#internetblog

In recent years piracy has grown at an increasing rate, from peer to peer sharing like torrents, to file sharing website like the newly resurrected MEGA. They allow users to easily upload ripped music, ripped movies, and cracked games. They offer the price of 0$, fast download, and potential user support if someone is lost on how to crack a game. Piracy has given the internet users an easy access to illegally free softwares at a convenience. A well known software called LimeWire began as far as 2000, where it allows P2P sharing through Digital Audio Access Protocol (DAAP). Instead of wasting time buying the game at a local shop, they can instead download the game first, play it, and if they really like the game, they can buy it as a supportive act. Piracy gives convenience in comparison to itunes or other music purchasing stores, where they even limit you from having the ability to burn the music on a cd to play on your car. Facing such limitations, it would be way more convenient to just simply download the music, burn the music and play it on your car whenever you want.

It is true that piracy may damage industries,as it de-motivates gaming company to continue developing new games when people can just download it for free. However piracy isn't all bad, where in the music industry it is quite different. By allowing music to be spread freely online, it promotes the popularity of the singer at a larger scale in comparison to the minimized market of people who would buy albums. As most people who downloads music wouldn't buy music albums even if piracy was non-existent. With the increase of people who were exposed to the songs sang by the singers, there will be a higher amount of people who would attend their concerts and buy their merchandise. In my opinion, instead of focusing on fighting against piracy, the industries should focus on establishing new ways of using it as a free international popularity promotion. Since no matter how they try to block the content from being pirated, all it take is 1 person to crack the security and 1 person to find a loophole to the copyright law, for it to be available online.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/sunday-review/internet-pirates-will-always-win.html?_r=0

http://ca.ign.com/articles/2011/07/27/is-piracy-good

Anonymous is a hacktivist group that originated in 2003 from the imageboard 4chan. The group opposes internet censorship, governmental internet privacy acts, governement corruption, scientology, hate groups and unfair treatment of civilians. It started small as a decentralized online community but slowly it growed into an international hactivism force. They go on protests, hacking governemental sites, ddosing websites, hacking private information and spreading them as a threat toward the target. The group is unique in that, there is no membership where a personnel can officailly join the group as the group has no leadership, ranking nor direct means of communication. Instead they can simply join by claiming to be part of Anonymous. This prevents the opposing target from easily capturing the leaders/hackers and arresting the core of the group.

There is also a low orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) where people can register their computer as part of a bot net used by the Anonymous to DDOS their targets. I feel that it is great to see people around the world acting together to bring corruption into the light so everyone can see and judge the corruptor. The anonymous group can act simply as a media coverage where they can dig out the deep dark secrets of the current society through illegal means like hacking. They have the power to ddos websites, spread company secrets and gain media coverage over corrupted actions. However one problem with Anonymous is that, it is easy to spin out of control due to the fact that there is no direct leadership; thus allowing random people to use the name for any of their own actions no matter if it is truly beneficial to the world. So all in all, I am happy that anonymous exist to deliver the voice of the general public, bring worrying issues to the media, and having the power to actually make a change for once; so long as they don't lose sight of their original purpose and act as a tyrant.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/08/anonymous-taking-down-government-websites

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/02/201121321487750509.html