Jessie Brown Poet

Do hackers need to just grow up?

“What Lulzsec and Anonymous don’t realize is these companies aren’t their enemies…there is a much more difficult system to hack…becoming the guy at the head of the board. So when you’re the 40-something-year-old CEO who hears that some kid, some guy in his garage, is tearing your product apart and doing amazing things with it that is hitting your top line revenue…go find that guy, pay him and let’s see what he can do…That’s a real hack worth touting and it ends with you sleeping in a king-sized bed in a mansion on the hill and few can claim it’s been done before.”

I guess that’s also advice for the brass at Sony (and the CIA and PBS and the CPC). But you get the idea: change the system from within and get rich doing it. It’s not the most original idea—hackers have been switching sides and trading black hats for white for years. It’s got a certain poetry to it and is a genuine win-win; for companies, who better to employ than the geeks who would otherwise destroy them? And for the hackers, well, at some point most will take a paycheque over lulz.

But there’s more to it than that. In the case of LulzSec, their tweets and taunts describe something of a manifesto . To summarize, they hack for two reasons: (1) Lulz (duh). And (2) to teach us a lesson about entrusting private companies with our information. LulzSec sez:

As “grey hat” hackers, Lulzsec, I have argued , provide a public service. They infiltrate systems for fun, not profit, and then they brag about it. Sometimes they publicly dump the data they’ve scraped, just to prove that they have it.  In doing so, they hope to humiliate companies into fixing vulnerabilities, and to teach the public a lesson about  protecting personal data. The first part is working. The second part isn’t.

After years of breathless, fear-mongering news coverage about the scourge of hackers, the public still doesn’t give a whit about Internet security. No one is really afraid of getting hacked, because so few have paid a tangible price for it. Yes, hacks happen all the time. They’ve happened to me—I had a few thousand dollars mysteriously disappear from my bank account. Did I destroy my bank cards, leave all my social networks and line my hat with tinfoil? No, I called my bank and they reimbursed the cash in 24 hours.

It’s true that no computer system is 100% secure, but neither is any bank. The credit card industry, the insurance industry—both suffer billions of dollars of fraud every year. But all the above make enough profit to absorb these losses easily, and the public continues to use their services. So goes Internet security. The lesson hackers keep trying to teach the public will never be learned.

"Hymn Surgery" by Jessie Brown Pounds

The editorial alteration of hymn texts is a longstanding source of confusion, irritation, and sometimes amusement. For example, I had the honor of leading congregational singing of the hymn “Come, Thou Fount of every blessing” at a wedding. For those who do not know, the Churches of Christ in this country have inherited a significantly altered version of the text, in which the first stanza reads, The bride chose to use the version familiar to herself and her family, and had it printed in the program. But as I suspected, the groom's family knew the other; and at the rehearsal, when we came to the midpoint of that first stanza, the scene resembled what it must have been like when God confused the languages of the builders of Babel. Fortunately, with the addition of a politely worded call to attend to the lyrics in the program, things went smoothly enough at the wedding itself. In the 1921 volume of Memorial Selections by Jessie Hunter Brown Pounds, a posthumous miscellany, there is an essay titled “Hymn surgery.” The date of writing is undetermined. In this piece, Pounds compares editing hymns to the practice of surgery: sometimes necessary, but only to be undertaken circumspectly. (Read the full text of the essay here: http://sites.google.com/site/davidsscriptorium .) Her theme is stated as follows: “By what right, we are asked, does one lay irreverent hands upon the work of a master, cutting out a line or a stanza here and altering a word or a phrase there? Has a dead-and-gone author no rights which posterity, as represented by the editors of hymn-books, is bound to respect?”(91-92) She addresses the topic under three main headings. “One reason is that most hymns, especially old hymns, are too long for congregational use.”(92) A quick look at an 1804 Methodist hymnal shows that probably half of the hymns have six or more stanzas, and a few have more than ten. If one counts the “doubled” eight-line stanzas twice, about two-thirds of the hymns have the equivalent of six or more stanzas. But Methodist hymnals of a century later--the turn of the last century--had already made the transition to 4- and 5-stanza hymns, and the 6-stanza hymn is more the exception than the rule. (Primitive Methodist hymnals were an exception, and tended to retain more stanzas.) In another example, Pounds mentions the editing of a poem--a text not necessarily intended to be sung, or to be sung in its entirety.

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