Told in a hilariously cliche 1990's fashion, this informational video, a subproduct of the popular NetCafe web series of the time, touches upon the emergence of crime in the web during the rise of the internet in the 90's. The video spends a good deal of time highlighting the "underground" sector of the internet in which hackers fester and hope to pounce on the next most vulnerable website. With the growing popularity of the Web at the time, such a popular tool falling victim to various forms of crime, such as hacking, was inevitable. At the time, there were even websites up that were dedicated to relaying to the visitor which sites out there were and were not hacked as it became more and more of a prominent issue with little security on the Web then.
What a viewer of the video can take away from watching it is an interesting comparison between then and now in how crime is perpetuated in online spaces, and how it was and continues to be dealt with. It's been 15 years since the video was originally created, and yet I feel that we as a society can do just as little to prevent hacking and certain cyber crimes as we could then. As technology advances, so does the Web and its various features, making it so that more and more vulnerabilities open up than can be tracked. These vulnerabilities are what hackers continue to target, and in a world where some of the worst crime is carried out online, as is stated in the video, big corporations and the government will release products and set out precautions to attempt to prevent fraud and hacking, but in the end, cyber security is far from guaranteed. Just as it was in 1999, the best thing a person can do now to stay away from being the victim of an online crime is not interact with the Web at all. The issue there being that even individuals who don't make use of the internet or Web may still fall victim to cyber crimes with the way these types of technologies have progressed today.
Video link: https://archive.org/details/Crimeand1999
I agree with you! Although the issue of hacking is of a different scale than it was when this video was produced, you hear about all the celebrity iCloud accounts getting hacked and the scandals that follow, and it just shows that privacy/hacking is just as big and important of an issue as it was when the internet was first being formed.
ReplyDeleteI think as a society we put so much faith into the newest technology without even consciously thinking about it, because we think this technology is so different from what was out there in the 90's, but we really do not know that at all. We really have no idea how systems like iCloud truly function.