Acting like a FOOL said:
with the growing prevalence and awareness of skilled hackers(some of them with bones to pick)taking bold lunges at corporate, government and military organizations wouldn't it suck if the governments of the world attempted to turn on the people and the internet to protect their securities.
cause y'know,with Hactivist you'll have people with the ability and willingness to do structural and even financial harm for some ideals and legimate organizations will be siccing the law on the people to root out the problem.
wouldn't it suck having to procure a license to own a computer?
I don't much care enough for peoples ideals to let them destroy civil stability.
what are your opinions?
There has been a lot of fiction on this very subject over the years. In the US it's fairly unlikely that we'll ever see anything like this done, due to there being an armed populance. The goverment deciding to take away people's computers or limit someone's access to a right that they have had since the inception of computers is not going to go over well well. In other countries, including some like Canada and the UK the situation is a bit more dire.
Right now civil stability is not even remotely in jeopardy, the only thing being affected is a few companies that are choosing to try and victimize people online and who are finding themeselves facing stiff opposition. The current situation with Sony kind of illustrates the stupidity of the masses of humanity, who are upset over being inconveinenced without looking at the actual issues at stake. The current battle having been provoked by nothing less than the issue of a person to own the property he paid for and to expect to receive an agreed upon service. Right now corperations like Sony are so heavily in control of the infrastructure due to their wealth that the protections we as people are supposed to enjoy do not apply. Basically we're looking at Sony getting "checked" by the people themselves due to exploitation.
If anything I think the message that should be taken away here is that there are lines that shouldn't be crossed, and if goverments were doing their jobs to protect the people against exploitation from companies like Sony, there wouldn't be a need for hackers.
Argueing that there should be controls on computers and anonimity sounds good until you find yourself getting it from every conceivable end without any real recourse. Social stability is only desirable when that same stability doesn't include your exploitation.
To be honest with you, hacker groups have been doing things like this for many years now. It's just that the mainstream is increasingly online, and big business is coming online in order to exploit the sheeple, and finding itself meeting a lot of opposition to it trying to enforce it's own order into a domain based largely on personal freedom.
I can't say I agree with hackers on everything, but when it comes to this issue Sony is so clearly in the wrong that it's not even funny. I find it sad that people are so intent on being consumer sheep that they can't even recognize people fighting for their interests.
In the end society has existed alongside things like The Internet for a long time now. The worst that can really happen here is that businesses will back away from The Internet since they won't be able to control it, and life will just go on. If businesses can agree to behave civilly and not exploit people, there likewise won't be an issue.
To be honest I am depressed how many people seem to think that less freedom and more regulation is a good idea.
That's my thoughts at any rate. I think people are getting too bent out of shape over the current situation, and really aren't looking at the big picture. Sony did nothing less than steal from every one of it's customers in shutting down the "other OS" option. No matter how they try and defend it with shady agreements and the like, that's what happened. There was no way to confront them within the legal system. Civil actions being too expensive, and none of the major goverments were lining up to prosecute. If you must be making complaints, look at the system that allowed this issue to arise in the first place. Had the legal system done it's job, there would be no reason for hacker vigilantes.
At the moment all Sony has to do to end this, is apologize, admit it was wrong, and agree not to do it again. Very, very simple. If Sony was to do this and the attacks continued, then they would be the good guys, but they haven't so right now this is all a slap fight between two groups of bad guys. That makes it time to get popcorn... not start begging the goverment to put yet more shackles on us.
