Dot Con

Recently I watched a documentary on the Wall Street dot com inside trading scandal called “Dot Con.” My initial reaction was that these companies who are making millions of dollars on their initial public offering are super lucky. When a “.com” company went public its initial investors were made millionaires overnight. It is just disgusting to me how the investment bankers, in charge of taking the company public, were using the IPO of the company as a form of legalized bribery. There were some cases where a company’s stock price had already increased by literally hundreds of dollars and the broker would offer the stock at the initial offering price to those who he could collect favors from later. This never would have happened if investors were smarter about the companies they invested in.  Many novice investors were getting nailed at the tail end of these “pop stocks” and stuck with the outrageous priced stocks in a company who may not have any sort of plan to become profitable in the future. If someone wants to invest in a company, I hope they use this tragic situation as an example; it is necessary to do research on a company before one invests in it.  It is usually better to invest in a solid company you can trust to make good business decisions and give you small profits, than it is to blindly trust someone because of the enormous amounts of money they say they will generate for you.

My Thoughts on Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg

A world without cyber espionage would be incredibly dull. At least this is what reading The Cukoo’s Egg made me think. Unfortunately I have never actually tracked down a cyber-terrorist. I am, however, aware that cyber-crime happens frequently enough to merit my caution in setting passwords on my own sensitive documents and securing my internet connections. In the current era of internet usage many more people are aware of internet crime and safety than were aware of those things during the 60’s or 70’s. This is a good thing as tools have been developed to make hacking super easy. A script kiddie is a person who does not possess the skills or doesn't use them to do their hacking, but uses a pre written program to do the job. The hacker in The Cukoo’s Egg was very much an expert in hacking and with computers in general. I believe that today we are in the dark as to how easy it is to find security vulnerabilities in software. For example, lately, many video games which have been coming out have a modified or cracked version which is distributed online with in a day of being released. It is super easy to use a program to jailbreak even proprietary hardware such as the IPhone. 

One of my favorite parts in The Cukoo’s Egg was the fact that Cliff's original career was not in computer science, he was an astronomer. I am pretty sure astronomy majors are not required to learn too much computer programming to get a degree today. At the same time I do know of a few individuals who are graduating with degrees other than computer science and are currently working in meaningful programming positions. I believe in the near future most careers will demand at least a proficient skill level in some sort of programming; even high schools are starting to incorporate programming into their curriculum. If it is not for the abilities that people should be educated in computer programming it is for the knowledge of how programs work. It would be pretty scary to have an office full of ignorant people downloading whatever software from the internet, and unknowingly compromising a secured network where a company stores and communicates its trade secrets.  The world is fast becoming subservient to the internet, relying on a search engine or database query to get information quickly; if we are not educated about the way technology we use works, we will not be a valuable asset in the workforce. 
  

One word continually came up throughout the plot, bailiwick. Bailiwick by the dictionary means: “One’s sphere of operations or particular area of interest.” It is seems incredible that the FBI was not even willing to look into this case of cyber espionage. They were so unconcerned with a cyber-crime that they told Cliff: unless there were millions of dollars missing or someone was being injured they would not take the case. Many other people said that they couldn't help out in any meaningful way, however they were very interested in the outcome of the hunt. Today we have many new technologies which are being used for various activities which are in the legal gray area. For example drones in the last couple of years have become such a reality that the FAA has had to make, and are still refining, new regulations concerning the use of un-manned air craft. Amazon has been experimenting with a drone package delivery systems which could be revolutionary to the delivery system as we know it. What is the legality of it? Should it be regulated? Whose bailiwick is it to decide?

It was very fun to read about the history of my career field. While reading I came across Cliff’s discovery of Object Oriented Programming, the battle of unix systems, and first generation software applications such as GNU-emacs. I very much appreciated being able to know how a programmer thought about and worked with the technology I have only heard of from older programmers. It was very much like reading a history book about the civil war or the roaring 20’s. Much like we read history books so that we learn from others mistakes, we should treat The Cukoo’s Egg with a similar mindset and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. 

Geneology via DNA Testing

Recently in the United Kingdom nationhood has been a hot topic, especially in the area of Wales. An article by the BBC cites a study called the CYMRU DNA project which is asking the citizens of Wales with certain last names to take DNA tests which will help create an ancestral profile of the people of Wales. The project is hoped to shed light on the true origins of the Welsh community. The testing is done through a process of DNA analysis from an individual’s saliva specimen.  I think this is a great example of the secular benefit of knowing your family’s history. As technology advances it affects how we think of our families and who is a part of our family tree. The Welsh are trying to put together a history of their nation using the latest known technology in human relationship analysis. It will be interesting to see how accurate these tests turn out to be and what significant data they uncover about their population.

Here are two recent articles which talk about the Cymru project:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-29340077

http://www.green-bay.tv/news/2014/09/26/cymru-dna-wales-project-set-to-rewrite-welsh-history/