The act of pirating software is almost as old as the concept of software. In fact, depending on how broadly you define software, piracy of information has been around for generations. Therefore, the ethical quarrel has been around for just as long. There are and have been those who feel it is wrong to steal information and those who either don’t care or feel that they deserve information for free. This specifically has become a common topic with the digitization of movies and music through the internet. With more and more pathways to transmit data there is more ways for pirates to get a hold of the information. In the recent years, sites like “the pirate bay” have been actively pursued by governments to shut down the operations and having some success. The problem with sites such as these is each user that downloads a file can then become a source to be downloaded from and therefore the source of the pirated software is constantly moving and changing. As well, mirror sites can easily be set up to counter act one specific page being taken down. My opinion on this topic is that the act of piracy is wrong. Although tempting to want games or movies or music for free, the act of essentially stealing a production team and artists product decreases the payment the author receives. When the author receives less payment there are less incentivized to make more of that content. So even if you liked the content you downloaded illegally, you are propagating the end of that exact content in the first place.

Alan Turing was born June 23, 1912 in London. His most impressive achievement arose from attempting to create a machine that could accomplish any task. He wanted to create a machine that would later become that basis for the modern computer. He worked endlessly to break the “incomputable” and he achieved such a feat. He used his “Turing Machine” to crack the uncrackable German enigma code. The enigma machine had stumped the entire cryptographic department of Britain for the entirety of the second world war and it was used for messages to be sent, masked in secrecy, to the German troops. Turning applied his generalized approach to a preexisting machine called a Bombe to be able to decode German messages from local assumptions made of text in the German messages, such as repeated text. The Germans would change the input code of the enigma machines each morning and with each morning a repetitive weather report would be sent out and the modified Bombe could decipher the code from there. Turing played a critical role in the second world war and without his genius, out of the box thinking there is every chance that the Germans would have maintained the element of surprise and the world could look very different today. Turing spent the remaining portion of his life focused on developing the modern computer and even put research into what is now called neural nets. In my opinion, Alan Turing lived a bit of a tortured life, as his homosexuality was looked down upon in the early 1900’s, and he took what life had given him and left a legacy that can only be described as heroic. The world itself would not be nearly as advanced without the genius that is Alan Turing.

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Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton