Is this right?

Hey all. I know I'm not as active as I used to be - joined a few years back, was active, then the rollback killed all motivation I had left :P.

The reason I'm posting this here rather than myspace or face book or any of those silly "social" sites is because I've found that the wisest and smartest of the internet population is that of computer lovers - moreso hackers. So then I just had to pick the best hacking site I know of (off that long list of websites that give a fuck sarcasm) to discuss this on - that was a no brainer. </suckup>

I'm going to write this all out and hope it makes some sort of reasonable sense. I'm not a good writer, so bare with me. I'm plainly writing this to ask a question.

I've lately been thinking a lot. That's good, right? If some of you are as obsessed with computers as I am, then you would know that going through school with this obsession often leads to doing projects, papers, and the like ON computers themselves - their inner workings, processes, history, etc. When looking at todays computers, the internet, and everything that comes with it, then comparing that to the abacus, we've obviously advanced a bit. If you don't know what an abacus is, google it. That seems to be the easiest way of obtaining data these days.

Reading the above paragraph, I might seem a little… disgruntled. No, I'm not. And even if I was, you don't care, and I don't care. Not what this thread is about. I'm just trying to get your input on whether or not we're advancing in the right direction. Are we where we intended 70 years ago?

Think about it. Computers were made to aid us in creating documents, sorting voting results, etc. Reasonable time savers. Now? Well to put it bluntly, we're just a bunch of lazy slobs. Google? The devil. Any piece of information we need is right in that size 55 text box. Our grammar has depleted (well, a lot of ours…) purely because we don't write anymore. The school I attend, a technical charter high school, has a set of laptops for every class + 3 computer labs, 1 of which has a huge set of computers that could quite possibly render the world. Thinking now, the last time I ever seriously wrote a pencil (yes, with my numba 2 ghetto pencil that is now obsolete in this world) was in the eighth grade - middle school. I'm now a sophomore. 2 years. 2.

Not only that, but we are constantly stimulated with these contraptions. For one, we find games quite ammusing, yes? Any hardcore computer hobbyist has played a game on a computer - it's obvious. Whether it be a flash game off of AddictingGames to pass time, or a full on LAN party playing CoD4, overclocking to reach that juicy 120 FPS - and everyone conversing in a foreign tongue - computer-ese - to talk about it.

Lazy, stimulating.. what else can we add to the mix?

I could go on and on about how computers have advanced.

But it all leads back to the question: is this where we wanted to go? Are we going in the right direction? At this rate, we're not going to be doing anything at all! Taxes will be automated. Gaming with be automated. Researching will be automated. Hell, even writing a school paper discussing the habitat of kinkajous will be automated!

On to the discussion of hacking. I'm not going to call myself a hacker, purely because I am not one. Sure, I can screw around with javascript and bypass a timer forcing you to wait 4 minutes to download a text file. Sure, I can hex edit Halo to give me unlimited needles to pwn a grunt's ass. But the that's not hacking, thats… I don't even know what. No, Im not a skiddie - those types of people need to die. <tangent>They are the ones who are lazy and feed off of us programmers (yes, I will consider myself a programmer). If you are a skiddie, and you know it, fuck off my thread.</tangent> (I was almost half expecting the "tangent>" to appear automatically - exactly what I'm talking about, right?).

A long time ago, when on the first hacking website I learned some of my current knowledge on, HTS, I met an interesting and long time friend, who I've now not talked to for a very long time - ZoNe VoRTeX. He wrote an article on the ethics of hacking, and where the world of hackers is going. That won a print-out and a place on the cover of my notebook containing the three first zines of HBH.

'Till this day, I often find myself reading it. If you can track the article down, sweet, it's on HTS: read it. It sure beats the crap out of this article by far. He states that over time, we have become a society of outcasts, and that when the seed of computers had been planted, "hackers" were respected, and not only fertilized the computer community, but gave it it's meaning today. He goes on to bash skiddies and the whole idea of black hat/white hat.

Then goes on to the fact that we are criminals. In the US, at least, even visiting this website may be breaking some laws. I don't care, arrest me, I dare you.

Did we want this? No. Not at all. But every year it gets worse - hence the inspiration for this thread for the '09 year.

So reading this jumbled up mess, I ask you:

Is this where we want to be? Are we advancing in such a way that computers will literally take over us? If so, where did we go wrong?

Hmm, i admit i have only skim read your rather larger… err post… But;

What we do and use computers for now was unimaginable not many decades ago, there was a time when the top people in the computer field where convinced that games on computers would be impossible, how wrong those pioneers of modern day technology where…

But what we do and use computers for is not bad, after all, once we have an automated car that is proven to be safer than any human driver, why would we not change over? quicker, easier, safer. Thus giving those intelligent people more time to focus on that which matters, whatever that may be.

Sure it gives some people the ability to be a useless vegetable, watching the 3D TV all day with a machine feeding you to wiping your arse, but we have always had lazy slobs, and always will, just the same as we will always have those that want to be someone, and are ever advancing the technology that the generations give us…

Computers have taught many people many things, someone can easily learn to read if brought up with computers, as long as they want to… Else he can go to miniclip.com till he is forced to stock shelves at Asda… His choice.

Though yes, sadly the art of hand written text will pretty much die out, but I'm sure they would still know how even if the did write the lower case 'a' as it is here.

I think we have a very good idea what the technology of the next few decades will give us, but would still be dumbfounded by what the future will bring, that or we go extinct for whatever reasons .^^

I'll try to keep this as short as possible.

A couple of things that stood out to me are: a) computers were not made to aid us in creating documents and sorting voting results, they were first made to more accurately bomb the fuck out of others and other such things that are useful in war. Technology always advances most in wartime, it's just how it is.

b) ethics of hackers? We don't have any ethics. There are a very general set of flexible views, but no ethics. The word ethics is a very vague and dangerous word to toss around, it needs to be specified. One of the views hackers tend to share is freedom, a set of exact constrictive ethics they must follow would inhibit that and freedom consists also of freedom within their own ethics.

You ask if this is where we wanted to be 70 years ago, well I personally wasn't here then and I doubt anyone else here was alive 70 years ago as well. So we can't really say. Things are easier, that's what mankind always have strived for, ever since the first time we made a knife out of sharp rocks. We are pathetically incompetent physically and that's why our strong side is thought and technology to aid us. Whatever the circumstances are or will be, there will always be people who don't want to do anything, all the better for them in these ages. However, many will after a while feel the need to do something, to accomplish something in their lives, if that can't be hard physical labour it'll be whatever else is available. No matter how technologically advanced we get, people will have to understand the reasons behind everything that helps us. If you think that we need to know less compared to earlier generations because technology has advanced so much, just look at all the seemingly (and many times actually) unnecessary crap we have to learn in school. Knowledge will always be needed, all that happens is that we discover more things to learn.