.NET @ Kape Ni LaTtEX

An article on this month's issue of The Escapist Magazine talks about the dire scenarios encountered when one's meatspace (real world) identity is revealed and causes them to lose their anonimity online.

Take for example, this scenario:

It began with an impassioned, 5,000-word letter on one of China's most popular Internet bulletin boards, from a husband denouncing a student he suspected of carrying on an affair with his wife.

Immediately, hundreds joined in the attack. "Let's use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons," as one person wrote, "to chop out the heads of these adulterers, to pay for the sacrifice of the husband." Within days, the hundreds had grown to thousands, and then tens of thousands, with total strangers forming teams to hunt down the student's identity and address, hounding him out of his university and causing his family to barricade themselves inside their home. [International Herald Tribune]

Goes to show how China's sexually conservative culture prevails even in the internet, in light of the crackdown on Chinese sex bloggers and porn early this year.

But the internet does not only affect personal lives; primarily it is a medium and tool for political propaganda. So much so that a war has just started -- and no I'm not talking about Lebanon.

It appears that Morrocan and Israeli hackers are waging war against each other after a Morrocan group that calls itself Team Evil. Their motives are clear:

“As long as you kill Palestinians, we will kill your servers.”

Team Evil attacked Israel to protest the daily deaths of Palestinians which resulted from the offensives in the occupied territories. The group, which regularly attacks small Israeli sites, began its work in 2004 by hacking American sites. Gradually, the group’s activities became more and more powerful. Last year, it attacked lesser known enterprises, until last April, when the team attacked the rapidly growing restaurant chain of MacDonalds(sic).

[wurdz as translated from afrik.com]

I guess that completely redefines the phrase "war on many fronts". But it also illustrates how integrated the internet has become with our daily lives. And by "our" I mean the whole world, or at least the parts of it that has internet access.
On a personal note, I met my wife through the online forum PEx. Can't we all just spread the love in the net?

Tags: Blogs, Technology, Web

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 9th, 2006 at 1:16 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.