lure friends to impress. Those life, car and household insurances that were all grudge purchase anyway, which they endure under great strain because the Jones' have them. That expensive lifetime gym membership that's costing them an arm and a leg which they hardly use, except as a conversation piece.  Not forgetting the maxed out credit cards that they constantly juggle not to embarress the arse mousse out of your families. Slave to the system with debt as the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. Dept up to their freaking eyeballs.

That's what gets these obedient slave,  Zombies jumping out of bed at an unruly hour of the morning, braving the traffic to get to work on time to earn that measly salary that they are unhappy with to pay for the trinkets that they don't really need which they were enticed into by the system even though it's not what they really wanted   in the first place. They are spokes in the  system and getting out is most difficult hence its best not to get into the system in the first place. That's why hackers keep it real and therefore don't deserve the negative connotations attached to the term. Admittedly there are angry hackers who tend to be anarchists,  evil enough to destroy the establishments, but you have those types in all walks of society. Then their are wannabe hackers ... the script kiddies (crackers) who gave hackers the bad name by hacking into networks haphazardly because they lack real hacker knowledge. This hacker stigma has led to the White hat, Black hat, blah, blah blah by those who wants to label everything.  The cybersecurity problem of today doesn't lie with the hackers but falls squarely the shoulders of operating system manufacturers who couldn't design  a secure system in the first place. And secondly on the heads of the dumb asses corporates employ to guard their networks who don't know enough to hack their way out of a wet paper bag.