The Online Rant

There is an old hacker saying, “Information wants to be free.” Now when I say old, I don’t mean old in real world time. I mean old in Internet time. Where if it is older than a year, it is considered ancient. The saying is kind of a cliche, but lately I’ve been wondering if there might be some truth to it.

The question is, does information naturally gravitate towards freedom? In an information based society like ours, the above question is very relevant and rather important. For thousands of years governments, religions, and businesses/trade guilds have used control of information to protect their power and position.

These days all of that is changing. As the information age comes into full swing, control of information is getting harder to maintain. And suppressing unwanted information is nearly impossible. The best anyone can hope for, is that the unwanted info will be forgotten. But you can’t remove it or hide it. So that information will always be there.

Every government, business, and religious group that relies on information control is feeling the effects today. Repressive, and even democratic, governments around the world that try to hide their policies and actions are finding that it is nearly impossible. New scandals and abuses are daily leaked to the Internet and spread far beyond the reach of the governments involved. Religious groups like the Scientologists that rely on secret knowledge for elites, are fighting a losing battle to keep that knowledge off of the Internet. Business models that rely on a monopoly of information are all feeling the pressure of competition from non-experts. Copyrights and patents are becoming increasingly hard to protect.

Basically, if it is information, it will end up on the internet at some point. And once it does, it will be there forever. I’m not sure what that really means for our society. I know that it means a lot of change for a lot of different areas and people.

By the way, here are a couple of video’s that illustrate the point.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

Information R/evolution

The other day I got an email claiming I had a message from a friend on MySpace. Well, I really don’t like MySpace (More of a FaceBook fan)and I don’t use it much anymore, so I didn’t rush out to go get it. But I did eventually go check it out. As soon as I logged in, I saw that it was nothing but a spam message. So I just deleted it. Since I was on anyway, I thought I would check out the various bulletins that people had posted.

And what do you know! There were 4 bulletins from the person who had sent me the spam message. Three of those bulletins were clearly spam, but the last one was really from her. In that bulletin, she claimed that someone had hacked her account, and to disregard any strange messages that she might have sent before she realized she had been hacked.

Well, I was a little curious about the “hack” and decided to do some investigating to find out how peoples accounts normally get hacked. You see, I’ve had a MySpace account for years and it’s never been hacked. And it’s not like my password is super secure. I wont tell you what it is, but I will say it isn’t one of those extremely long ones with a random conglomeration of letters, numbers, and symbols that security experts say you should have. I’ve also never changed it the entire time I’ve had the account!

So I was really wondering how so many of my friends get there accounts hacked. It turns out that the most common method of getting your account “hacked” is to have the password stolen. That’s right, stolen. Not broken or guessed. No one is running brute force attacks to get your password.
Furthermore, if they did steal your password, it’s probably because you GAVE it to them. That’s right, I said gave. They tricked you into giving them your password, and then they simply logged in to your account.They didn’t hack your MySpace account. They hacked you.

So how do you keep this from happening? Well it’s real simple. Don’t give away your password to anyone. Never enter it into any other site except the MySpace login page. That will take care of most of the methods by which people get your password.
The remaining ways people can get your password are a little trickier, and I have a lot more sympathy for people who fall for these. These methods involve sending you to a page that looks exactly like the MySpace login page, but isn’t. So you think you are logging into MySpace, but actually you are logging into another website that is stealing your password. Still involves you giving them the password, but its a little trickier because you thought you weren’t giving it to anyone but MySpace.

This method is still easy to avoid. Just log in to your account only from the official MySpace.com website. How do you know if the page you are logging into is from the original page? Make sure that the address you typed to get to the page was MySpace.com After that you can click on the login link to be taken to the login page. Just make sure you started at the MySpace.com website and not some other site.

Oh, and this advice goes for my FaceBook friends as well.

How much of what you do on a computer every day is online? Do you really need many of the desktop apps you have on your Windows, Linux, or Apple computer? Depending on what you use your computer for, you may be able to ditch many of the apps you use for online ones.

ZenHabits, a really excellent blog has an interesting and highly useful post about moving your computer needs and work online. It has a lot of good applications and ideas for doing all your computer work online. I’ve actually been moving a lot of my computer work to web based apps myself for a while. But until I read the article, it was mostly unconscious. I wasn’t really putting an effort into moving online, it was just happening.

The advantages of moving your work online, are significant. No longer are you tied to a specific computer or location. Any computer with an unrestricted Internet connection is theoretically “your computer” since all of your stuff and work is online. And the applications you are using are not OS specific. So you aren’t tied to a specific operating system or platform.

The disadvantage is of course that all your stuff is online. Which is actually the advantage as well. But when you don’t have a connection, you can’t get to any of your stuff. And if the web based app you are using is experiencing downtime, you are out of luck.

In my case, I’m online most of the day. So I think the advantages, at least for me, outweigh the disadvantages. Of course, I’m not able to completely ditch all my desktop applications. I still have to use Visual Studio for my work, and there are a few small applications that do things I haven’t been able to find online substitutes for. But over all, most of the things I use my computer for, can be done online.

Last week I was on vacation. The place I went was up in the hills and too far out for DSL or Cable internet access. So I was stuck with very limited dial up as my only choice for internet access. I had forgotten how incredibly slow the internet is when you are stuck on dial up. It was so slow, that I really couldn’t use it for much beyond simple email. So in effect I had no Internet access for the whole week.

Until I didn’t have it, I really had no idea how dependent on Internet access my daily life had become. Being without Internet access was a real problem. Every time I wanted to do or know anything, I would want to look it up online. But I couldn’t. Directions, movie times, restaurants, schedules, orders, maps, and just general communications. I had to try to remember how I would have found the info without Internet access. Sometimes, I just decided it wasn’t worth knowing or finding out because it would be too much trouble to get whatever info I wanted.

I’m so used to having all of the info available to me online, that I don’t even realize how often I use the Internet. I use the it for all my banking, planning, scheduling, news, and communications. I also use it for general trivia and curiosity whenever I see or hear something I want to know more about. Without it, I felt lost and cut off. Sure I have a cell phone on which I could call anyone I wanted. And the place I was staying at had satellite TV. If I wanted news, I could pick up a newspaper or watch TV any time I wanted. But it wasn’t the same.

I couldn’t read a headline or hear a news blurb, and look up 30 different stories on the topic or event. I couldn’t instantly look up historical background on the city, company, person, nation, or item in the story. Even worse, I couldn’t get the story reported from several different political, social, and demographic points of view. All the news I got was limited and filtered through a few mainstream outlets.

If I wanted to go somewhere I had never been, I needed to ask someone for directions rather than simply looking it up. I’m so used to looking up directions online before going somewhere, that I don’t even own a map anymore and I almost never ask someone for directions. I usually just ask for an address.

I had to call places to find out times and schedules because the information wasn’t right there in front of me just a search away. Movie times, store opening times, calendar events. Even phone numbers for stores and businesses. I had to discover all over again how to find things in a phone book(a huge pain in the neck). All the info I needed was either unavailable or had to be discovered in ways I don’t normally use.

This whole problem kind of surprised me because I hadn’t really realized how dependent I was on the Internet for everything I do and learn now. To think that just 10 years ago, I was barely using it for email, and now I have trouble functioning without it. It makes me think I may be just a little too dependent on it. I guess I’m sort of addicted.

So how necessary is the internet to your daily life?