Scott Rader, PhD

So it’s been a while since I ran a post. Part of that reason is that for much of the winter I have been overseas and mostly in Vietnam. Most of the time I was unable to reach WordPress, Facebook or other blogging/social media sites. Asking around, I discovered that (true to “just copy China” fashion) I had been firewalled. And as I have since discovered, true to the reputation of hackers everywhere, people had found a way around it. I’m not going to give away their secrets (which I could never get to work for me anyway, so I guess I’ve lost my hacker credentials over the years), but it leads me to believe that a lot of the great hackers of our day are coming out of these “firewalled” countries … I’m wondering what that’ll lead to.

But the whole situation leads me to reflect on the notion that an analogy exists about how the internet works from a technical standpoint and how people on the internet work from a social standpoint. It’s the same. The internet is designed* to “break up” requested information (in the form of data, e.g., emails, web pages, downloads) and route that information around obstacles (such as downed or busy servers) to ultimately reach its destination and be “reassembled.” So too, people have figured out a way to access the internet by going around obstacles such as government-imposed firewalls. Even in developed countries, where employers have blocked access to social media sites as well, employees do the same “routing around” by using their own devices (e.g., smart phones, 3G netbooks) to access the internet.

I’m reminded of William Gibson’s line from the book Burning Chrome … in reference to “advanced” technology: “the street [always] finds its own uses for such things.”

* – An interesting YouTube video attempts to explain this.