COMPUTER SCIENCE: EXPECTATION OF COMMUNITY VS REALITY

A PICTURE BY IZ ZY

Computer Science is a perfect career only if you are willing to work really hard in it. I have heard a lot a people who are trying for engineering are not interested in Computer Science. The main reason behind this they assume is that they do not have sufficient knowledge of Computer.

In today’s world of digital information, everyone is busy offering customer services or their product at free or minimal rates which we can all afford. The social website like Facebook and searching platform like Google provides free of services. But what we do not know is that nobody in this world wants to work for free. Hence, they end up collecting information about the users and end them selling up to the third-party companies to make money. Even the NSA, USA keeps track of all the people in the world, watching their daily activities with the help of social media feed, call logs, payments logs etc. Their aim is to prevent the terrorist crime but their method of invading the privacy of others is very wrong. Hence, we can see from the above context that maximum of big corporations is busy distributing our data and finally making the privacy and security just an illusion for the world.

If we take Computer Science as a field or learn to code, then we can make these things right which is so wrong in this world. Many of the people from computer science do not bother by these things and try to work for huge money. But why would we do that? Let me give you a few examples

There was a child who was a nerd, programmer from the beginning. He, in fact, hacked a few sites at the age of 14 where he ended up meeting some of the hackers twice his age. He went to MIT where he saw a problem. The problem was that every student from MIT who wants to write a research paper has to read other’s research paper to understand what is best. Hence, he has to pay a certain amount to read that research paper and the same procedure is applied to thousands of students. It was estimated that MIT made billions from this. He decided to provide these research paper for free. He went to the server room which was installed in the basement of MIT.

He wrote a simple read and fetch script in python which would fetch the research paper once at a time. He would change the hard disk in which these papers were stored, once a month. Then he uploaded these research paper on the website for free which resulted in the loss of billions of dollars of MIT. As a result, MIT filed a case against him and he went to court. There also he faced once more issue that certain amount of money had to be given to the court and then the documents for that court case would be given. This thing should be free but made American courts billions of dollars. He ran the same program this time fetching the court cases. This resulted in the loss of billions of dollars. He was caught and sentenced. He committed suicide soon after. He was the owner of Reddit, a popular forum where people posted and discussed the views. He only wanted to give free education to all and make life easier.

In another story is the man who also was pretty good at coding. He was selected at CIA, USA. He performed a series of task and went up the level pretty fast. He was soon sent to NSA where he worked on a software named HeartBeat whose work was to organize the data properly that was collected by the NSA from several regions. But after some time, he felt that the work NSA is doing by invading privacy is not the complete solution. Hence, he tried to leak the Top-Secret NSA documents to prove that NSA has been spying on the world for some years now. He was declared a terrorist and is currently in Russia. He is no other that Edward Snowden and the documents that he released came to known as Snowden leaks. He believed that privacy is very important and everyone should have it.

A PICTURE BY DAYNE TOPKIN

Why am I telling you all these? Because these people could have made billions if they focused towards earning but they choose to stop the wrong and correct it on their own. I can tell you that there are dozens of hackers and programmers out there who have done so much for us that we don’t even know about it. Hence, it is our duty as a programmer, coder, developer and as an individual that we should acknowledge their work, learn what they created and take it farther. Make something better out of it which can help the community who has given us so much. It’s not that we should go fighting but we can support them from behind the curtains, motivate them and help them in any way that they need.

But most of us think that we cannot code as perfectly as they can. Hell, most of us cannot complete a project on their own. But we can help them by providing the information to our friends, helping them with documentation, small bug fixes, and patches. Hence, it is up to us to make our world a better place and proving that security isn’t just an illusion. The world needs us and it’s high time that we accept this fact too. In reality, we got for fat paychecks and works for the company who may be destroying our community.

A PICTURE BY SAMUEL ZELLER

You are smart. The rest of decision is up to you to take.

Peace.