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journal entry | february 9 | melissafebruary 9

hack, hack, hack

because of the latest news about yahoo! I am in a hacker mood. for those of you who don't know, because you live under a rock or are in college, I would suggest starting here. But for a short rundown, yahoo was inundated with computer data on Monday and were shut down for three hours because of this. Hackers are thought to be responsible for this massive problem, and later also hit other sites, including eBay, and Amazon.com. For a very good audio news update about this event, go here. Below is the excerpt about Yahoo's attempt to deal with the hackers, off of Yahoo's own news site. If you click the image, you can go to a detailed article about Yahoo being targeted by electronic villains.

Yahoo! Inc. said Tuesday it was meeting with the FBI to track down hackers who brought its site to a standstill Monday, although the company expects no financial impact from the incident. (Reuters) - Feb 08 8:21 PM EST

Anyway, all of this put me in the a hacking mood thing. One of my favorite books is by Cliff Stoll, who wrote the Cuckoo's Egg. (And recently a good book about computers and education) This book chronicles his own experience of catching a hacker who got into a Berkeley computer system. It introduced me to the world of hacking, unix, and the weird sense of humor that many geeks have. And then I love computer espionage movies, like Sneakers, The Net, The Matrix, etc. However, the movie that really put the concept on the popular culture map was Hackers. This movie didn't portray anything about the computer accurately, but it gave it a glamour, and took the geek out of hack. When MGM put up a website devoted to their movie, hackers messed it up. They made the left poster into the right poster. MGM seemed to have a pretty good humor about it, and even posted the hacker's creation on their site. I doubt yahoo! is going to be so kind. For a real life hacker in jail who is looking for some sympathy, go see Kevin's website. You might even join in the Free Kevin cause.

academic sidenote

• today I had my don quixote class, and we learned about Reader Response theory. There was one exercise you can do with this theory that seemed to be a great tool for self-examination, and not just theory. "Select a text you loved or hated when you were young. Write a response statement from initial encounter with book. Read it again and write current statement. Compare/contrast the two encounters with text." Eventually I am going to try this, and might put the results up in this journal.
• this literary theory stuff got me thinking: is there an Objectivist literary theory, or literary critical approach possible beyong the personal aesthetic of Ayn Rand. What foundation would it have, and what form would it take? Or would it be akin to social crits like feminism or marxism? No answer, just a lot of thinking.

anyway, enjoy your thursday...

MELISSA

02/10/00 03:30:55 AM