http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/sep/09/jake-davis-anonymous-charged-bail By Jake Davis The Observer 8 September 2012 The last time I was allowed to access the internet was several moments before the police came through my door in the Shetland Isles, over a year ago. During the past 12 months I have pleaded guilty to computer misuse under the banners of "Internet Feds", "Anonymous" and "LulzSec". One of my co-defendants and I have also been indicted with the same charge in the United States, where we may possibly be extradited, and if found guilty I could face several decades in an American prison. Now I am on conditional bail and have to wear an electronic tag around my ankle. I'm forbidden from accessing the internet. I'm often asked: what is life like without the net? It seems strange that humans have evolved and adapted for thousands of years without this simple connectivity, and now we in modern society struggle to comprehend existence without it. In a word, life is serene. I now find myself reading newspapers as though they weren't ancient scrolls; entering real shops with real money in order to buy real products, and not wishing to Photoshop a cosmic being of unspeakable horror into every possible social situation. Nothing needs to be captioned or made into an elaborate joke to impress a citizenry whose every emotion is represented by a sequence of keystrokes. Things are calmer, slower and at times, I'll admit, more dull. I do very much miss the instant companionship of online life, the innocent chatroom palaver, and the ease with which circles with similar interests can be found. Of course, there are no search terms in real life -- one actually has to search. However, there is something oddly endearing about being disconnected from the digital horde. It is not so much the sudden simplicity of daily life -- as you can imagine, trivial tasks have been made much more difficult -- but the feeling of being able to close my eyes without being bombarded with flashing shapes or constant buzzing sounds, which had occurred frequently since my early teens and could only be attributed to perpetual computer marathons. Sleep is now tranquil and uninterrupted and books seem far more interesting. The paranoia has certainly vanished. I can only describe this sensation as the long-awaited renewal of a previously diminished attention span. [...] -- #HITB2012KUL - The 10TH ANNUAL HITB Security Conference in Malaysia with no keynotes, no labs - just three tracks filled with our most popular speakers from the last decade: http://conference.hitb.org/Received on Mon Sep 10 2012 - 00:08:16 PDT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Mon Sep 10 2012 - 00:08:55 PDT