Anonymous is a disparate community that has online and offline political affiliations and impact. For example, hackers in the group took up the mantle against Scientology by disrupting their Internet capabilities as well as some “ultra-coordinated motherfuckary.” Though, the "church"'s tax exempt status is, agreeably, very debatable, the church of Scientology isn't much different than any other organized religion. L. Ron Hubbard took the best spiritual elements of religions that he had studied and threw in an alien Sci-fi plot because he was a terrible Sci-fi writer whose plots had holes the size of craters. If you listen to Tom Cruise's video, he says nothing different than any person involved in any religious doctrine.
And in fact, the narrative of only you can make change is repeated in thousands of self-help books as well. Why does their narrative sound any crazier to people than that of these Christian Mega Churches, for example?
I had not realized how many tools that Anonymous had given to Tunisian cyber activists, OpTunisia, either but was unsurprised by their warning that, “This is *your* revolution. It will neither be Twittered nor televised or [sic] IRC'ed. You *must* hit the streets or you *will* loose [sic] the fight. Always stay safe, once you got [sic] arrested you cannot do anything for yourself or your people. Your government *is* watching you."
The other end of the spectrum is children trying to prank people through changing a background and getting charged with cybercrime when disciplinary action should be taken instead of criminal action.
But, we also must be able to keep people safe by punishing cyber attacks as well. If planes are vulnerable to hackers, as posited by technology experts, then it is important to be able to charge people with a crime. But there needs to be leniency for people like eighth grader Domanik Green, who attends Paul R. Smith Middle School in Holiday, Florida. His 10 days suspension was warranted and maybe could have been longer because he could have cost a teacher their job.
But the fact that he was also charged with an offense against a computer system and unauthorized access was probably going too far. Charging him with a crime doesn't help this middle school student learn anything other than the government is willing to put you on the chopping block and ruin any chance at a normal life with opportunities. If they do go through with the charges, I don't want the kid to get anything other than community service so he learns a lesson and not forced out of actually getting something positive from this experience. He was certainly in the wrong here but shouldn't be treated like it was intended to be malicious when he is a minor who is still learning and making mistakes.
We also need to keep in mind that wearables will increasingly be able to access your health status which could be life saving or could be a tool to enable people who already have mental health issues regarding health (hypochondria, Munchhausen, Munchhausen by proxy etc) to be even more anxious.
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In other news, I am unsurprised that digital music has finally matched physical sales. It was a long time coming. If you want a physical copy of a digital product, you can still use your computer to burn a CD for driving. The digital copy is not limited by the use of one medium.
Streaming services have started taking a hold of the market because we are now starting to move from the early adopter stages into the main stream stage of media usage.
It was only a matter of time before people started buying digital media more than physical media.
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