Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Sarah Palin, The Large Hadron Collider and The Hackers

The Large Hadron Collider
Sarah Palin
David Kernell, the hacker

Sometimes its difficult to understand a person's non-verbal actions. In our course, we learn methods to decrypt the actions of others based on orthodox reasoning. However there are certain groups of people that do not operate in our sphere of social mechanism. The group that I will be focusing on will be the hackers. Most of the time they hack into high profile systems to gain reputation or mostly just out of fun. It is also not shocking to know that some do it for the monetary gains by selling the hacked information.

Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, sends out sensitive information via email to other government agencies on a daily basis. Instead of using the secure government server, she used a web-based Yahoo! email client to send confidential emails. If she had understood the general characteristics of hackers, she would have known she's a sitting duck waiting to be shot. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), capable of exciting a single proton to such a speed that some say a dark hole could be formed when 2 of them struck together, was also hacked by a group of hackers from Greek. According to reports, they were only a hairline away from gaining control of the whole system. The result would be catastrophic according to the engineers from LHC. Similarly, had they thought about what might hackers do to their $8 billion machine, they would have taken precautionary measures to be well protected.

We learn alot on how to present ourselves to others but equally important is how we should receive others. This may make me sound overly paranoid but we should equip ourselves with skills to understand these groups of people as well. Such skills are more of a preempt reaction that provides us with a shield that protects against these people.

*Note: With the incident of Sarah Palin in mind, getting a good password for your senstive accounts is extremely important. Bytes Interactive is a website I chanced upon that provides suggestions for good passwords.

2 comments:

Brad Blackstone said...

This is an interesting post. You make a good case for caution, certainly. It's also astute of you to connect hacking, albeit not on the surface a social mechanism, to nonverbal communication.

One factual issue: Palin is not an ai to the governor of Alaska. She IS the governor, with design on the White House itself.

tom said...

Goodness...fatal error...thanks for pointing it out to me Brad.