Daniel Lovell has won more than two dozen awards for his columns, editorials and investigative journalism. He is actively addicted to the Internet, soda and New York Yankees baseball.
Let's face it: Most of us are just too darn busy to really pay attention. We live our lives in the hectic vacuums of individual existence, eeking out whatever joy we can. To really and truly consume information is a struggle.
Consider how much news you read or listen to in the course of a day. Now consider how much news there actually is to consume. How much news about health breakthroughs do you actually read? How about technology news? Sure, we're inundated daily with news about the presidential race, the tragedies around the world, the so-called war in Iraq. But there are real things happening every day that could alter your way of life dramatically. And most of us have no idea.
I told you a while back about CERN and the large hedron collider set to go online this summer. The physicists at the heart of the project are basically set to create microscopic black holes, an effort to recreate the universe when it was a mere billionth of a second old. Seriously. I don't really know why this is important. Not at all. I think we have more than enough "today" problems to be tinkering away with devices that will give us some insight into our origins. Frankly, I don't care how the universe was formed, and modern science seems Hell-bent on disproving that God had anything to do with it. But I digress...
What's scary is that the large hedron collider is not merely a benevolent contraption. There is the possibility of a very big downside. By that I mean the end of humanity. The end of the earth, in fact. See, they're trying to create a microscopic black hole. But what if -- as so often happens -- something goes wrong? Could our entire planet be sucked into this thing? Even CERN admits there's the possibility of disaster. And that's scary.
Know what else scares me? That the content police -- primarily those who control what you hear on the radio and see at the movie theaters -- are pushing for new measures that would scour your iPod or computer to determine where you got the files that are on your computer -- you know, just to make sure you didn't pirate them.
Why is that scary? Well, for the same reason it's scary to think that Google now has an application that allows all your medical records to be stored online. Privacy. It's like allowing the music industry to come to your house and dig through all the mix tapes you made in 1991. It's isn't their business.
And lest you find the invasion of your privacy a mere annoyance, there's a whole lot more to this story. Like the recent Denial of Service attack leveled on Revision3.
Maybe you don't know anything about Revision3. That's okay. It's a company that labels itself a television network for the Internet generation. It's filled with original content -- primarily tech shows -- like Tekzilla and Systm, that talk about things in the news, DIY tech projects, making your computer run better. You know, awful stuff like that.
Turns out that over the Memorial Day holiday, Revision3's servers were crippled by a DoS attack -- an attack mounted by a company called Media Defender, which pounced because Rev3 uses file sharing technology to serve its content. Media Defender's clients have included Sony-BMG, Universal, and the umbrella associations for the recording and movie industries.
DoS attacks are illegal. Plain and simple. And so Media Defender is a company that clearly uses illegal means to -- it claims -- protect copyrighted material from being illegally distributed through the Internet. And nobody has stopped them yet.
This recent attack was on a legal and legitimate business serving legal and original content -- not on attack on hackers and thieves. And it should scare you.
It should scare you because it points to the vulnerability of your data and your privacy. And it shows that the content industry will stop at nothing to "protect" the garbage they're creating.
The fear I have is that we don't hear enough of this news in the mainstream media. And to find out, you need to dig around for it.
