#oneaday Day 116: Hacked Off

So, Sony fucked up. Pretty bigstyle. And yet I find myself less angry at them and their incompetent handling of the situation and more angry at the fact this situation even arose in the first place.

I’m talking, of course, about hackers. Hacking, despite people not really knowing what it is outside of representations that they’ve seen in movies, is one of the things people are most paranoid about in the online age — and with Sony’s PR disaster in full swing at the minute, it’s easy to see why, as people frantically cancel their credit cards and change all their passwords on the offchance that some bearded, smelly loser (not me) may pick their personal details to commit fraud with.

In practice, it seems that a lot of hacks are committed to make a point rather than cause damage as such, whatever Introversion Software’s excellent Uplink might have you believe. But for a service as inoffensive as PSN, it just seems spiteful to attack it. Anonymous had its high-profile throwing-toys-out-of-a-pram moment a week or two ago but they claim they’re not responsible for this latest incident as they’re supposedly “on the side of the consumer”. That and everyone was yelling at them for fucking up PSN when people just wanted to get online, play stuff and buy stuff.

I guess it’s just like any other crime — crime shouldn’t happen, but it does, whether it’s in the real or virtual world. However nice it’d be to imagine a Star Trek-esque future where crime and war between humans is a thing of the past, it’s not going to happen — or at least, not for a long time. As long as there are people out there who feel a misplaced sense of “entitlement” — whether it’s to get their hands on software they haven’t paid for, to steal people’s personal information or just to fuck everyone else’s enjoyment up — then we can never feel completely “safe” and confident.

Which is a shame, really, isn’t it? So much of new technology is genuinely awesome when used properly. Were the threat of hacking and other technology crime not present, the capabilities of devices could be even more awesome. But as it is, so much time and money has to be spent on installing cutting-edge security into every single device we own that things are probably held back from where they could be if security wasn’t such an issue.

Oh, I know. It’s nice to want things, and some sort of Utopia would supposedly get boring quite quickly, but I’d certainly like to enjoy it, if only for a while. But it’s never going to happen — the world is full of just enough arseholes to make life less enjoyable for the majority, non-arsehole population out there.

So, arseholes, a big fuck you, and I hope your cock falls off. Into a fire. Which someone then douses with acid, mistaking it for water. And then feeds you the remains. And then jams a really sharp spike right up your bum-hole.

Yeah.