The Cuckoo’s Egg

The conclusion that Cliff Stoll ends his account in The Cuckoo’s Egg with was different then I had anticipated. Throughout the book, the author goes in to great detail describing his extended encounters with a German hacker trying to steal government secrets. However, the moral of his story was not about the importance of using strong passwords or the need to develop better encryption algorithms. No, he concludes by stating why these attacks were so repulsive. He concludes with the observation that this transcendental computer network was more then hardware—it was the front for a community of users. A community built on trust and cooperation that was being violated by this hacker.

These ideas of community reminded me of a lecture given by Robert Putnam at BYU a few years back. Robert Putnam is famous for his controversial book Bowling Alone which details his study on the decline of Social Capital, and his forum lecture touched on the same subject. In his book and during his lecture he contended that the United States has undergone a unique breakdown in civic, social, and political life. Additionally, he felt that this breakdown has caused negative ripples in our cultural pond.

Now, if Cliff Stoll could feel that a fringe network of University and Governmental computers was sufficiently developed to constitute a community worth protecting, then he and anyone that agrees with him would have to consider the social networks of today to be even more fully developed. Then, is Robert Putnam wrong? Has he only witnessed a shift, not a decline, in Social capital? Or is he still right because these social replacements are insufficient to take the place of more traditional forms? Can the clans of World of WarCraft sufficiently replace bowling leagues?

Dreamspark

Microsoft announced Tuesday the launch of a new student software giveaway program called Dreamspark. Here is an article form the Washington Post article covering this new program. The new program mostly differs from their other similar programs like MSDN academic alliance in student scope. Dreamspark is available to all students regardless of the major being pursued. What caught my interest in the article were a few snippets injected by the journalist about Microsoft’s motive. It made me wonder if a company like Microsoft could do anything without their motives being criticized? I’m not making a judgment, just asking a question. If they did something truly benevolent would anyone ever know, or would we always assume that there is some hidden agenda? And is it even worth them trying? Have we created an environment where it is not even worth being benevolent?

Church History

This semester I am taking a class covering Family History. As I have started to delve into this never-ending project, I have been interested to see an internet phenomenon that I am starting to notice more and more throughout the entire internet. The internet is making us lazy. Just because you look up look up some names and you copy & paste them in to PAF doesn't mean you have done any work. In the few databases that I have looked at there has been a lot of duplication. Even these duplicated records have done a poor job of replication. Still, I guess it is a small price to pay for the power and ease-of-use that the internet affords us.