Wednesday 21 September 2011

A wasted hack

The title of this particular post is not, as it might appear, a reflection on my own life, although some of my readers may be justified in assuming so. No, this is a brief post about something that popped up on my Twitter feed last week.

As you may have read or seen on the news last week, NBC news had their Twitter account hacked by a small group of hackers calling themselves The Script Kiddies (a more unoriginal name I think would be hard to find!). Once they had taken over the account, the hackers proceeded to post tweets about a fresh attack on the World Trade Centre on the anniversary of 9/11. Of course, I find this particular act deplorable, but I also can't help thinking that it really was such a waste of a hack.

These hackers could have posted absolutely anything. The opportunities to post links to real stories about humanitarian disasters around the world to raise awareness, or to post stories and links to charities fighting disease and poverty around the world are truly endless.

The hackers could even have tried to bring a little joy into the world by posting ridiculously faked stories. A news item about a man being attacked by a shark on the 38th floor of his office building, or Toyota designing a car that only has one gear, reverse.

Stories along these lines may have helped cheer up a world so full of anger, suffering and misery that the hack may have been seen as something of a public service acted out by a group of hackers wanting to rid the world of a few frowns. Instead, the hackers once again made people question the very technologies they have become reliant upon and attempted to prove that hackers have nothing but evil tendencies and a talent for code.

Shame!

Monday 12 September 2011

Apple In Shock "We Invented Everything" Claim

The new CEO of Apple today claimed that the high end consumer electronics company can lay claim to having invented "nearly everything since the dawn of time". The claim was made during a press conference held to release details of the latest Apple product, iAir, a new interoperability platform allowing seamless communication between existing products in the iElements range including iOxygen and iNitrogen.

The move is likely to spark another wave of condemnation from anti-Apple protesters concerned about the influence the technology company is having on modern society.

"They will one day have to accept that some things were around before them, surely" said a spokesperson for "Bananas Are Better", a lobbyist organisation campaigning for the freedom of licence to create. Their campaign, which started last year calls for individuals outside of the Apple corporation to be able to show creativity without seeking permission from the Apple corporation. The lobbyist group was started after a trade-marking of the letter "I" saw the banning of the use of the aforementioned letter to represent the first person singular last summer, after which it became legal for people to refer to themselves only as "one".

The spokesperson, who's name we cannot print in full due to the number of I's in his surname went on to say "I mean, I'm pretty sure that I was breathing before Apple invented iOxygen! And where does it end? Will my own lungs be the subject of Apples next trade mark?"

The Apple corporation have seen backlashes from the public before, most notably from religious groups worldwide a few years ago when Steve Jobs, co-founder and then CEO of the Apple corporation made claims to the beginnings of the Earth.

"A prototype 'Garden of Eden was available on the Mac long before god came along and worked on the idea", he said in an interview with CTX Technology News. "He then tried to do us out of our idea by sewing the seed that the Apple corporation was a hindrance to humanity with some story of Adam being ejected from the Garden of Eden for eating an apple".

Now in it's final stages, the legal battle between the Apple corporation and God, which Apple claims as one of its former employees has been raging for longer than this reporter can remember.

Where used in this article, the letter i is done so with permission from Apple corp. No iGuanas were harmed during the making of this article, although we may have hurt ones feeling after we refused it an interview.