People behind the curtain

Every morning we wake up, wash ourselves, eat and drink coffee and if the weather allows us, we enjoy the sunshine. People go to work, by cars, buses or on foot. On weekends they explore new places, visit museums and go to cinema. Usually people live a happy life. But behind the big mass are groups of individuals who, by a fate of choice, are not so lucky. People who have some sort of disability. Modern technology has come to help and given them some new devices to work with and at least try to enjoy the life.

                One of the possible devices is Brainport.  It was initially developed as an aid to people’s sense of balance, particularly of stroke victims. Later on the technology was  developed for use as a visual aid. Brainport has demonstrated its ability to allow a blind person to see his surroundings in polygonal and pixel form. In this scenario, a camera picks up the image of the surrounding, the information is processed by a chip which converts it into impulses which are sent through an electrode array, via the tongue, to person’s brain. The human brain is able to interpret these impulses as visual signals and they are then redirected to visual cortex, allowing the person to „see“. This is similar in part to how a cochlear implant works, in that it transmits electrical stimuli to a receiving device in the body.

                It is not a perfect device, but a backbone has been placed. I believe that in the nearest 20 – 30 years we will be able to send direct signals to brain and visualize our surroundings.

Hacking the World War II

Hackers have been known to mankind since the birth of computers. They have been the people who want to go against the system. As a matter of fact they have also been the people who have introduced new models of thinking and solving problems. Nowadays after hearing word hacker people tend to imagine a hunched young man with no ability to communicate with the society and some odd interest in machines. But if you let the thought sink into you. People called hackers are extremely intelligent in their field of endeavour and i think that people with similar habits have existed among us from the beginning of the ages. As one bright example I would like to point out a scientist, Alan Turing, the breaker of Enigma machine. I must confess I haven’t read any biography literature nor have I had any keen interest in his life, all my reference is thanks to the movie.

                During his work at Bletchley Park he expressed innovative approach to great mystery in the face of Enigma machine. He handpicked his teammembers. Working hours where not fixed, as contrary they were working non stop since lives where at stake. And at the end he simply noticed a loophole in the code of Enigma. Although he is not a prime example of modern hacker I believe that at his time he would be called so. And he suits perfectly under Eric Raymonds based criteria.

Digital enclosure

At first you create necessety.

Let us remember the time, thousands of years ago when most of us were separated by thousands of miles. We didn’t knew each other and we were afraid of everything new. As time moved on we started to expand, soon our lands became small and we had to move on. As we met others similar to us, we had to mark the lands/places where we were. So that we could know people that live there, their habbits and their products. In order to flourish we had to keep databases. Another few hundred years passed and the information grew, the more we knew the more we could. Very soon data became traceable and people became aware of the power of knowledge(I and II WW).

If we throw away the fear of knowledge, ability to get information frees you and imprisons at the same time.  Current pace of life doesn’t allow us to slow down, to shut down. I may sincerely confess that I am addicted to cloud. Google simplifies my life, my everyday actions so much that i do not want  give up that freedom. See, in another 25-50 years it will not matter where we are. Life is so mobile that it would be dangerous for human to cling to one place. Right now I can’t see another future besides cloud. Human should leave behind a habbit that is daily simplifing his/her life.

And then you shackle them down…

Online privacy and security

Now for more than 4 years of active enterntainment twtich.tv has been the home for gamers, entepreneurs, trolls and even criminals. While at the same time opening new fields of endevour simultaneously putting online streamers at risk for their privacy.

            One of the people to catch the hype train to "free money" is James Varga aka PhantomL0rd. He was a professional League of Legends player who after 2 years of gaming carreer desided that streaming is more profitable than competetive play. Everything went like a clockwork until the 30 of december, 2013. On that decisive day a certain organisation called Derp desided to Troll upon him and a number of other popular gaming websites. Derptrolling (sometimes referred to as Derp) is the name of a hacker group that has been active since 2011. They have largely used Twitter to coordinate distributed denial of service attacks on various high traffic websites.

Initially, Derp sent a few tweets using their Twitter account to indicate that they were going to bring down the popular gaming website League of Legends. Their first attack however, was on a game called Quake Live. Hours afterwards, many of the League of Legends game server regions in North America, Europe, and Oceania, as well as the website and Internet forums were taken down. To bring down the game servers, they used an indirect attack on Riot Games' internet service provider Internap. They were revealed to have been targeting a popular livestreamer who goes by the name of PhantomL0rd on the streaming website Twitch. PhantomL0rd, whose real name is James Varga, is a 25-year-old professional gamer who regularly streams gameplays on his Twitch account and gets paid to play video games. Reddit summarized the report by saying that they had planned to use distributed denial of service attacks to flood traffic on various high profile gaming websites associated with PhantomL0rd, including League of Legends and Blizzard Entertainment's Battle.net. According to The Escapist, the group also issued a threat to take down Dota 2 if PhantomL0rd were to lose his game, which they carried out. However, they only crashed Phantoml0rd's game, while other games in DoTA 2 were running normally.

When PhantomL0rd asked members of the hacker group why they were attacking these sites, they responded by saying it was "for the lulz" and that it was also partially out of dislike for "money-hungry companies." They also persuaded PhantomL0rd into playing Club Penguin while simultaneously managing to take down Electronic Arts website EA.com. PhantomL0rd's personal information was leaked during the attack and released onto multiple gaming websites, in a process often referred to as doxing. This led to many fake orders of pizza arriving at his house, as well as a police raid on his house when they received reports about a hostage situation. According to PhantomL0rd, at least six policemen searched through his house, but they only realized later that the call was fake. The hacker group claimed to have additionally attacked several other Internet games and websites including World of Tanks, the North Korean news network KCNA, RuneScape, Eve Online, a Westboro Baptist Church website, and many others. A day after the attacks, Riot Games issued a statement confirming that their League of Legends services had indeed been attacked by the hacker group, though they have brought their services back online.

It is hard to summarise what exactly happened. One moment you are casually spending your time behind your personal computer and the other you are hacked by a group of total strangers who have seized you connection with the world and have threatened directly you. Is this normal? How one should defend oneself in a world where you are not allowed to go grocery shopping without someone keeping an eye on you?

For any additional information you may search google: Phantomlord hacked; online video game streamer hached.

Merry security and a happy privacy.