Introductory questions

Thursday evenings this semester I have Freedom and Security in a Digital-Divided Society. Pretty much the only homework assignment last week was to go to the university blog server, create your blog, and answer a couple of questions. Following the directions for creating the blog and logging on for the first time aren't working for me. I'm pretty sure it's not any lapse on my part, because it fails whether I'm trying from home or office, with Firefox or IE. The Wordpress stylesheet doesn't even load. When I emailed my trouble to my instructor I also suggested I could answer the questions at my LJ. He didn't respond to the suggestion, but here goes.

1. What would you like your classmates and instructors to know about you? Include a picture. (For picture see this entry's icon. If you see a cartoon instead of a photo, you're looking at the Recent Entries page instead of at the page for this specific entry.)

   I work in the office of the School of Nursing, and I draw a cartoon every day and put it on the internet. I have a wife, two grown stepchildren, two stepgrandsons and one stepstepgrandson. I'm a computer science major and I want to go into website design and maintenance. I'm a student of the modern screen action-adventure hero as the natural descendent of the fireside folklore hero of all of human history up until now, which means I go on the internet to read, write and draw stories about King Arthur, Captain Kirk, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who. [The assignment specifies securing this answer in a password-protected post, but that assumes that I got my Wordpress blog going, whereas this is Plan B.]

2. And, based on your reading for next week's class session: What would classify different hackers into categories of White Hat, Black Hat, and Gray Hat? Does a "sneaker" qualify as a Hacker?

   Well, according to the reading, a White Hat is someone who hacks in for entertainment purposes only, without any intent to perform mischief or malice, like Matthew Broderick in War Games (though of course for him It All Went Horribly Wrong). Black Hats are hacking in with mischievous or malicious intent, like the villains in the recent Harrison Ford movie I didn't see where he runs network security for a bank. Grey Hats hack into The Man's systems for information or to perform mischief that they believe is ethically sound even if illegal, like Willow on Buffy. I'd say sneakers are paid White Hats.