Social Hacking

  The evolution (devolution?) continues. I will in this post talk more about some observations that I have made and not really try to teaching anything. I will also start to label the post more carefully. For example this post will be labeled with observation and rant. The posts in which I try to teach something will be labeled with lesson. Still, in my own opinion, observations are an important part of understanding. Reaching your own conclusions and coming up with your own ideas will help you understand. Also, I will try to make the observation more entertaining to read. If anyone has any objections or ideas, as usual: tell me.

  It has not been a great day today. First I experienced the first “attack” towards this page. Someone in Spain (nothing against Spanish people but the attackers IP was hosted in Spain) was probably trying to find weaknesses in this page's structure. Even though I am fairly sure the attacker did not manage to get anywhere before I put an end to it, he or she did manage to completely screw up my statistics system and waste my time. I spend about an hour getting the person away from the page and I did not have anymore time correcting the stats. I also had to remove the poll as you might have noticed. Anyway, if you are looking for a page to hack and you don't really know what you're doing; please target someone who's not a computer engineer. It's just a big hassle for me and it wastes both your and my time.

  Secondly my guitar broke today, but you probably don't want to hear about that so lets get back to the subject of social hacking. I had a seminar in one of my courses today and we had three minor debates. I will not mention the subject since it is completely irrelevant. However, I did make some interesting observations and got some ideas on how to be more successful in a debate. I will spend some post later own trying to teach you these different methods.

  There were a couple of different strategies that I saw different people use. The most annoying one, which I personally cannot stand, was what I would like to call get-in-your-opponents-face-method. I saw one person doing this. As soon as this person heard some negative about what he had said, he instantly raised his voice, interrupted the critic and ask him to clarify what he though was wrong. The thing that I don't like about this method was that he made it seem like he talked down to the critic, making it seem like the negative feedback was nothing but nonsense, almost like calling the critic stupid.

  Another technique that I saw, that I was more impressed by, was ones person ability to almost force a question from the audience that he had a really good answer to. I don't think he did it intentionally but if someone is able repeat this, it can be a very powerful strategy. What this person did was that he talked around the subject, almost leaving out obvious information and forcing someone in the audience to ask the question that he has the perfect answer to. When giving a perfect answer you show the audience that you know the subject and you will earn some of their trust.

  One last observation I made when I looked at others debate was that in most cases you can clearly see if someone is paying attention to what you say, if they agree or disagree with what you are saying, and/or if they are waiting to tell their own opinion. To realize when your opponent does not pay careful attention anymore can be used in many different ways depending on what situation you are in. Can you think of when or why it could be useful?

  As a last thing I would like to mention something that hopefully will give you something to think about (if you are what people refer to as a "geek" or a "nerd"). For you who don't understand this I will say this: Look at what people do instead of what they say that they do. "Do as I say, not as I do" is commonly used. The example I want to share is from my physics lecture today. It was a lecture in basic mechanics but me and some friends discussed how the lecturer unintentionally came up with a new way to explain some quantum physics. Here is a picture of the board. My guess is that about maybe 5% of the people who look at the picture will understand what I am talking about. If you really, I mean really, want me to explain, send me an message.