Let’s look at series of events
The Internet
Every story about Internet technology starts with US and it’s ARPANET.
I will start from the birth of USENET in1979. It is a simple and small computer network in a college campus; Users, mostly students, can publish an article on any topic on “newsgroup” of that category, which can be read by anyone on network. There were no images/videos at that point of time. Content shared was pure text and is completely free. There are no centralized servers to handle everything. It was a big success until ARPANET became public calling itself Internet.
Advent of Arcade games, Windows, UNIX and Macintosh and many more changed the world; they were “the happening” thing in 80s. They made computer usable for common people. Personal Computers became so popular that large companies came out of nowhere, dominating technology space. With increase of number of computers, centralized servers started ruling the networks, which are also controlled by large companies.
Some people who didn’t like proprietorship started developing their own softwares and asked other people to contribute to the projects. They started replicating things that are proprietary in nature, which is the starting of open source revolution. Large communities started evolving around open source culture. Everything here is free. It is a huge success.
Events after that are more dramatic. Linux Happened, pulling more people towards open culture. Google became verb; it means searching any content, both proprietary and free. Mozilla FireFox was born from ashes of Netscape in Browser wars. Antitrust lawsuits were filed by large companies on one another just to control each other. Wikipedia became the centre of world. Napster, a peer to peer music sharing, came into existence, before which music is something that is restricted to proprietary Cd's and DVDs. Social networks started consuming people’s time. Torrents – Gnutella – pirate bay are the hottest topics in internet.
Web is torn between proprietary and free stuff.
Until this time, people seemed to be targeting only huge companies. But now, at the next level - may not be the final level - they are standing against governments’.
Wikileaks,
“....providing a universal way for the revealing of suppressed and censored injustices. ”
This one line on the site says what they are trying to do. Interestingly, The motto of “Free speech” sounds odd for many people.
What Wikileaks has done may have ruined mutual relationships of countries, but it has also exposed the evil side of war.
Lets take an example of employee working in a company.Before joining he has to sign Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). Why do the company needs NDA? Copy Rights and blah blah blah. If the employee came to know about some “evil things” the company is doing and releases some proof documents, should the individual be punished for violating the rules of the company? If the information he leaked has only proofs, then the obvious answer is “no”, problem arises when he leaks some patented stuff along with that. Should we punish him for that? Even if he is doing good for society?
It is the same case with wikileaks.
When it comes to ethics, society is greater than any individual, be a government body or a corporate company. The problem with US Govt. is, they are trying to make Wikileaks look like outlaw and trying to shut it.
If US wants to start censoring websites, how different is their philosophy from that of the Chinese government, which monitor each and every message and post by their civilians. They are acting to save the government, not the society. For instance, if there is any hacker using a particular site to harm people, Govt. is more than welcome to shut it down without notice. But wikileaks is different. They didn’t “harm” anyone in society, per-se . Of course there are issues with mutual relations of countries, they should be blamed for that, not for releasing war documents.
We make rules for our own convenience, When the rules themselves are creating the problem.. breaking them is a perfect way to show the world that they are unnecessary.
Think of a doctor in 1200s or so, If he wants to to cut open dead bodies to know more about physiology of human body. People wouldn’t have let him as that is against their rules, what should he do? He should wait for the world to understand or change? No, he should become an outlaw and show the world how it is going to help them make their lives better. Should he be punished for doing that? What do you think is the answer of people then? ‘Yes, He should be punished’, but what about us? We will say, he did a great thing.
If a person claims to have done something against rule and is good for society, that should be verified first then punish him next. That is the whole point of justice .isn’t it?
Wikileaks is a part of evolution. It is still in early stages. They have done some mistakes, yes, but it should not be the reason for shutting it down.
When MasterCard and Pay-Pal freezed accounts of Julian Assange because of pressure from US Govt, A group of loosely bound protesting hackers calling themselves “Anonymous” started attacking websites of those companies with a mission named called “Operation payback”. Anonymous claim themselves to be the supporters of free speech and have got a huge response from people around the world. This reminds me of Star wars, the whole rebelling against evil empire thingy.
Of course, there are hackers supporting US government as well. Like the one who attacked Wikileaks website. He justifies himself saying ‘wikileaks is “bad” for country’.
World as we know has changed forever. There is no going back. As free software and content there is huge response for free speech as well. World is not divided by boundaries anymore, they are divided into virtual boundaries dictated by morals of world. Finally world will have only two groups.. one supporting free web, another supporting censored web.
Some people are depicting this as the start of Cyber world war 1.
There are polarities, yes, but lets hope they don’t bring war. They still effect how we live.
War needs weapons. Weapons involved in Cyber war?
DoS attacks, In this, servers hosting the sites/services are requested with lot of dummy requests until server no longer serves genuine requests. In this type of attack, Winner will be the one with huge network capabilities.
Viruses & Worms, They are the nastiest, Recently, Iran was struck by virus called “Stuxnet”, affecting its Uranium enrichment facility, which raised international concerns over unleashing of viruses and worms to attack the infrastructure of a country. Viruses sometimes use loopholes in the systems. Countries which use pirated softwares like India, China will be the first to get effected by them.
Consequences:
1) People might start ignoring privacy of individuals.
2) Services like mails/social networking may get effected
3) Taking advantage of situation, unethical hackers may wreak havoc.
4) A country with weak defences may end up with all its net related infrastructure damaged, and daily life could get effected and thus emergency situations may raise and civil wars may break out.
5) Might effect mutual relationships of countries and might lead to a real world war.
The Internet
Every story about Internet technology starts with US and it’s ARPANET.
I will start from the birth of USENET in1979. It is a simple and small computer network in a college campus; Users, mostly students, can publish an article on any topic on “newsgroup” of that category, which can be read by anyone on network. There were no images/videos at that point of time. Content shared was pure text and is completely free. There are no centralized servers to handle everything. It was a big success until ARPANET became public calling itself Internet.
Advent of Arcade games, Windows, UNIX and Macintosh and many more changed the world; they were “the happening” thing in 80s. They made computer usable for common people. Personal Computers became so popular that large companies came out of nowhere, dominating technology space. With increase of number of computers, centralized servers started ruling the networks, which are also controlled by large companies.
Some people who didn’t like proprietorship started developing their own softwares and asked other people to contribute to the projects. They started replicating things that are proprietary in nature, which is the starting of open source revolution. Large communities started evolving around open source culture. Everything here is free. It is a huge success.
Events after that are more dramatic. Linux Happened, pulling more people towards open culture. Google became verb; it means searching any content, both proprietary and free. Mozilla FireFox was born from ashes of Netscape in Browser wars. Antitrust lawsuits were filed by large companies on one another just to control each other. Wikipedia became the centre of world. Napster, a peer to peer music sharing, came into existence, before which music is something that is restricted to proprietary Cd's and DVDs. Social networks started consuming people’s time. Torrents – Gnutella – pirate bay are the hottest topics in internet.
Web is torn between proprietary and free stuff.
Until this time, people seemed to be targeting only huge companies. But now, at the next level - may not be the final level - they are standing against governments’.
Wikileaks,
“....providing a universal way for the revealing of suppressed and censored injustices. ”
This one line on the site says what they are trying to do. Interestingly, The motto of “Free speech” sounds odd for many people.
What Wikileaks has done may have ruined mutual relationships of countries, but it has also exposed the evil side of war.
Lets take an example of employee working in a company.Before joining he has to sign Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). Why do the company needs NDA? Copy Rights and blah blah blah. If the employee came to know about some “evil things” the company is doing and releases some proof documents, should the individual be punished for violating the rules of the company? If the information he leaked has only proofs, then the obvious answer is “no”, problem arises when he leaks some patented stuff along with that. Should we punish him for that? Even if he is doing good for society?
It is the same case with wikileaks.
When it comes to ethics, society is greater than any individual, be a government body or a corporate company. The problem with US Govt. is, they are trying to make Wikileaks look like outlaw and trying to shut it.
If US wants to start censoring websites, how different is their philosophy from that of the Chinese government, which monitor each and every message and post by their civilians. They are acting to save the government, not the society. For instance, if there is any hacker using a particular site to harm people, Govt. is more than welcome to shut it down without notice. But wikileaks is different. They didn’t “harm” anyone in society, per-se . Of course there are issues with mutual relations of countries, they should be blamed for that, not for releasing war documents.
We make rules for our own convenience, When the rules themselves are creating the problem.. breaking them is a perfect way to show the world that they are unnecessary.
Think of a doctor in 1200s or so, If he wants to to cut open dead bodies to know more about physiology of human body. People wouldn’t have let him as that is against their rules, what should he do? He should wait for the world to understand or change? No, he should become an outlaw and show the world how it is going to help them make their lives better. Should he be punished for doing that? What do you think is the answer of people then? ‘Yes, He should be punished’, but what about us? We will say, he did a great thing.
If a person claims to have done something against rule and is good for society, that should be verified first then punish him next. That is the whole point of justice .isn’t it?
Wikileaks is a part of evolution. It is still in early stages. They have done some mistakes, yes, but it should not be the reason for shutting it down.
When MasterCard and Pay-Pal freezed accounts of Julian Assange because of pressure from US Govt, A group of loosely bound protesting hackers calling themselves “Anonymous” started attacking websites of those companies with a mission named called “Operation payback”. Anonymous claim themselves to be the supporters of free speech and have got a huge response from people around the world. This reminds me of Star wars, the whole rebelling against evil empire thingy.
Of course, there are hackers supporting US government as well. Like the one who attacked Wikileaks website. He justifies himself saying ‘wikileaks is “bad” for country’.
World as we know has changed forever. There is no going back. As free software and content there is huge response for free speech as well. World is not divided by boundaries anymore, they are divided into virtual boundaries dictated by morals of world. Finally world will have only two groups.. one supporting free web, another supporting censored web.
Some people are depicting this as the start of Cyber world war 1.
There are polarities, yes, but lets hope they don’t bring war. They still effect how we live.
War needs weapons. Weapons involved in Cyber war?
DoS attacks, In this, servers hosting the sites/services are requested with lot of dummy requests until server no longer serves genuine requests. In this type of attack, Winner will be the one with huge network capabilities.
Viruses & Worms, They are the nastiest, Recently, Iran was struck by virus called “Stuxnet”, affecting its Uranium enrichment facility, which raised international concerns over unleashing of viruses and worms to attack the infrastructure of a country. Viruses sometimes use loopholes in the systems. Countries which use pirated softwares like India, China will be the first to get effected by them.
Consequences:
1) People might start ignoring privacy of individuals.
2) Services like mails/social networking may get effected
3) Taking advantage of situation, unethical hackers may wreak havoc.
4) A country with weak defences may end up with all its net related infrastructure damaged, and daily life could get effected and thus emergency situations may raise and civil wars may break out.
5) Might effect mutual relationships of countries and might lead to a real world war.
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