Google Hack

In post number two, I mentioned the events that have been going on between Google Inc. and the nation of China. Seeing as we've been covering technology's impact on society this week, I thought it would be a great chance to talk about some of these international events. Earlier this month, Google announced in an online blog that it had been the victim of several electronic attacks around the week of New Years. These attacks comprised the security of 34 related technological firms linked with Google and originated in China.

The details of these attacks have not been divulged to the public however we do know a few things. First, Google has said that the attacks were mainly aimed at stealing corporate source codes from these companies. Using these source codes, hackers could essentially write their own version of programs already used by these firms and sell them for huge profits. Along with the economic advantage, stolen source code could give hackers valuable insight as to the weaknesses of said programs. For these companies, most of which are in Silicon Valley and are highly electronically oriented, this is a huge problem. After these attacks, Adobe reported that it had been the victim of a security breach itself. It is not known if these events are related however the circumstances are eerily similar. Someone was able to identify a flaw in the programming of Adobe's software and attempted to infiltrate it with a virus that would deposit on someones computer every time they opened a PDF file. Luckily a catastrophe was averted and Adobe sniffed out the attacker and managed to fix the flaw.

The last attack I would like to mention was also aimed at Google. Details of the attack have been kept quiet however we do know that they are separate from the first attacks and that gmail accounts of several Chinese human rights activists have been comprised. We also know that these attacks stemmed from China itself. Every single program, file, webpage, and online interaction has whats known as a digital fingerprint, composed of a string of binary digits. Every fingerprint is completely unique. If two files have 10,000 binary digits exactly the same but one that differs, they have different fingerprints. Using this premise, investigators have been able to trace the security breach back to its own source. This source was a Chinese server and the virus was built using a unique algorithm published only in Chinese.

Anyway, this post is getting kind of long so I will post again before the weekend with updates as well as to discuss some societal connections of these events.

Anna's 2nd blog

This week I was really interested in the information because it relates to my other classes. Right now I'm also taking computer science 101 and we're learning about the binary system. Honestly, I'd never heard of the binary system before two weeks ago. It is amazing that so much can be said through all 0s and 1s, but I think it would drive me crazy trying to convert everything into binary.

We also learned about measurements and their use in the business world. Measurements are used to make decisions in the business world so we thought of different measurements used in different business careers. I especially understand how important measurements are in accounting because I'm taking an accounting class right now. The link describes different measurements used in accounting, such as assets, liabilities and expenses.

The information about logic was familiar to me because I've taken a few philosophy classes. It is funny because computers and philosophy seem to be nothing alike but they actually both apply the rules of logic. I always like when my classes intertwine because it shows that what we're learning is applicable in many ways, and it helps me understand the information better.

Bits and Bytes

When hearing about the bits and bytes in class I didn't really understand them too much, so I did a little bit of research on my own. I will share with you a few things that I learned. Bits work in decimal and binary. In binary bits hold a place value that goes up by the power of 2 each time, from what I understand. It looks like this:

0 =     0
1 =     1
2 =    10
3 =    11
4 =   100
5 =   101
6 =   110
7 =   111
8 =  1000
9 =  1001
10 =  1010
11 =  1011
12 =  1100
13 =  1101
14 =  1110
15 =  1111
16 = 10000
17 = 10001
18 = 10010
19 = 10011
20 = 10100
When you see a bit it usually is never by itself. They are usually packed together in a set of 8 bits. This is called a byte.
The good thing about bytes is you can hold more place values with them. They look like this:
 0 = 00000000
 1 = 00000001
 2 = 00000010
  ...
254 = 11111110
255 = 11111111
There are a few neat things about bytes and bits. A byte can make up to 256 characters
Standard for bytes to hold is 127 characters. These codes are used a lot of the time
in text documents that are both stored in memory and stored on a disk.
All of this stuff is important because this is how we do many of the things we do on
our computers. If the bits and bytes where never found out or created then we would
not be able to do the things that we do like write papers on the computer. Bits and
bytes may seem complicated but when you look at the system especially for the binary
system it all really makes a lot of sense.