Hack Me Once, Phreak Me Twice There are a few elite in our technology-driven world that possess the unnatural ability to understand and wield the power of computers. To the media they are known as hackers, threats to computer security everywhere. To the underground they are known as "console cowboys", samurais, and the last defenders of free information. To the common man they are young teenage boys that break your computer and ruin your e-mail. Hackers are not criminals or mischievous kids with no purpose. They play an important role in our culture and are the fuel behind our technological revolution. Before we can fully understand the mind of a hacker, we need to look at the history of hacking. Hacking is usually broken up into three time periods: The Elder Days, The Golden Age, and Zero Tolerance. The Elder Days were the years from 1965-1979 when the "hackers" emerged from the computer labs of MIT, Cornell, and Harvard. These computer geeks of the 60's had an incurable thirst to know how machines worked, specifically computers. While professors were trying to teach structured, mathematical programming, students were staying up late nights "hacking" away at their programs until they found shorter and more elegant solutions to the problems. This process of "bumming code" contradicted the professors' methods, and so began the defiant and rebellious origins of hackers. This time period produced one of the best hacks of all time, when Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thomson of Bell Labs created the operating system UNIX in 1969. This primitive operating system was written by hackers, for hackers. There was now a standard to run programs on, although it required an enormous amount of knowledge of computers for even the simplest tasks. As a consequence of UNIX, the 1970's became all about exploring and figuring out how the computer world worked. In 1971, a hacker found out how to get free calls from AT&T by emitting a 2600 MHz tone into the receiver. He called himself "Cap'n Crunch" because he used the free whistle that came in the cereal box to give off the 2600 MHz tone. From this, a new type of hacking gained popularity, one that did not deal specifically with computers but rather with telephones. Hackers like Cap'n Crunch were called "phreaks", for "phone freaks." So, fittingly, hacking phones is known as "phreaking." As more phreakers and hackers emerged, they needed a way to communicate with each other.
In reality, most hackers are ordinary people with a great deal of curiosity, above-average skills with a computer, a good understanding of human nature, and plenty of time to kill. Hackers have no distinguishing characteristics. Your next-door neighbor could be a hacker, as could your niece or nephew, one of your co-workers, or even the kid who serves you coffee in the morning. Not all hackers are dangerous and out to destroy business or damage lives. The view of the general public toward hackers is mixed. A recent CNN-poll shows 33% of respondents labeling hackers as "useful," 17% seeing them "as a menace," and the majority (45%) seeing hackers as "both" useful and a menace (CNN, 1999).
Through the path of history, there have been several major events that influenced thousands of lives and were significant in forming the world today. One of the largest and deadliest events that occurred in history was a disaster not anybody could control or be held accountable for. This was Hurricane Katrina. On the early Monday morning of August 29th, 2005, a Category 5 rating Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of the United States with winds up to 175 miles per hour and a storm surge of 20 feet high. Hurricane Katrina was one of the greatest and most destructive natural disasters recorded to make landfall in the United States. The natural causes of the hurricane, poorly structured levees, disaster inside the Superdome, and the
Formerly, New Orleans and surrounding areas had eluded the calamity of the storm, which was later proven wrong. A flood warning was announced after it was predicted that the river would ‘’rise 60ft,’’ which would overflow a levee. A few of the barriers surrounding the city ‘’broke or were washed away’’ within one day of landfall, flooding the ‘’Sinking City’’. The
However, with Hurricane Katrina FEMA was not prepared to know how to respond to a Category 5 hurricane as big as Katrina. Part of this failure for FEMA to know how to respond was due to poor planning in how to take control of the situation. In Cooper and Block’s book, Disaster, the authors state how “the city was pitch black, communications were poor, and it was impossible even to prioritize problems when everything seemed to be cause for panic” (Cooper and Block, 2006, 152). With citizens stranded on rooftops in New Orleans and the city completely flooded, it can be hard to know where one should start with a mess as a large as this disaster. Consequently, FEMA had a hard time responding to a large city that was in dire
More than 1,400 people lost their lives. It became the global symbol of American dysfunction and government negligence. At every level and in every duty, from engineering to social policy to basic logistics, there was revelations of malfunction and failure before, during, and after Katrina. With 80 percent of the city underwater it has been a slow road to recovery. Out of the 140,000 applicants, only 22,000 families have received funds for renovating their homes and only expending 1.3 billion out of the total allocated. Many people are still displaced, many are still waiting for their homes to be rebuilt, neighborhoods are still in shambles, and business are still trying to rebuild but for some the situation still remains
Gibson, J.W., and R.M. Hodgetts. 1991. Organizational Communication – A Managerial Perspective. 2nd Edition. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
Hacking has historically been associated with shady behavior or criminal connotations. It is very rare that a person condones hacking or thinks of it as anything other than a crime. However, in his article “Academic Freedom and the Hacker Ethic”, Tom Cross challenges us to redefine a hacker and what they actually do. He forces the audience to think as he states that “knowing how to do something that might be harmful is not the same as causing harm” (Cross, 38). Using this powerful statement, Cross uses his article to give the reader a new take on hacking. He proceeds to explain that often times, the information that we receive as a public is a result of hacking into government systems. He provides us with a new perspective as he divulges the
Following Katrina, the wait-and-see approach was no longer an acceptable approach to responding to significant disasters. The new approach adopted by the federal government involved a proactive posture, stronger collaboration, and engaged partnerships between the public and private sectors. The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Private Sector Division launched the NBEOC after being widely criticized for the federal government’s lack of preparation and response during Hurricane Katrina. In the days leading up to Sandy, the federal government activated the NBEOC to assist impacted local governments and private sector organizations (Homeland Security, 2013). After identifying and planning for vulnerable areas, the NBEOC rapidly deployed 30 private sector liaisons to support New York City, New Jersey, and Connecticut (FEMA, 2013). Moreover, the NBEOC kept in constant communication with the business community and senior FEMA, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and White House staff by constantly gathering and sharing critical information, and relaying the impact and needs of impacted communities and
Hurricane Hugo was a catastrophe that caused widespread residential damage, extensive lifeline destruction, and enormous timber destruction in South Carolina and was one of the most costly disasters ever experienced in the US in terms of damage to homes, infrastructure and local economies. The media reported accounts of incidents that were serious problems in South Carolina’s response and early recovery efforts which further initiated an exploratory research to gather information about recovery experience in four badly impacted counties and about the state response and recovery actions undertaken. Post hurricane response problems were both organizational and functional. The research reveals significant state deficiencies with state and county emergency capabilities and serious problems in two national disaster response organizations, the Red Cross and FEMA. Another concern was that most emergency management knowledge came from direct experience rather than from existing educational and training programs along with serious mitigation planning problems were found with hurricane. Deepen concerns we...
Waugh, W. (2006). Shelter from the Storm: Repairing the National Emergency Management System after Hurricane Katrina. Michigan City: SAGE Publications.
As a result, to the slow response to Hurricane Katrina by FEMA, President Bush stated in the article “Shortfalls in the federal response to Hurricane Katrina highlight that our current homeland security architecture, to include policies, authorities, plans, doctrine, operational concepts, and resources at the Federal, State, local, private sector, and community level, must be strengthened and transformed” (Bush, nd).
This was primarily due to President George W. Bush’s ignorance towards the current situation. At the time of the hurricane, President Bush was on vacation which was forced to be cut short. He returned from vacation on August 31, about two days after Hurricane Katrina had already struck. Many people claim that President Bush was unaware about the extent of the disaster, and that the response would have been much more effective if he had a plan. According to Newsweek, “the president of the United States [had less] ‘situational awareness’ than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century.” Quite obviously, President Bush lacked responsibility and initiative towards the disaster, and this was a major cause for the delayed
The Truth about Hackers In the winter of the year 2000 an eighteen year old hacker, who went by the name Curador accessed about 26, 000 credit card numbers and put them on the internet. With the help of an ex-hacker, Curador was eventually tracked down and sentenced. All of this was explained in a frontline interview with Curador himself also known as Raphael Gray. Who are these so called hackers? Are peoples assumptions about teenage hackers correct? In 1995 the movie Hackers portrayed the images and lifestyles of hackers similar to the one mentioned above. The characters in Hackers show a media example of finding themselves in cyberspace by forming a community which creates their own boundaries. According to Coppin, hacking is the process of writing and reading code. People who code in an open range of society are hackers. The term a hack is often meant as a fast and dirty solution. Hackers are often confused with hackers are crackers. Crackers are people who break into or crack computer security systems (Coppin). In Hackers, high school cyberpunk teenagers get together and associate with the rave lifestyle known as techno. Due to the medias portrayal of the average hacker, people constantly associate hackers as teens with a love for techno music and rave-like gatherings. This is not necessarily true. Anyone can be a hacker. Even those with a family, a job, and an ideal lifestyle, including females have the potential of being a hacker. Therefore, no stereotypical labels should be placed on hackers due to their possible diversity. Hackers influences the way people tend to associate how everyday hackers are supposed to be. Hackers also show how hackers form their own cyber communities. They share simil...
The definition of hacking has undergone some changes in the past few years. At first it identified people “who enjoys modifying and subverting system, whether technological bureaucratic or sociological.” (Lemos, 2002) In the last decade hacking has evolved to describe “those people with a hands-on interest in computer security and circumventing such security. (lemos 2002) As you explore deeper into the digital landscape it becomes clearer that these hackers are sub divided into three groups of intermingling individuals classified by a system of hats.
In Computer security terminology Hacker is a person or group of persons, who exploit, modify and identify weakness in a computer system or network. Hacker may be motivates of reasons such as profit, protest and challenge. based on attitude, belief, and goals hacker groups are categories such as