oops, almost forgot the blogs about word and excel. Basically, following the directions, it was pretty damn hard to make ANY mistakes or encounter ANY problems lol. granted, i didn't know the feature that we used in microsoft word, and sure it would be handy to use when applying for many jobs, or things along that line, the task was preeetty damn simple all in all. the software overall, is very usefull(word processors, i use openoffice.org) , i use it every day for uni work, writing things that im generally interested in. a Hell of a lot more power than the age old typewriter eh?
now, as for excel, i don't have quite as much experiance in this, although it was stuff pretty damn simple when following instructions, how could one make an error? personally i dont have a need for it, but it would be pretty damn handy for writing up rosters, working out calculations, wages etc? maybe we should swap this over to access and give making a database a go? something a little more challenging perhaps? overall, the group of office software is a handy and powerful tool for almost anything you can think of. maybe we should do work on powerpoint? i mean, if we are going back to basics, powerpoint is a tool most uni students will use, moreso than excel? and maybe not everyone knows how to use it? just a thought....
anyway, till next time, bye bye
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Course Overview
well the end of the semester is upon us, and it has gone by much faster than anticipated. This course has definitly been one of the highlights for me, being into all that nerdy stuff and all. now i've been asked on what could have been improved in this course..... the only things i could think of was where the girls did that P.R lecture, maybe cut that right down, and turn it into a future careers lecture? a whole bunch of possible careers which are possible from this learning pathway? and also, maybe not do those 2 tutorial tasks on microsoft office....i mean, its all well and good, but its just so damn boring. maybe put them into just the one weeks task. also another thing we kinda came up with in the class was change the blog sizing, make it about 600 words each week, 200 words being devoted to the lecture, 200 to the task, and 200 on the textbook review. that way after 12 weeks, you pretty much know everything, and you've put it into your own words, a way for you to be able to bring it back into memory whenever needed.
well thats my 2 cents, i hope everyone else enjoyed this course and got as much as they could out of it.
pavel.
well thats my 2 cents, i hope everyone else enjoyed this course and got as much as they could out of it.
pavel.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
essay
Hackers and Crackers: a common misconception
“Information sharing is a powerful, positive good, and it is the ethical duty of a hacker to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and to computer resources wherever possible.” (Himanen 2001: 3)
In today’s day and age, the term hacker is thrown around all too lightly, The public views hackers as social outcasts, who break into computers and destroy them by exposing sensitive information, exploiting someone or spreading virii everywhere, and who can blame them? They are usually uninformed and misled into believing this via the countless many media streams, but it is nothing more than a misconception. The true definition for these people is known to the digital underground as a ‘cracker’. Every hacker’s ultimate goal is knowledge. Any possible means may be used to obtain that, including illegal ones; on the other hand, a cracker breaks into a computer system for the sheer joy of destruction and confusion. This essay will look at the origin of ‘the hack’, make clear the true hacker ethic, hackers within the work force and their benefits to society. Then it will distinguish what a ‘cracker’ is, and what they do, and finally the laws and punishments associated with computer crime.
After a group of MIT programmers from the 1960’s adopted the word ‘hack’ as a synonym for their work, came the second wave of hackers in the early 1980’s. What characterised this group was that they desperately wanted computers and computer systems designed to be useful and accessible to citizens. Now in the late 80’s, the meaning of the word hacker changed once again, the to computer underground, ‘to hack’ meant to break into a computer system, and a ‘hacker’ was the person who did this. In a book titled Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution (Levy 1984: 52) the hacker ethic is but down into 5 points.
‘All information must be free.’
‘Mistrust authority – Promote decentralisation.’
‘Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not by criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.’
‘You can create art and beauty on a computer.’
‘Computers can change your life for the better.’
Reading the ‘Hacker Manifesto’ written in 1986 by a hacker named ‘the mentor’, who was part of the elite hacking group ‘the legion of doom’, presents a view which is similar to this, a story of the curious explorer, pursuing knowledge and intellectual challenge. The hacker ethic would state that unauthorised access to a www server would be acceptable as long as no damage is done. Now in 1991, 3 members of the legion of doom founded a company known as Comsec Data Security, a Houston based consulting firm. The firm quickly built a client list made up of several Fortune 500 companies, but just as quickly as they rose to power, the company went out of business due to media hysteria and blackballing by rival companies, exploiting the fact they were former hackers. The computer industry has a long, respected tradition of hiring so-called teams of professional hackers to attack a computer system to determine how secure it is. The idea is that only by waging a full-scale siege on a system with an authorized break-in can its true level of vulnerability be determined, so that backdoors and weaknesses are rectified.
One thing which you very rarely see the media publish is that not only do hackers help companies, but other forms of ‘ethical hacking’ such as working with various forms of justice departments to help put criminals behind bars, one example of this is an article published in the U.K newspaper the Telegraph (Bamber 1999) where hackers working in conjunction with the police, helped infiltrate a internet paedophilia community and in only 60 hours, found evidence that helped police make 19 arrests, on counts such as rape, incest, indecent assault and possession and distribution of indecent images of children. Even the U.S department of justice has looked to recruit hackers in order to conduct penetration tests on its networks (Furnell, Dowland & Sanders 1999)
On the other side of the so easily mistaken line, are ‘crackers’, whose skill levels vary on a large scale. The Chantler study (Chantler 1996) classes hackers into several factions. At the bottom end of the scale you have ‘Lamers’, people who use programs such as BO2K or ‘back orifice.’(BO2K 1999) Written by the hacking group Cult of the Dead Cow it enables any user with half a brain to control another computer from a remote location. Originally intended for ethical use, for system administrators wishing to remotely monitor systems within their network, but eventually found its way into the hands of those who would use it to maliciously attack users by entering another users system to steal passwords, delete files and also spread pre-written virii for kicks. Moving up your scale you have users who have a better understanding, who exploit weaknesses in websites in order to rearrange them, either as a joke, or for more serious issues usually politically related. One such group is the Chilean “Byond Hackers Team”, who has claimed to have more than 8000 hacks to their name, famous for hacking the NASA website, as well as government sites in their own country, the US, Israel and many other South American states(Kornakov 2006). Finally, right at the top of the scale are the crackers who hack into financial institutions and corporations for personal gain, usually in the form of money. A computer industry survey in 1998 calculated that 550 of Americas corporations, government agencies, and universities had lost more than $100million to computer related financial fraud, copyright theft, and data sabotage (Taylor 1999: 71)
Australia’s federal law on hacking has many penalties. in section 76C’ A person who intentionally and without authority or lawful excuse :(a) destroys, erases or alters data stored in, or inserts data into a Commonwealth computer;(b) interferes with, or interrupts or obstructs the lawful use of, a Commonwealth computer;(c) destroys, erases, alters or adds data stored on behalf of the Commonwealth in a computer that is not a Commonwealth computer.
All of which are possible by using programs as simple to use as the back orifice tool, the penalty for this is 10 year imprisonment! (Extract from Federal Law on Hacking 2003)
In the U.S, courts are also getting harsher with their penalties, most maximum prison sentences handed down for computer crime range from one year to 10 years. Hackers whose exploits result in injury or death -- if they disable emergency response networks or destroy electronic medical records, for example -- face 20 years to life in prison. Hackers will face up to a 25% increase in their sentences if they hijack e-mail accounts or steal personal data -- including financial and medical records and digital photographs. Convicted virus and worm authors face a 50 percent increase.
Sentences also will increase by 50 percent for hackers who share stolen personal data with anyone. The sentences will double if the information is posted on the Internet. (Krebs 2003). Perhaps the most famous hacker throughout the late 70’s to the early 90’s was Kevin Mitnick, who has been in and out of jail and in the tabloids throughout that time frame, described as a ‘brilliant and elusive cyber-thief’. (Meriwether 1995)
The media and the government will always look down upon hackers AND crackers, and make mistakes about which is which. The simple fact is a hacker builds things, a cracker breaks them. Nevertheless within their culture lies an attitude towards solving fascinating problems. Challenging ones mind is the highest form of mental stimulation, and if not for hackers and the computer enthusiasts from the 70’s and 80’s, we may not have come this far with technology. Much of our computing technology that we take for granted today, like the internet and what it has become, e-mail, word processing.. Almost everything would not be what it is today without their efforts and as long as there is technology, there will be people wishing to know more about it, inevitably, hackers will hack on.
Bibliography
Bamber, David (1999) ‘Police hackers catch Internet paedophiles’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=/archive/1999/08/15/nhack15.html (accessed 28 April 2007)
‘BO2K’ http://www.BO2K.com (accessed 26 April 2007)
Caroline, A (2004) ‘Political hacktivism: tool of the underdog or scourge of cyberspace?’ Aslib Proceedings: New Information Perspectives 56(4) 212-221
Chantler, N (1996) Profile of a computer hacker Infowar Florida
‘Extract from Federal Law on Hacking’ http://www.uwa.edu.au/it/rules/fedhacking (accessed 26 April 2007)
Foltz, B (2004) ‘Cyberterrorism, computer crime, and reality’ Information management and computer security 12(2) 154-166
Furnell, S.M, Chiliarchaki, P and Dowland, P.S (2001) ‘Security analysers: administrator assistants or hacker helpers?’ Information management and computer security 9(2) 93-101
Furnell, S.M, Dowland, S.M, and Sanders, P.W (1999) ‘Dissecting the ‘Hacker Manifesto’’ Information management and computer security 7(2) 69-75
Himanen, Pekka (2001) The hacker ethic and the spirit of the information age Secker & Warburg London
Kornakov, Konstantin (2006) ‘Major hacking crew taken down in South America’ http://www.viruslist.com/en/news?id=%20206082634 (accessed 29 April 2007)
Krebs, Brian (2003) ‘Hackers to Face Tougher Sentences’ http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2wp-dynA35261-2003Oct2language=printer
(accessed 29 April 2007)
Levy, S (1984) hackers: heroes of the computer revolution Bantam Doubleday Dell New York
Meriwether, Dan (1995) ‘Kevin Mitnick’ http://www.takedown.com/bio/mitnick.html (accessed 28 April 2007)
Smith, A.D and Rupp, W.T (2002) ‘Issues in cybersecurity: understanding the potential risks associated with hackers/crackers.’ Information management and computer security 9(2) 178-183
Taylor, P (1999) Hackers: crime in the digital sublime Routledge New York
“Information sharing is a powerful, positive good, and it is the ethical duty of a hacker to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and to computer resources wherever possible.” (Himanen 2001: 3)
In today’s day and age, the term hacker is thrown around all too lightly, The public views hackers as social outcasts, who break into computers and destroy them by exposing sensitive information, exploiting someone or spreading virii everywhere, and who can blame them? They are usually uninformed and misled into believing this via the countless many media streams, but it is nothing more than a misconception. The true definition for these people is known to the digital underground as a ‘cracker’. Every hacker’s ultimate goal is knowledge. Any possible means may be used to obtain that, including illegal ones; on the other hand, a cracker breaks into a computer system for the sheer joy of destruction and confusion. This essay will look at the origin of ‘the hack’, make clear the true hacker ethic, hackers within the work force and their benefits to society. Then it will distinguish what a ‘cracker’ is, and what they do, and finally the laws and punishments associated with computer crime.
After a group of MIT programmers from the 1960’s adopted the word ‘hack’ as a synonym for their work, came the second wave of hackers in the early 1980’s. What characterised this group was that they desperately wanted computers and computer systems designed to be useful and accessible to citizens. Now in the late 80’s, the meaning of the word hacker changed once again, the to computer underground, ‘to hack’ meant to break into a computer system, and a ‘hacker’ was the person who did this. In a book titled Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution (Levy 1984: 52) the hacker ethic is but down into 5 points.
‘All information must be free.’
‘Mistrust authority – Promote decentralisation.’
‘Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not by criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.’
‘You can create art and beauty on a computer.’
‘Computers can change your life for the better.’
Reading the ‘Hacker Manifesto’ written in 1986 by a hacker named ‘the mentor’, who was part of the elite hacking group ‘the legion of doom’, presents a view which is similar to this, a story of the curious explorer, pursuing knowledge and intellectual challenge. The hacker ethic would state that unauthorised access to a www server would be acceptable as long as no damage is done. Now in 1991, 3 members of the legion of doom founded a company known as Comsec Data Security, a Houston based consulting firm. The firm quickly built a client list made up of several Fortune 500 companies, but just as quickly as they rose to power, the company went out of business due to media hysteria and blackballing by rival companies, exploiting the fact they were former hackers. The computer industry has a long, respected tradition of hiring so-called teams of professional hackers to attack a computer system to determine how secure it is. The idea is that only by waging a full-scale siege on a system with an authorized break-in can its true level of vulnerability be determined, so that backdoors and weaknesses are rectified.
One thing which you very rarely see the media publish is that not only do hackers help companies, but other forms of ‘ethical hacking’ such as working with various forms of justice departments to help put criminals behind bars, one example of this is an article published in the U.K newspaper the Telegraph (Bamber 1999) where hackers working in conjunction with the police, helped infiltrate a internet paedophilia community and in only 60 hours, found evidence that helped police make 19 arrests, on counts such as rape, incest, indecent assault and possession and distribution of indecent images of children. Even the U.S department of justice has looked to recruit hackers in order to conduct penetration tests on its networks (Furnell, Dowland & Sanders 1999)
On the other side of the so easily mistaken line, are ‘crackers’, whose skill levels vary on a large scale. The Chantler study (Chantler 1996) classes hackers into several factions. At the bottom end of the scale you have ‘Lamers’, people who use programs such as BO2K or ‘back orifice.’(BO2K 1999) Written by the hacking group Cult of the Dead Cow it enables any user with half a brain to control another computer from a remote location. Originally intended for ethical use, for system administrators wishing to remotely monitor systems within their network, but eventually found its way into the hands of those who would use it to maliciously attack users by entering another users system to steal passwords, delete files and also spread pre-written virii for kicks. Moving up your scale you have users who have a better understanding, who exploit weaknesses in websites in order to rearrange them, either as a joke, or for more serious issues usually politically related. One such group is the Chilean “Byond Hackers Team”, who has claimed to have more than 8000 hacks to their name, famous for hacking the NASA website, as well as government sites in their own country, the US, Israel and many other South American states(Kornakov 2006). Finally, right at the top of the scale are the crackers who hack into financial institutions and corporations for personal gain, usually in the form of money. A computer industry survey in 1998 calculated that 550 of Americas corporations, government agencies, and universities had lost more than $100million to computer related financial fraud, copyright theft, and data sabotage (Taylor 1999: 71)
Australia’s federal law on hacking has many penalties. in section 76C’ A person who intentionally and without authority or lawful excuse :(a) destroys, erases or alters data stored in, or inserts data into a Commonwealth computer;(b) interferes with, or interrupts or obstructs the lawful use of, a Commonwealth computer;(c) destroys, erases, alters or adds data stored on behalf of the Commonwealth in a computer that is not a Commonwealth computer.
All of which are possible by using programs as simple to use as the back orifice tool, the penalty for this is 10 year imprisonment! (Extract from Federal Law on Hacking 2003)
In the U.S, courts are also getting harsher with their penalties, most maximum prison sentences handed down for computer crime range from one year to 10 years. Hackers whose exploits result in injury or death -- if they disable emergency response networks or destroy electronic medical records, for example -- face 20 years to life in prison. Hackers will face up to a 25% increase in their sentences if they hijack e-mail accounts or steal personal data -- including financial and medical records and digital photographs. Convicted virus and worm authors face a 50 percent increase.
Sentences also will increase by 50 percent for hackers who share stolen personal data with anyone. The sentences will double if the information is posted on the Internet. (Krebs 2003). Perhaps the most famous hacker throughout the late 70’s to the early 90’s was Kevin Mitnick, who has been in and out of jail and in the tabloids throughout that time frame, described as a ‘brilliant and elusive cyber-thief’. (Meriwether 1995)
The media and the government will always look down upon hackers AND crackers, and make mistakes about which is which. The simple fact is a hacker builds things, a cracker breaks them. Nevertheless within their culture lies an attitude towards solving fascinating problems. Challenging ones mind is the highest form of mental stimulation, and if not for hackers and the computer enthusiasts from the 70’s and 80’s, we may not have come this far with technology. Much of our computing technology that we take for granted today, like the internet and what it has become, e-mail, word processing.. Almost everything would not be what it is today without their efforts and as long as there is technology, there will be people wishing to know more about it, inevitably, hackers will hack on.
Bibliography
Bamber, David (1999) ‘Police hackers catch Internet paedophiles’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=/archive/1999/08/15/nhack15.html (accessed 28 April 2007)
‘BO2K’ http://www.BO2K.com (accessed 26 April 2007)
Caroline, A (2004) ‘Political hacktivism: tool of the underdog or scourge of cyberspace?’ Aslib Proceedings: New Information Perspectives 56(4) 212-221
Chantler, N (1996) Profile of a computer hacker Infowar Florida
‘Extract from Federal Law on Hacking’ http://www.uwa.edu.au/it/rules/fedhacking (accessed 26 April 2007)
Foltz, B (2004) ‘Cyberterrorism, computer crime, and reality’ Information management and computer security 12(2) 154-166
Furnell, S.M, Chiliarchaki, P and Dowland, P.S (2001) ‘Security analysers: administrator assistants or hacker helpers?’ Information management and computer security 9(2) 93-101
Furnell, S.M, Dowland, S.M, and Sanders, P.W (1999) ‘Dissecting the ‘Hacker Manifesto’’ Information management and computer security 7(2) 69-75
Himanen, Pekka (2001) The hacker ethic and the spirit of the information age Secker & Warburg London
Kornakov, Konstantin (2006) ‘Major hacking crew taken down in South America’ http://www.viruslist.com/en/news?id=%20206082634 (accessed 29 April 2007)
Krebs, Brian (2003) ‘Hackers to Face Tougher Sentences’ http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2wp-dynA35261-2003Oct2language=printer
(accessed 29 April 2007)
Levy, S (1984) hackers: heroes of the computer revolution Bantam Doubleday Dell New York
Meriwether, Dan (1995) ‘Kevin Mitnick’ http://www.takedown.com/bio/mitnick.html (accessed 28 April 2007)
Smith, A.D and Rupp, W.T (2002) ‘Issues in cybersecurity: understanding the potential risks associated with hackers/crackers.’ Information management and computer security 9(2) 178-183
Taylor, P (1999) Hackers: crime in the digital sublime Routledge New York
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
3d chat environments
3d chat environments, they've been around for a pretty long time now, i remember seeing one almost 8 years ago, i think it might have been active worlds, but try running that on DIAL UP! and IM, that's been around for just as long, back when ICQ was popular, and also mIRC, which was also a was to set up basic servers for file sharing through ftp://ftp...but/ moving right along, back to the topic. i guess the major difference between the 2 are the users interface, instead of just a screen with text you have a virtual environment in which you can interact with, as well as being able to interact with the other users, i believe this makes the chat experience just that little bit more life like, allowing the user to get completely immersed in the virtual world. this also represents a very basic version of MMO's like world of warcraft or ultima online. It is much too easy to get addicted to these, if you have played wow for example, you know what i mean. You can pretty much do anything you can think of thats possible in the real world, shop, learn skills, cook, fish, hunt, leatherworking, pretty much everything, as well as things that are impossible, such as flyig etc...which definitly appeals to a lot of people out there, complete with ananomity. but with many IM programs out there now days, they allow for an almost real world chat, allowing for webcam plugins, mic etc... or if you prefer, just text based. straight to the point, just for chatting, allowing you to skip between that and say....writing a blog, or doing something else, it doesnt require as much attention.
honestly i don't mind either option, the 3d environment is like a game, and is pretty fun, whilst Msn etc.... is good for just talking, and the ability to share files, makes it very handy.
honestly i don't mind either option, the 3d environment is like a game, and is pretty fun, whilst Msn etc.... is good for just talking, and the ability to share files, makes it very handy.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Photo - Uni Life
to me, this is uni life, without this glorious beverage, all hope would be lost, and i would need more than 4 hours sleep a night. sweet sweet coffeePhoto - high tech
dont know if anyone remembers this, but its a screenshot i took of the movie 'hackers' and how they portrayed a online database, and how they 'hacked' it. couldn't stop laughing personally. but im sure many people found it amazing and the effects where definitly 'high-tech' for its day lol. go C.G.I!
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
