Kevin Whitman's Blog

2003-2006

The year is 2003-2006, MySpace is where you could just find about everyone your age. Everyone I knew in School had a MySpace, I had a MySpace. Teachers, Law Enforcement and adults would bad mouth and speak out against the website making it seem worser then it really was by saying it was unsafe. Maybe it was unsafe back then due to some hacks, but other than that talking to a random dude at a bus stop is kinda unsafe also, it’s a risk you can take, you could meet a creepy serial killer or some nice guy because you never really know till you try to talk to someone and get to know them. I remember one of my teachers got this crazy woman who seemed Anti-Tech to come in and give a slide show. She showed how she would hack in to MySpace and show all this set private information. At the end, where people would ask questions, people asked how she hacked it and she said she wasn’t going to tell because she knew we kids would do it.

I kinda think looking back now, she wasn’t really hacking as you would think. I looked up information on it before and all the so called “hacks” don’t work anymore. The way they would work is you would take the persons MySpace user id, not the username, but the number like say 10290292298(random number i just typed) and use that id with different urls because it didn’t check privacy in some areas. Also teachers and other adults would say privacy settings didn’t matter. I never understood why, maybe because of the hacks that got fixed. I always did and i do today trust privacy settings when they are set right and implemented by the social networking site correctly.

So back then All of us young people liked it. Teachers hated MySpace. I once taught people in my class in English back in middle school how to use proxies. About a few days later, after different teachers noticed people were on MySpace when it was blocked, our principle went to the class rooms in the eighth grade one morning to talk to us about it. He told us if any of us got caught from now on we would lose our computer privileges for the rest of the year. He said he would also report our MySpace name to MySpace so they would delete our account. I’m not sure if MySpace would really delete an account just because a principle told them to, i really doubt it. I think he was saying it just to scare us. Not all of us was under 13. But i don’t think the principle or any teachers really found out who showed people how to use proxies. Continue reading