How computer scientist rule the world...

Welcome to the wonderful 'secure' world of computers and internet.  You come into contact with them at least once, if not more, everyday.  You pay your bills, buy stuff, transfer money in to your poor college students bank account, look at your friends pictures on the book of the face, send messages to your "friend" your girl friend told you to stop talking to,  and use message boards to bash a certain sports team because they never had a good football team an now all of a sudden they are leading the big twelve south (Sic' Em). But what if your identity you thought was safe all of a sudden became public, like your bank account numbers, your credit card numbers, your address, every message you sent to your mistress, and your actual name from that sports forum.  Then you might find yourself missing a large chunk of your money, find out all the raunchy messages you sent to Crystal get posted everywhere, and a fan and his two friends Lady and Joy show up to your Austin apartment.  Well, the truth is... this can all happen.  You are not safe in this world of technology.. if someone wants your stuff.. they can get it.  To keep track of everything, all your online purchases, bank information, ip addresses, all sent and received messages, wall post from like 2005, and your address on your espn.com account are all saved on a database somewhere out there. This information is all accessible to people that we have to trust, and these people are the programmers of this software.  With out these trusted bunch of people the internet would be full of lies, scams, and thieves(more than it already is).  For instance, say I worked for a bank and I had to make it where my bank could do online transfers from one account to another account over all the different banks in the nation.  So in order to do these transfers I need to be able to process all of these account and routing numbers.  Then say I am the only programmer that works for this bank, so nobody is checking my code.  I could then log every account number that runs through my money transferring program, so then I have access to all these accounts.  Then I could take one dollar from every account that I get, and I could make millions on this. Plus, it might even be hard to catch me on this too.  If I only take a dollar from you, would you really notice that it is gone? Or care enough that it is missing?  And being the smart people we computer scientist are, we will find a way without getting caught too... remember the movie office space? Exact same concept.  Then lets say after getting fired from this bank for stealing 200 million from people (but I didn't get arrested because I invested it in a online stock trading program I made that makes trades in milliseconds making pennies and I eventually made say.. 10% profit off the 200 mil... so I paid everyone back with interest... everyone was happy.. and I kept my 5mil that was unaccounted for) so, I then get a job at facebook. And lets say its getting close to a presidential election... and this certain presidential candidate I didn't like had a facebook in high school and college... well, let me just tap into the database and take a look at every picture he was tagged in and every picture he uploaded and pretty much everything he said.... uh-oh.. that could cause problems for him if he did things that are a little more intense than chopping down a cherry tree.....  and now its floating all over the internet....  Kinda, makes you a little more afraid of what you say and what information you put up on the internet.... Oh, btw some peoples passwords for facebook and their email are so easy to break... all they have to do is look around on your profile and they will find out enough information to guess your security questions to your email. So they can change your emails password and then change your facebook's password.. and then you aint never getting in to it... And another thing... I have this tool on my mac that when I'm sitting in a non secure wifi zone, I can pull it up and it tracks every cookie going out from that router (google what that means).  So then if you are on facebook, I have the ability to get on your facebook and change anything I want, except the password.... crazy huh?  Enough telling you our secrets, Have a happy week!!





Halloween impressions 2010: Well it appears that everyone has uploaded their halloween pictures up to their facebooks for public screening, and your mom calling you asking why you were not wearing much cloths.  It seems the most over used costume was Mario and Luigi. They made an appearance at every party that had pictures on my news feed... let me take this time to dog on these two.... Ok, I still don't understand why people just love super Mario and say its the greatest game to ever come out... Have you played Halo?.... Come on, Super Mario on the original Nintendo sucks!! I played it the other day and it held my attention for a full 1 minute, then I went to work on a puzzle cause it was more entertaining.... So, why not dress up as Master Chief or Soap or Ghost from Call of Duty.. at least those games are fun...  Then for pumpkin carving, why does every party that has Mario and Luigi always have a pumpkin that appears to be drunk and throwing up?  Way to be different... it was funny once (Like being Mario and Luigi)... be original... copy kats..


-drew