It has become a normal thing now to not buy a CD, but to download individual songs. This really shouldn't be a big deal, but the amount of people who do this illegally is large. this sort of crimes have all the time any where you can access the Internet. I remember the good old days of Napster where we could trade music freely. I will admit that while I was growing up, even after it was illegal, I downloaded a lot of music for free. now I use iTunes now since it's easy and it has the capability to download song directly to my ipod. Downloading music is a petty crime compared to what some computer savvy people are up to.
There have been many attacks via the Internet and many of them have done millions of dollars worth of damage. 1945 the term "bug" was coined when a naval officer found a moth stuck between relays and soon after that debugging became the common term for fixing a computer. Hacking is nothing new. In 1983 a group of hackers known as the "414s" where caught after they had broken in to several U.S. government networks. In 1999 an estimated $80 million in damages was racked up when a virus infecting Microsoft outlook e-mail know as the Melissa virus quickly spreed. The U.S. laws surrounding the Internet are hard to keep in check because they are just U.S. laws.
There are a lot of crimes committed that rack up millions of dollars in damage that can never be prosecuted because the attack originated in a different country. The "I love you" virus Infected millions of computers in 2000. The virus sent usernames and passwords to a Filipino computer, but because there is no law against it there they couldn't do anything about it. Some attacks are out just to destroy and are very difficult to trace. In 2001 a worm infecting thousands of computers shut down the whit houses web site. This attack alone cost an estimated 2 billion dollars in damage. These are just a few of the attacks throughout the computer history, there are many more and this will continue to happen this we can be sure.
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That is very interesting about how the terminology for 'bug' came about. I also didn't know that there was a virus called 'I Love you'. I think that if laws could be made more universal it would prevent people from being so protected by the country that they live in.
ReplyDeleteI've heard that viruses don't exist for Apple computers. One of my colleagues informed me the reason is that since most of the market share is PC's, people don't waste their time writing a virus for Apple. If they did, it would not affect very many computers. Amazing. I wish I knew the drive behind a virus writer. If it does nothing more than harm everybody else, they are no better than a criminal rapist. They just like to rape computers. Ha.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to cyber theft I think a lot of people have the mentality that "everyone is doing it" and therefore it is ok. Because you don't see who you are stealing from, and because its only one song here and there, that its no big deal. Perhaps if people thought more in the term of the big picture, then cyber theft would decrease.
ReplyDeleteI also thought that some of the histories in this post were interesting. I never knew where the term "bug" came from, and it is a ironic story. As for hacking and cyber theft, they are very serious problems that need to be addressed. Unfortunately with any new technology people love to see what limits they can push with it. Some do it for knowledge or fun, but most have more malicious purposes. I agree that file sharing has been very destructive to the music industry. It has almost destroyed the record industry. I used to use those programs like many people, but now purchase my music on itunes because it is safe and convenient.
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