It is astonishing to think that there are pharmaceuticals that can not only extend our lives, but that can eradicate diseases that were once plagues, and even still are in some areas of the world. The technology of drugs and medicine has reached a fever pitch, and with greater understanding of the human genome, we are developing cures by the dozen on a yearly basis, each one more effective than the next. However, not all drugs are created equal, nor have they all been show to have a guaranteed efficacy. Add to that fatal side effects and pharmaceutical technology does not appear quite as good as it initially might have.

The Brafman brothers wrote a book recently that discusses the psychology of human irrationality. While only a short tome weighing in at under two hundred pages, it is well researched and a fascinating look at ourselves as humans. I do not mention it because of the psychology, but rather because of the ancillary statistics cited in a particular discussion within the book. The authors examined the meteoric rise of diagnoses of bipolar disorder between the years of 1994 and 2003. Their purpose was to illustrate how the Pygmalion (taking on positive traits that are assigned to us by others) and Golem (taking on negative traits assigned to us by others) effects, collectively called the “chameleon effect” (Brafman, 2008, p. 100).
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MediaDefender is a company that was hired by the RIAA and MPAA to perform DoS and DDoS attacks on BitTorrent tracker servers suspected of hosting illegal files. Over the Memorial Day weekend this year, they attacked Revision3 (Louderback, 2008), a Web2.0 and Internet media company that hosts multiple audio and video podcasts. Because they were being flooded with over 8,000 SYN requests per second, they could not keep their site up. What added insult to injury was the fact that Revision3 found out who was performing the attack, but could not reach anyone at MediaDefender as it was a holiday weekend, and apparently they left the attack running and headed out to the picnics. When Revision3 finally did contact MediaDefender on Tuesday morning, it took an additional one and a half hours to stop the attack on the Revision3 servers.

The attack was directed at port 20000 of the Revision3 BitTorrent tracking server (Louderback, 2008). BitTorrent is a form of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing that uses a tracking server, or trackers, and distributed files to provide quick and efficient file transfer, particularly for large files over the Internet or other networks. Rather than hosting the files themselves as in other P2P networks, a BitTorrent tracker simply keeps track of the files that users are sharing and which users have which bits. By doing so, it can enable other users to connect to the network and download all of the bits into one cohesive usable file on their computer, all the while sharing out the relevant bits that they have already received.
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Technology differs greatly from the common American societal viewpoint. It is not simply about personal computers in the home of every person, or touch screen interfaces, or even cloth that will make the wearer nearly invisible. Rather, technology is that which can be put to practical use. Often the practicality is extended to suggest an ease of use or a simplification of the task that the technology addresses.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines technology as

1. a. A discourse or treatise on an art or arts; the scientific study of the practical or industrial arts.

b. transf. Practical arts collectively.

c. With a and pl. A particular practical or industrial art.

d. high-technology applied attrib. to a firm, industry, etc., that produces or utilizes highly advanced and specialized technology, or to the products of such a firm. (OED, 2008)

Given this general definition, it is easy to see how many modern objects and practices can fall under the umbrella of technology. The Oxford English Dictionary supplies several additional definition including

4. Special Combs.: technology assessment, the assessment of the effects on society of new technology; technology transfer, the transfer of new technology or advanced technological information from the developed to the less developed countries of the world. (OED, 2008)

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When designing web sites, creators must take several criteria into account: navigation, consistency, performance, appearance, quality, interactivity, security, and scalability. This is especially true for e-commerce sites. Customers and companies alike access e-commerce web sites to accomplish a number of differing tasks from account setup to repeat purchases to content management. Content management is one task which companies must address when developing and maintaining their e-commerce sites. When implementing a content management system, not only do the needs of employees need to be met, but the system must meet all of the aforementioned criteria with respect to the customers which will be accessing it, scalability being arguably one of the most important. With the advent of Web 2.0, scalability comes to the forefront of issues that need to be addressed with new development kits and application frameworks that are being used to create e-commerce and other web sites.

Web sites such as eBay.com and Amazon.com see thousands, perhaps millions, of visitors per day and process transactions for many of them. These two companies use older technology to present their web presence to the world, but have begun integrating Web 2.0 technologies into their systems. While both use AJAX to enhance the appearance and user interface, neither rely on new application frameworks such as Ruby on Rails to power the transaction processing and presentation of the sites.
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Hackers like to draw a distinction between members of their subculture who exploit and break into systems for personal gain and those who do so for the knowledge. Hackers will often refer to a person of malicious intent as a “cracker”, but whether the intent is good or bad, the mere act of intrusion on an information system is of questionable ethics. In the United States, the law does not look at the individual’s intent, but rather at the action itself. If an individual attempts to break into a secured system, or even an unsecured system to which they are not entitled to access, it is illegal.

A hacker is defined as “a malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around” (Spinello, 2003, pg. 144). In his text, Spinello publishes an interview with a self-proclaimed hacker. Between smug remarks, the hacker is clearly convinced that his activities are good for the world. In fact, he describes the hacker ethic. This is a viewpoint in which “access to computer systems should be unlimited and unrestricted… [a]ll the information should be freely accessible in order to help others learn and develop their skills” (2003, pg. 145). The flaw with this “ethic” is that it does not define a computer system clearly and thus neglects that some systems may contain sensitive personal data which would serve no educational purpose whatsoever.
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