Tag: crime

#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.

One A Day, Day 45: The Golden Snitch

Read this, including listening to the audio clip of the complete twat.

I heard this on the news the other day and I was actually a little bit shocked that it was even being discussed. One sound bite from someone with a similarly obnoxious accent as “Adam” came out with the golden line “well, like, you just don’t do it, innit?”

Sorry, rewind a little there. Since when has it been not okay to talk to the police about… what’s that thing they deal with again? Oh, right. Crime. Since when has it been something you “just don’t do, innit” to inform the police about knife or gun violence?

The growing gang culture in the UK is something I find rather troubling. While in some ways it is amusing and pathetic that these groups of tracksuit-clad white English teenagers put on that ridiculous accent to try and sound like a tracksuit-clad black English teenager putting on an accent (do keep up) and acting like they’re “in the hood”, in other senses the culture of “casual crime” is an unpleasant blight on our society.

I realise I sound rather Daily Mail about all this – but I’ve seen it happening. Fortunately I’ve never been the victim of a crime myself, though some friends and I were chased down the street and into a shop by the “Bassett Boys” once for no reason other than we were walking on what was evidently their “turf”. And, remember, I’ve worked in schools, where I’ve seen a number of kids slowly descending into that kind of culture because they’re “bored, innit”. And in my last job we were regularly confronted with hoodie-wearing, attitude-giving morons who think that 50 Cent is God.

But this recent news about the stigma attached to actually informing the police about extremely serious crimes – violence and murder in some cases – is possibly the most troubling. Supposedly, the police are there to protect us, so why should people feel threatened? I certainly wouldn’t have any qualms about phoning the police if I happened to witness something going on – and, in fact, have on a number of occasions. Fortunately, none of them have been that serious (although the guy trying to kick down our neighbours’ door was a bit scary) but I just find it bizarre to think that so many young people find the idea of talking to the police to be a complete no-go area.

The report is probably skewed somewhat in its perspective (it is on the 1Xtra page, after all), but the fact remains – the police (and indeed, other authority figures) are supposed to be there to provide a sense of security to everyone, and help make things safer. What sort of culture are we living in if you can’t report a bloody crime?