51. MafiaBoy
We’re doing a series on the book “Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life” by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.
WARNING: If you want to comment on any of these articles, please make sure you understand the foundation from previous articles.
Section 6 covered “Linked” from a basic perspective and we looked at examples that substantiated Section 5's HUGE conclusion: Hubs are Cult Leaders that PREVENT Truth from spreading by encouraging Bullying!
Our 7th and final Section begins with a look at “Linked” from a Complex perspective.
Dr. Barabasi opened the book “Linked” with two real-life examples of a Network being used to facilitate the spread of a Contagion. The first is “MafiaBoy”.
On February 7, 2000, a hacker named “MafiaBoy” shutdown Yahoo by overwhelming their server with billions of emails. The next day, the same thing happened to Amazon, eBay, CNN, ETrade, and Excite.
Dr. Basabasi writes:
“Was he a contemporary David who, armed with the humblest of home computer slingshots, beat the mega-Goliaths of the information age? In hindsight, experts agree on one thing: The attacks were not the work of a genius. They were executed using tools available to anybody on various hacker Websites. MafiaBoy’s online antics revealed him to be a rank amateur, whose sloppy trail led the police right to his parents’ door. In fact, his actions were more reminiscent of a Goliath than David: Lacking the know-how to penetrate any of the sites he attacked and clumsy and vulnerable computers from universities and small companies, which he simply instructed to bombard Yahoo with messages.”
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Eventually, the FBI arrested the 15-year-old boy. Dr. Barabasi writes:
“MafiaBoy, the Montreal teen responsible for the attacks on Yahoo, eBay, and Amazon was sentenced a day after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He was ordered to spend eight months in a youth detention center and to make a $250 donation to charity. Prior to sentencing, Judge Gilled Oullet argued that ‘this attack weakened the entire electronic communication system.’ But despite this and many similar claims, MafiaBoy was at no time a threat to the internet.”
Dr. Barabasi used MafiaBoy to show how a Network can easily be used for destructive purposes. This basic example is rarely mentioned in the rest of the book other than to say that MafiaBoy used Links to transport his Contagion.
The other example was intended to show how a Network can be used for constructive purposes. This complex example is mentioned throughout, but Dr. Barabasi doesn’t seem to understand it. If he did, he would have realized the revelatory information we have been sharing in the first 50 articles of this series.
The complex example?
The Apostle Paul.
Next Article: 52. Apostle Paul