One thing that particularly interested, or rather startled me this week, was the article on the obsolescence of passwords. Essentially, Honan details the various groups that are stealing our information, and the one that struck me as especially disturbing- teenagers. Honan says that a large number of the sophisticated hackers are teenagers who are doing it “for fun”. Which raises the question “why is it fun?” At what point is basically taking someones life and turning it upside down rewarding or entertaining in any shape or form?

When discussing these teenagers whom have hacked, Honan states that the majority of them began on the online gaming scene, where they began hacking to get better user names, content, etc. and from there they continue to grow. My question is what is the motive to continue? How does one make the leap from taking a user name to hacking a persons bank accounts? If i had to personally try and explain it, my guess would be that it may be the desire of teenagers to one-up each other, or to gain bragging rights. However, one may surmise that the desire of teenagers to hack comes from the teen-aged desire for a community. Hackers that work in groups (such as UGNazi), work together to hack into these massive databases, and share both the risk and the reward. Therefore, they may feel like they belong to this group and will take on bigger and bolder hacks to continue to grow both their relationship.

Nevertheless, despite their reasoning, the teen-aged hacker will always be a great threat to cyber security as once someone creates a system that they feel is useful, it is simply defeated by someone younger and more tech-savvy. If we want to truly eliminate teen-aged hackers, or at least decrease their numbers, maybe we should look at not only the topical reasons they hack (because its fun), but maybe examine some of the potential underlying reasons-such as a desire for a community- and work with these youth to address the issues that led them to take up hacking in the first place.

This week the class focused on copyright and copyright laws. There are a few points from theses lectures that I would particularity like to touch on and what their ramifications are for the music industry as a whole.

First off, there are the copy right laws which essentially guarantee the rights to a piece for all of the creators life and then an additional 70 years. This law came into place after it was bumped up from 50 years and life, which was bumped up from life, and so on. These bumps, which were the product of Disney requesting extensions to preserve their vast amount of copyrighted material, have essentially created an infinite copyright. What is interesting about this is the true nature that that these laws really have. Copyright was originally created to protect inventors and keep them creative, however, since copyright laws now extend past the life of a creator, the real benefactor of such laws are corporate entities. While yes families of the creators do benefit, by and large, it is corporations that largely benefit, as essentially they will be able to profit off of copyright indefinitely.

Next, due to Bridgeport VS Dimension, In which Bridgeport music successfully sued Dimension for copyright infringement  it has been established that melodies can be copyrighted. With this in mind, I would like to propose a theory; That copyright law will eventually kill creativity. Logically, as we progress through time, more and more artists will begin to use similar cords, melodies, etc. (a current example of this trend are the many digital remixes of songs that have become immensely popular online). However, with the current copyright laws as well as their likely expansion in the near future, it is possible to think that due to the burden of royalties for simple melodies or cords, as well as the fear of a civil suit (be it frivolous or substantial) will discourage many artists from attempting to either create or share their music. Which presents a very dramatic and very possible irony that copyright laws will end up destroying the very thing they sought to protect- creativity.

I chose to research the phrase “Let’s Roll”.  I chose this phrase as it is the title of a Neil Young song which references the September 11th, 2001 attacks.

According to Wikipedia, the phrase gained widespread usage after its use by Tod Beamer, a passenger on United Airlines Flight 93, one of the aircraft hijacked during the September 11th attacks (Wikipedia). Beamer, who was one of the passengers on-board the aircraft who decided to revolt, made a phone call during his final moments. The last words that were heard from him were “Lets Roll”, which were in reference to the passengers attempt to regain control of the hijacked plane. The article then goes on to state that the phrase gained its current usage (to initiate something) through movies and TV shows such as Adam-12, Dragnet, and even Toy Story (Wikipedia).

A google Ngram search of “Let’s Roll” (both upper and lower case) shows the first usage of the phrase between 1860 and 1880. During this time period, the phrase was used primarily to describe the physical action of rolling, and not in its current context. Ngram shows that beginning around 1900 the phrase is used more, however, upon review of text exurbs, it appears to be used almost exclusively to refer to the physical action of rolling. The Ngram search peaks around the year 2000 where mentions of Tod Beamer’s use of the phrase become common. It is at this time that the phrase becomes politicized, being mentioned in many politically based words on terrorism, american patriotism, and national security.

Based off of this, the phrase “Lets Roll” can be summarized as beginning initially used simply to refer to the action of rolling, followed by the current usage to denote the beginning of some activity, and then gaining political and cultural significance after its usage by Tod Beamer.

(WORKS CITED)

“Lets roll”. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved November 1, 2015, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/let%27s_roll

NGRAM Search:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=let%27s+roll%2C+Let%27s+Roll+&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Clet%20%27s%20roll%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CLet%20%27s%20Roll%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Clet%20’s%20roll%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CLet%20’s%20Roll%3B%2Cc1