Hackers

Steve Wozniak
John Draper
Kevin Mitnick

Steve Wozniak is a computer engineer and a co founder of apple computers. He was one of the first hackers and established the base of these skills that are used all over the world today.

John Draper AKA "Captain Crunch"- captain crunch with the help of a blind friend helped Draper to figure out that if they could whistle into a phone at the same frequency that AT&T uses that they could hack the phone line and make free phone calls.

Kevin Mitnick- is a computer hacker and a convicted criminal in the United States because of his hacking. Mitnick was convicted in the late 90's of gaining access to computer networks and stealing intellectual property. He spent 5 years in prison.

Although at the time these three guys were "phone phreaks" they set the way for what is known today as hacking.

TED

Our generation today lives in a way where they read and write. Today the youth creates T.V. and remakes things from ideas they get from someone elses work. Kids today are living their lives illegally and the older generation needs to learn to accept this because their ways arent going to change they can just be monitored slightly and kids are going to do illegal stuff on the web no matter what.

Pictures

Net Neutrality & Android

Net Neutrality is what we have today that makes the internet public and allows anyone to visit any site on the internet. There is a huge debate today on whether we should have net neutrality, companies such as; comcast, verizon and at&t want to privatize the internet and want people to pay to visit certain sites.

The new google phone is called android. This phone will be an operating system that will be able to run on many different phones. Google is making this software that will be free and can run on any other phones. Google has 33 partners to help with this new software.

DARPA Contest

A Chevy Tahoe made by Carnegie Melon University (CMU) won the Darpa contest that was held in California. Carnegie Melon walks away with a $2 million grand prize.

Headlines on Modern IT concepts

Nanotechnology:
1) Loebner Prize- the Loebner Prize is a competition where computer software tries to convince hums that they are real people Zebaware won the Loebner prize this year for Artificial Intelligence
2) Nanotechnology Inspired by Eyes of Moths and Wings of Cicadas to Lead to Anti-Reflective and Water Repellant Coatings and Better Solar Cells
3) Nanotechnology Leader Presents Talk About His Career Path From Engineer to Marketer to CEO
4) U. recruits 2 nanotechnology researchers
5) Testing tiny solutions
Hopkins gets $200K grant to study nanotechnology
Social Networking:
1) Social networking and the 50-plus
2) Social network woes
3) Don't sue social networking sites if you know what's good for you
4) Social networking sites 'useful for finding IT staff'
5) Mobile services company SpinVox has created a service for users to streamline their social network activity.
Computer Hardware:
1) Stealth Rally for Computer Hardware Stocks
2) US Federal Government Computer Hardware Expenditures, 2006-2011
3) Interview: The Future Of Computer Hardware
Riffware's Rob Witman discusses strengths of mobile devices, and future operating systems
4) California R-I improves computer technology levels
5) Research faces 'perfect storm' of data
Artificial Intelligence:
1) Hardware, Software, Civilized Chimps
2) Artificial intelligence suggests Russia are narrow favourites
3) Web Language and Artificial Intelligence Expert Joins Tetherless World Research Constellation
4) World depends on artificial intelligence
5) Are created men created equal?

Assistive Technologies

Assistive Technologies are devices for people with disabilities to enable them to do tasks that they would normally do without their disabilities. This helps them with tasks that they would otherwise not be able or would have difficulty to perform without the help of this technology. Some examples of Assistive Technologies are;
1) TTY- A communication device similar that sends text rather than voice for the deaf
2) Kurzweil Reader- A device created for a small machine to read text that the blind would otherwise not be able to read.
3) Larger text keyboards- Keyboards for the seeing impaired
4) Spell checkers and grammar checkers- This is assistive technology for those without good grammar and spelling
5) Brail Text- For those who cannot see and are unable to read this helps them to feel text rather than seeing it

The Unabomber

Ted Kaczinski's efforts in the 1990's was killing people that were tied to technology advancement. Something that is debated widely today is that should what he wrote be accepted today and something that should be considered or should we completely ignore his thoughts because he was a murderer. David Gelernter was a major role in the Yale Computer Science Program and was trying to make many advancements in technology at the time, therefore he was targeted by the unabomber.
Victims: Diogenes J. Angelakos, Buckley Crist Jr., Dr. Charles Epstein, Patrick C. Fischer, David Gelernter, John G. Harris, John E. Hauser, James McConnel, Thomas J. Mosser were his victims. He terrorized the country with bombs for 17 years and attacked head people of technological advancement.

Albert Fert & Peter Grunberg

Albert Fert is a French physicist and created a major breakthrough in gigabyte hard disks by discovering the giant magnetoresistance. Peter Grunberg is the other French physicist that helped Albert discover this breakthrough and they both won Nobel Peace Prizes for the accomplishments. They both impact my life everyday because of the discovery they made, we are now able to store data in the computers. We store data in computers everyday of our lives.

Pirates of Silicon Valley

After watching this movie I discovered many things about the computer business that I had not known. Apple and Microsoft got big strictly off of stealing. Steve Jobs stole the idea of the mouse and the computer interface from Xerox. Then next in the movie you witness Bill GAtes and Steve Jobs working together, but then Bill Gates steals many of Apples ideas and the movie is just the two stealing back and forth.

Intellectual Property Rights

Intellectual property is property that is granted to you instantly when you come up with an idea. When you write a paper, a blog or anything of that sort you it is instanly considered Intellectual property. Jammie Thomas in Minnesota is being tried for sharing music. She is the first of 26,000 similar cases and could potentially be sued up to 1.2 million dollars. She won't back down and didn't settle with a smaller price, she is not refusing to fight this case and her arguement is whether the companies own the music at all.

www.ready.gov

The website ready.gov cost $47 million and is created to prepare Americans in emergency situations. This site is open for public use and is just what the government wants you to be prepared to do in certain situations. This is to prevent Americans from panic, so that they learn to be calm and know how to handle situations. The information on this site is useful but is rarely used by Americans today. The website provides good information but families today do not even bother to look at this site. Therefore, this site is pretty much useless.

Important People

Gordon Moore- is the author of moore's law which describes an important trend in the history of computer hardware, it states that the doubling of the number of transistors and double the speed of the computer happens every 18 months.
Alan Turing- is the author of the turing test which is a test where a computer tries to fool a human being, there is a judge and the turing test has not been passed yet.
Steve Jobs- is the co-founder and the ceo of apple. He was a creator of pixar for disney and he is considered to be a leading figure in both computer and entertainment industries.
Bill Gates- is the chairman of microsoft and has been ranked as the richest person in the world from 1995-2007.
Larry Page- is a co-founder of the internets google search engine and is an estimated worth $18.5 billion.
Tim Burner-Lee- created the memory software for finding things which would grow on the World Wide Web.
Jeff Bezos- is the founder of amazon.com. Now he is the president and chief executive officer.
Steve Ballmer- is the chief executive officer of microsoft corporation. He was roomates with Bill Gates in college.
Kevin Rose- founded the social-bookmarking site Digg. Digg is a community based popularity website with an emphasis on science and technology.

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners Lee is responsible for every single persons obsession with the web in America. He is the founder of the internet and is only 52 years old! He was born in London, England and now officially goes by Sir Tim Berners Lee because he was knighted by the Queen of England. It is easily debatable that he has come up with the most important invention throughout history.

Jeff Bezos

I wish I was Jeff Bezos, he is the founder, president, chief executive officer, and chairman of the board of Amazon.com. Although he was worth about 7 more billion dollars in 1999 but now he is worth 3.7 billion dollars. It started with a crazy idea of him selling books online and running to bookstores and now has turned into a billion dollar success. You can now buy anything on Amazon.com and everything that billions of people around the world are buying, some of that profit is going to him. That is why I wish I was Jeff Bezos.

Singularity

I do not believe that singularity will happen. I cannnot see a computer thinking and being smarter than a human. A computer can have as much information that is put into it by the human and process all of it. But it cannot think on its own

The Creation of Smarter Minds

I believe that once we do hit a certain point in technology are minds will be able to become smarter and hold more information. I do not think that once we have the technology, to assist our brains with technology that it will create more intelligence for humans. I think computers could only do so much as far as giving us information, I do not think that computers will ever be able to think like humans do using the right side of the brain which contains creativity and things of that sort. When computers will be assisting us in our thinking they will be able to do things such as; help us know about any historical event, know about any book and compute any math problem. But I cannot see a computer being able to process something and be able to interact.

Turing Test

The Turing test is a test where a judge has a conversation with a person and a computer and has to figure out which is which. The computer tries to trick the judge into thinking he is human. When this happens this would be an incredible accomplishment but also very scary. For a computer to be able to fool a human would be incredible. To some this may seem like a thought that is so out there, but with the accomplishments tht we have already had, why would one not believe that this could happen in the near future. Although I do not believe in the whole singularity thing, I do believe that the Turing Test will be passed around the year 2020.

Moore's Law

Moore's Law descrives the trend and advancement our computers have been going through. He statess that the transistors that are on the integrated circuit is increasing approxiametly every two years. I think that the plateau of computer advancement in the next 20 years but do not agree with what Ray Kurzweil is saying about singularity. I do believe we have made some incredible advancements up to date such as when no one thought that a car would be able to drive it self but today we have seen cars being able to navigate themselves with GPS systems. I do not think that computers will make the step where they are smarter than the human brain and even if this does happen (which I do not believe) I don't think the public would know about it, because I think it would be too dangerous of a thing for our society to have.