Computer Addiction Quotes

It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you.

He had tried to explain the way he felt to Danny once, about compulsive behavior and time rushing too fast and the Internet and drugs. Danny had only lifted one of his slender, mobile eyebrows and stared at him in smirking confusion. Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.

So, your kids must love the iPad?” I asked Mr. [Steve] Jobs, trying to change the subject. The company’s first tablet was just hitting the shelves. “They haven’t used it,” he told me. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” (Nytimes article, Sept. 10, 2014)

Walter Isaacson, who ate dinner with the Jobs family while researching his biography of Steve Jobs, told Bilton that, “No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices.” It seemed as if the people producing tech products were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: never get high on your own supply.

Why is it drug addicts and computer aficionados are both called users?

It seems there is nothing I cannot find out from my oracle, the computer.

Sometimes I would worry about my internet habits and force myself awy from the computer, to read a magazine or book. Contemporary literature offered no respite: I would find the prose cluttered with data points, tenuous historical connections, detail so finely tuned it could have only been extracted from a feverish night of search-engine queries. Aphorisms were in; authors were wired. I would pick up books that had been heavily documented on social media, only to find that the books themselves had a curatorial affect: beautiful descriptions of little substance, arranged in elegant vignettes—gestural text, the equivalent of a rumpled linen bedsheet or a bunch of dahlias placed just so. Oh, I would think, turning the page. This author is addicted to the internet, too.

early computer engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit chips,

We all need a technological detox; we need to throw away our phones and computers instead of using them as our pseudo-defence system for anything that comes our way. We need to be bored and not have anything to use to shield the boredom away from us. We need to be lonely and see what it is we really feel when we are. If we continue to distract ourselves so we never have to face the realities in front of us, when the time comes and you are faced with something bigger than what your phone, food, or friends can fix, you will be in big trouble.

Schwartz said that several of the early computer engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit chips, especially in the years before they could be designed on computers. “You had to be able to visualize a staggering complexity in three dimensions, hold it all in your head. They found that LSD could help.

Only two industries refer to their customers as 'users': computer design and drug dealing

I claim that this bookless library is a dream, a hallucination of on-line addicts; network neophytes, and library-automation insiders...Instead, I suspect computers will deviously chew away at libraries from the inside. They'll eat up book budgets and require librarians that are more comfortable with computers than with children and scholars. Libraries will become adept at supplying the public with fast, low-quality information. The result won't be a library without books--it'll be a library without value.

Listening to teens talk about social media addiction reveals an interest not in features of their computers, smartphones, or even particular social media sites but in each other.

Our minds may be like some computers that can have a lifetime of wrong information stored in them.

I am increasingly persuaded that our 24-7 addiction to screens and social media is perhaps our most destructive habit, not only to our ability to sleep but to our mental health in general. So I banish those from my evenings (or at least, I try to). Turn off the computer and put away your phone at least an hour before bedtime. Do NOT bring your laptop or phone into bed with you.

The ultimate computer game would be a 'total addiction' - a game that shapes itself to the elements you most like to play in such a manner that it totally satisfies you. You never want to stop playing. However, any self-configuring activity always has such risks inherent in it. Will we see one day the goverment insisting that games have time limiters the way that some motor vehicles have speed limiters?

The computer is credited with the capacity to create unsuspected amounts of busywork. We are straight on our way towards an energy-obsessed low energy society in a world that worships work but has nothing for people to do.

The world needs more love and Twitter just figured out a way to send 'hearts all over the world'.

Never post family pictures online, There's no such thing as privacy settings. It is a total jungle out there, In every corner predators are lurking.

Douglas Adams amusingly satirized computer addiction of exactly the kind that hit me. The target of his satire was the programmer who had a particular problem X, which needed solving. He could have written a program in five minutes to solve X and then got on and used his solution. But instead of just doing that, he spent days and weeks writing a more general program that could be used by anybody at any time to solve all similar problems of the general class of X. The fascination lies in the generality and in the purveying of an aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly product for the benefit of a population of hypothetical and very probably non-existent users – not in actually finding the answer to the particular problem X.

Our feelings of anxiety are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so need to be listened to and patiently interpreted -- processes which are unlikely to be completed when we have to hand, in the computer, one of the most powerful tools of distraction ever invented. The entire internet is in a sense pornographic, a deliverer of a constant excitement that we have no innate capacity to resist, a seducer that leads us down paths that for the most part do nothing to answer our real needs.

For dinner Jade microwaves some Stars-n-Flags. They're addictive. They put sugar in the sauce and sugar in the meat nuggets. I think also caffeine. Someone told me the brown streaks in the Flags are caffeine. We have like five bowls each. After dinner the babies get fussy and Min puts a mush of ice cream and Hershey's syrup in their bottles and we watch The Worst That Could Happen, a half hour computer simulation of tragedies that have never actually occurred but theoretically could. A kid gets hit by a train and flies into a zoo, where he's eaten by wolves. A man cuts his hand off chopping wood and while he's wandering around screaming for help is picked up by a tornado and dropped on a preschool during recess and lands on a pregnant teacher.

The internet is a dangerous place. If you are not careful it will consume you and rob you of your happiness. It can make you angry, jealous, hostile, bitter and lead to the eventual loss of enthusiasm for living your best life. Be wary and avoid overconsumption.

Bit by bit, he has pared down his desires to what is now approaching a bare minimum. He has cut out smoking and drinking, he no longer eats in restaurants, he does not own a television, a radio, or a computer. He would like to trade his car in for a bicycle, but he can’t get rid of the car, since the distances he must travel for work are too great. The same applies to the cell phone he carries around in his pocket, which he would dearly love to toss in the garbage, but he needs it for work as well and therefore can’t do without it. The digital camera was an indulgence, perhaps, but given the drear and slog of the endless trash-out rut, he feels it is saving his life. His rent is low, since he lives in a small apartment in a poor neighborhood, and beyond spending money on bedrock necessities, the only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of.

When we ignore our radar we have to shut out its voice. Our minds become busy and distracted - we may compulsively perform mind-numbing activities such as computer games, gambling and gorging ourselves with sugary delights to the extent that they eat into our time in an unhealthy way, make us stay up late, or stop us from carrying out our essential tasks.

Most of them have desktop computers rather than laptops, which makes it easier to separate their real-world and digital lives;

Because words have deep meaning, Tweets have power.

I can’t control who follows me, but I can control who I follow.[Social Media]

We could just turn our phones and computers off – but we don’t. And we don’t blame ourselves for our lack of self-control: we blame our technology for being too addictive.

Before you post online ask yourself two crucial questions: Does my content add to the space; or, is it just clouding the feed?

Scientists have found that the amount of time spent milkshake-multitasking among American young people has increased by 120 percent in the last ten years. According to a report in the Archives of General Psychiatry, simultaneous exposure to electronic media during the teenage years—such as playing a computer game while watching television—appears to be associated with increased depression and anxiety in young adulthood, especially among men.[1] Considering that teens are exposed to an average of eight and a half hours of multitasking electronic media per day, we need to change something quickly.[2] Social Media Enthusiast or Addict? Another concern this raises is whether you are or your teen is a social media enthusiast or simply a

Brüks had never been entirely clear on what an omniscient being would need a computer for. Computation, after all, implied a problem not yet solved, insights not yet achieved. There was really only one sort of program for which foreknowledge of the outcome didn’t diminish the point of the exercise, and Brüks had never been able to find any religious orders that described God as a porn addict.)

In 1995, psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg coined the term internet addiction disorder. He wrote a satirical essay about “people abandoning their family obligations to sit gazing into their computer monitor as they surfed the Internet.” Intending to parody society’s obsession with pathologizing everyday behaviors, he inadvertently advanced the idea. Goldberg responded critically when academics began discussing internet addiction as a legitimate disorder: “I don’t think Internet addiction disorder exists any more than tennis addictive disorder, bingo addictive disorder, and TV addictive disorder exist. People can overdo anything. To call it a disorder is an error.

the brain is limited, lacks bottomless capacity, and isn’t particularly fast relative to computer technology. The technological advances defined by laws of Moore and Metcalfe got married and long since overtook what our brains can handle. And we know now that their union also presents the challenge of addiction, or, at least, serious compulsion. Even allowing for the fact that we can know these devices challenge our limitations, sometimes they are so compelling we can’t stop using them.

One professor from MIT made the passionate plea that we must encourage children to develop the ability to think first, and then give them the computer. After that, the sky's the limit. But if you introduce the computer before the child's thought processes are worked out, then you have a disaster in the making

Your Script Here’s what to tell someone or yourself while you’re totally unable to understand the reason for or source of a problem. Dear [Me/Family Member/Spouse/Overly Logical Friend]: I know it’s hard to understand why a [positive adjectives] person like me should have a problem with [addiction/politics/attraction to morons] but I do, and, to date, treatment with [three analysts/kabbalah/Judge Judy] hasn’t given me an answer that makes a difference. I’ve decided that ignorance is okay, but my problem isn’t, and that from now on I need to do everything I can to improve and manage my behavior, just to be the person I want to be. So I will be open about my problem [in meetings/press releases/tweets], welcome observations about my behavior [with/without retaliating], and track my progress over time [in my computer/Facebook/a secret journal that you should burn if I die]. And I will not give up.

humans find the sweet spot sandwiched between “too easy” and “too difficult” irresistible. It’s the land of just-challenging-enough computer games, financial targets, work ambitions, social media objectives, and fitness goals. Addictive experiences live in this sweet spot, where stopping rules crumble before obsessive goal-setting. Tech mavens, game developers, and product designers tweak their wares to ensure their complexity escalates as users gain insight and competence.

A piece of plastic stole an entire species— In lobbies, in the bathroom, in an elevator, Ideas, reactions, and silent contemplations, During lunchtime, during mass, during his funeral, On the street, on break, on duty, Before the waiter brings the food and after the check, While the flight attendant bothers to request airplane mode, While a trafficked victim speaks to you in code, While the potential love of our life just walked past, While mother cooks with a recipe we forgot to ask.

Dan went on to describe his WoW-playing experiences. He was so addicted to WoW that he’d play straight through the night and wouldn’t eat, sleep or go to the bathroom; when nature called, he’d simply pee in a mason jar next to his computer. I would eventually find out that peeing in jars isn’t uncommon for World of Warcraft enthusiasts; the addictive gravitational pull of the game is so powerful that they’ve been known to wear diapers, like deep-space astronauts or long-haul truckers, so as to not miss a moment’s playing time.

Yet, ironically, the most tech-cautious parents are the people who invented our iCulture. People are shocked to find out that tech god Steve Jobs was a low-tech parent; in 2010, when a reporter suggested that his children must love the just-released iPad, he replied: “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” In a September, 10, 2014, New York Times article, his biographer Walter Isaacson revealed: “Every evening Steve made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things. No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer.” Years earlier, in an interview for Wired magazine, Jobs expressed a very clear anti-tech-in-the-classroom opinion as well—after having once believed that technology was the educational panacea: “I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody on the planet. But I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.”34 Education

Hey Pete. So why the leave from social media? You are an activist, right? It seems like this decision is counterproductive to your message and work." A: The short answer is I’m tired of the endless narcissism inherent to the medium. In the commercial society we have, coupled with the consequential sense of insecurity people feel, as they impulsively “package themselves” for public consumption, the expression most dominant in all of this - is vanity. And I find that disheartening, annoying and dangerous. It is a form of cultural violence in many respects. However, please note the difference - that I work to promote just that – a message/idea – not myself… and I honestly loath people who today just promote themselves for the sake of themselves. A sea of humans who have been conditioned into viewing who they are – as how they are seen online. Think about that for a moment. Social identity theory run amok. People have been conditioned to think “they are” how “others see them”. We live in an increasing fictional reality where people are now not only people – they are digital symbols. And those symbols become more important as a matter of “marketing” than people’s true personality. Now, one could argue that social perception has always had a communicative symbolism, even before the computer age. But nooooooothing like today. Social media has become a social prison and a strong means of social control, in fact. Beyond that, as most know, social media is literally designed like a drug. And it acts like it as people get more and more addicted to being seen and addicted to molding the way they want the world to view them – no matter how false the image (If there is any word that defines peoples’ behavior here – it is pretention). Dopamine fires upon recognition and, coupled with cell phone culture, we now have a sea of people in zombie like trances looking at their phones (literally) thousands of times a day, merging their direct, true interpersonal social reality with a virtual “social media” one. No one can read anymore... they just swipe a stream of 200 character headlines/posts/tweets. understanding the world as an aggregate of those fragmented sentences. Massive loss of comprehension happening, replaced by usually agreeable, "in-bubble" views - hence an actual loss of variety. So again, this isn’t to say non-commercial focused social media doesn’t have positive purposes, such as with activism at times. But, on the whole, it merely amplifies a general value system disorder of a “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT HOW GREAT I AM!” – rooted in systemic insecurity. People lying to themselves, drawing meaningless satisfaction from superficial responses from a sea of avatars. And it’s no surprise. Market economics demands people self promote shamelessly, coupled with the arbitrary constructs of beauty and success that have also resulted. People see status in certain things and, directly or pathologically, use those things for their own narcissistic advantage. Think of those endless status pics of people rock climbing, or hanging out on a stunning beach or showing off their new trophy girl-friend, etc. It goes on and on and worse the general public generally likes it, seeking to imitate those images/symbols to amplify their own false status. Hence the endless feedback loop of superficiality. And people wonder why youth suicides have risen… a young woman looking at a model of perfection set by her peers, without proper knowledge of the medium, can be made to feel inferior far more dramatically than the typical body image problems associated to traditional advertising. That is just one example of the cultural violence inherent. The entire industry of social media is BASED on narcissistic status promotion and narrow self-interest. That is the emotion/intent that creates the billions and billions in revenue these platforms experience, as they in turn sell off people’s personal data to advertisers and governments. You are the product, of course.

From the perspective of my old laptop, I am a numbers man, something like that every instruction he gives me is a one or a zero I remember well I have information about him before he left for his new toy thinner, younger, able to keep up with him, I have information about him may 15th 2008, he listened to a song five times in succession it was titled Everybody, open parenthesis, Backstreet's Back, close parenthesis it included the lyric 'Am I sexual, yeaaaaah' He said once, computers like a sense of finality to them when I write something I don't want to be able to run from it this was a lie he was addicted to my ability to keep his secrets I am a numbers man, every instruction he gives me is a one, or a zero I remember well January, 7th 2007 I was young just two week awake he gave me, a new series of one's and zeros the most sublime sequence I have ever seen it had curves, and shadow, it was him he gave his face in numbers and trusted me to be the artist, and I was do not laugh I have read about your God you kill each other over your grand fathers memory of him I still remember the fingertips of my God dancing across my body After I learnt to draw him he trusted with more art rubric jpeg 1063 was his favourite Him, and that woman, resting her head in the curve of his nick I read his correspondence she hasn't written him back in years but he asks for it, constantly, jpeg 1063, jpeg 1063, jpeg 1063 it was my master piece it looked so, .., life like I wanted to tell him That's not her that is me that is not her face those are my ones and zeros waltzing in space for you she is nothing more than my shadow puppet you do not miss her, you miss me, I am a numbers man, every instruction he gives is a one or a zero I remember well but he taught me to be a Da Vinci and I sit here, with his portraits waiting for him to return I do not think he will Is that what it means to be human to be all powerful, to build a temple to yourself and leave only the walls to pray

Slot machines cater, like the games on computers and phones, to the longing to flee from the oppressive world of dead-end jobs, crippling debt, social stagnation, and a dysfunctional political system. They shape our behavior with constant bursts of stimulation. We become rats in a Skinner box. We frantically pull levers until we are addicted and, finally entranced, by our adrenaline-driven compulsion to achieve fleeting and intermittent rewards. Behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner found that when pigeons and rats did not know when or how much they would be rewarded, they pressed levers or pedals compulsively. Skinner used slot machines as a metaphor for his experiment.27

What stuck with me was the way you describe your addiction to work. I’ve been so used to hearing of depression as something that forces you to do absolutely nothing. But pushing my limits became my drug. It was essentially a form of masochism. 18 years old and I found myself working nonstop for 20 hours a day. I didn’t socialize. I major in computer engineering and spent my day in front of a laptop. I wear glasses now from staring at screens so much. Getting things done let me avoid taking care of myself. I was just “too busy.” 96% of the things you focused on relating to your struggles have caused me to think, “Oh my gosh, it’s not just me!” Frankly, you helped me realize working so hard was a side effect of my depression, a source of control, and not just something other people who didn’t know what was up admired me for.

Neither Rafi nor I saw what was happening. No one did. That computers would take over our lives: Sure. But the way that they would turn us into different beings? The full flavor of our translated hearts and minds? Not even my most enlightened fellow programmers at CRIK foresaw that with any resolution. Sure, they predicted personal, portable Encyclopedia Britannicas and group real-time teleconferencing and personal assistants that could teach you how to write better. But Facebook and WhatsApp and TikTok and Bitcoin and QAnon and Alexa and Google Maps and smart tracking ads based on keywords stolen from your emails and checking your likes while at a urinal and shopping while naked and insanely stupid but addictive farming games that wrecked people’s careers and all the other neural parasites that now make it impossible for me to remember what thinking and feeling and being were really like, back then? Not even close.

And the lights are everywhere. They are so pervasive in modern life we’ve stopped seeing them. In turning them off, it’s hard to know where to begin. There are house lights and garage lights, fluorescent lights and halogen lights. There are streetlights and stoplights, headlights, taillights, dashboard lights, and billboard lights. There are night-lights to stand sentinel against the dark of our rooms and hallways, and reading lights for feeding our addiction to words and images and information, even in the middle of the night. There are warning lights and safety lights, and the lights of our cell phones and televisions and computer screens. No wonder our larger towns and cities are so bright you can see them from space. Nor does that urban and suburban light stay put. It seeps into the nearby plains and hills and mountains, casting shadows from trees and telephone poles. It throws off the rhythms of insects and animals and confuses the migrations of birds.

The Archons use 'mind control' techniques. This is known as psychological warfare, but Archontic manipulation far surpasses anything the United States, Russia, Vatican City, Israel, or the United Kingdom has, of yet, invented. The Archons are the ultimate brainwashers. The Archons keep people distracted with pornography and drugs, with sports and alcohol, with material possessions, exotic vacations, artificial reality, addiction to various pleasures, along with dreams of the artificial technological paradise of: radical life-extension, transhumanism, nootropics and Brain Computer Interfaces. The Archons do this so that humanity does not have the time or opportunity to observe what is really happening in the world. Humanity is under siege. The Archons want you to be as uneducated and uninformed as possible. They destroy your passion for learning, and infiltrate and sabotage the educational system. Ultimately, they want to destroy all that makes you human, your hopes, your dreams, your joys, especially they want to destroy your spirituality.

I’d finally gained enough distance from my addiction to realize something. Human beings were never meant to participate in a worldwide social network comprised of billions of people. We were designed by evolution to be hunter-gatherers, with the mental capacity to interact and socialize with the other members of our tribe—a tribe made up of a few hundred other people at most. Interacting with thousands or even millions of other people on a daily basis was way too much for our ape-descended melons to handle. That was why social media had been gradually driving the entire population of the world insane since it emerged back around the turn of the century. I was even beginning to wonder if the invention of a worldwide social network was actually the “Great Filter” that theoretically caused all technological civilizations to go extinct, instead of nuclear weapons or climate change. Maybe every time an intelligent species grew advanced enough to invent a global computer network, they would then develop some form of social media, which would immediately fill these beings with such an intense hatred for one another that they ended up wiping themselves out within four or five decades.

The popular 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma illustrates how AI’s personalization will cause you to be unconsciously manipulated by AI and motivated by profit from advertising. The Social Dilemma star Tristan Harris says: “You didn’t know that your click caused a supercomputer to be pointed at your brain. Your click activated billions of dollars of computing power that has learned much from its experience of tricking two billion human animals to click again.” And this addiction results in a vicious cycle for you, but a virtuous cycle for the big Internet companies that use this mechanism as a money-printing machine. The Social Dilemma further argues that this may narrow your viewpoints, polarize society, distort truth, and negatively affect your happiness, mood, and mental health. To put it in technical terms, the core of the issue is the simplicity of the objective function, and the danger from single-mindedly optimizing a single objective function, which can lead to harmful externalities. Today’s AI usually optimizes this singular goal—most commonly to make money (more clicks, ads, revenues). And AI has a maniacal focus on that one corporate goal, without regard for users’ well-being.

When you get right down to the nuts and bolts of understanding what the brain is doing and the relationship between conscious experience and the brain,” Dr. Schwartz said, “the data do not support the commonly held principle that you can just will yourself into one mental state or another. “It’s a subtle thing, freedom. It takes effort; it takes attention and focus to not act something like an automaton. Although we do have freedom, we exercise it only when we strive for awareness, when we are conscious not just of the content of the mind but also of the mind itself as a process.” When not governed by conscious awareness, our mind tends to run on automatic pilot. It is scarcely more “free” than a computer that performs preprogrammed tasks in response to a button being pushed. The distinction between automatic mechanism and conscious free will may be illustrated by the difference between punching a wall with your fist in a fit of reactive rage and mindfully saying to yourself, “I have so much anger in me, I really want to punch this wall right now”—or even more consciously, “My mind tells me I should punch the wall.” The latter mind-states give you the option of not striking the wall, without which there is no choice and no freedom—just a fractured hand and a head full of regret. “Choice,” Eckhart Tolle points out, “implies consciousness—a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice.

More than anything, we have lost the cultural customs and traditions that bring extended families together, linking adults and children in caring relationships, that give the adult friends of parents a place in their children's lives. It is the role of culture to cultivate connections between the dependent and the dependable and to prevent attachment voids from occurring. Among the many reasons that culture is failing us, two bear mentioning. The first is the jarringly rapid rate of change in twentieth-century industrial societies. It requires time to develop customs and traditions that serve attachment needs, hundreds of years to create a working culture that serves a particular social and geographical environment. Our society has been changing much too rapidly for culture to evolve accordingly. There is now more change in a decade than previously in a century. When circumstances change more quickly than our culture can adapt to, customs and traditions disintegrate. It is not surprising that today's culture is failing its traditional function of supporting adult-child attachments. Part of the rapid change has been the electronic transmission of culture, allowing commercially blended and packaged culture to be broadcast into our homes and into the very minds of our children. Instant culture has replaced what used to be passed down through custom and tradition and from one generation to another. “Almost every day I find myself fighting the bubble-gum culture my children are exposed to,” said a frustrated father interviewed for this book. Not only is the content often alien to the culture of the parents but the process of transmission has taken grandparents out of the loop and made them seem sadly out of touch. Games, too, have become electronic. They have always been an instrument of culture to connect people to people, especially children to adults. Now games have become a solitary activity, watched in parallel on television sports-casts or engaged in in isolation on the computer. The most significant change in recent times has been the technology of communication — first the phone and then the Internet through e-mail and instant messaging. We are enamored of communication technology without being aware that one of its primary functions is to facilitate attachments. We have unwittingly put it into the hands of children who, of course, are using it to connect with their peers. Because of their strong attachment needs, the contact is highly addictive, often becoming a major preoccupation. Our culture has not been able to evolve the customs and traditions to contain this development, and so again we are all left to our own devices. This wonderful new technology would be a powerfully positive instrument if used to facilitate child-adult connections — as it does, for example, when it enables easy communication between students living away from home, and their parents. Left unchecked, it promotes peer orientation.

the absence of an ‘international standard burglar’, the nearest I know to a working classification is one developed by a U.S. Army expert [118]. Derek is a 19-year old addict. He's looking for a low-risk opportunity to steal something he can sell for his next fix. Charlie is a 40-year old inadequate with seven convictions for burglary. He's spent seventeen of the last twenty-five years in prison. Although not very intelligent he is cunning and experienced; he has picked up a lot of ‘lore’ during his spells inside. He steals from small shops and suburban houses, taking whatever he thinks he can sell to local fences. Bruno is a ‘gentleman criminal’. His business is mostly stealing art. As a cover, he runs a small art gallery. He has a (forged) university degree in art history on the wall, and one conviction for robbery eighteen years ago. After two years in jail, he changed his name and moved to a different part of the country. He has done occasional ‘black bag’ jobs for intelligence agencies who know his past. He'd like to get into computer crime, but the most he's done so far is stripping $100,000 worth of memory chips from a university's PCs back in the mid-1990s when there was a memory famine. Abdurrahman heads a cell of a dozen militants, most with military training. They have infantry weapons and explosives, with PhD-grade technical support provided by a disreputable country. Abdurrahman himself came third out of a class of 280 at the military academy of that country but was not promoted because he's from the wrong ethnic group. He thinks of himself as a good man rather than a bad man. His mission is to steal plutonium. So Derek is unskilled, Charlie is skilled, Bruno is highly skilled and may have the help of an unskilled insider such as a cleaner, while Abdurrahman is not only highly skilled but has substantial resources.

Computation, after all, implied a problem not yet solved, insights not yet achieved. There was really only one sort of program for which foreknowledge of the outcome didn't diminish the point of exercise, and Brüks had never been able to find any religious orders that described God as a porn addict.

I have an affliction It’s an addiction To computer solitaire   I can’t resist The icon’s invitation There’s simply no fix Black five on red six   It’s become My reward a Take-a-break kinda thing Black queen on red king   I’ve spent so many many Hours of just Wasted time Red eight on black nine   No way can I stay away Resistance’s no use Just can’t find a home for

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on as you learn more complex hacks and tests, you will need a target machines suited for such hacks. The best way to learn to hack Linux systems is to download and install the Metasploitable Linux distribution. The Metasploitable distro is purposefully made to incorporate vulnerabilities that learners like yourself can use for security testing and hacking purposes. The best part is that you can set it up to boot just like an operating system you use for your everyday computing needs or you can set it up in VirtualBox or VMware Workstation platforms. Using Metasploitable Linux OS for your hacking practice is the best way to understand more about the Linux infrastructure, security setup, and how to discover and exploit its vulnerabilities. You can read the documentation of Metasploitable and download the installation ISO from Rapid 7

need to download and install Python, get the recent most stable version from python.org and install it on your computer. If you already have Python installed on your Linux computer, do not uninstall the older 2.x as this may break your operating system. Instead, install the latest version alongside it. You may be required to use the command python3 and not python to initialize the interpreter though. All the information you need is provided on the documentation page of the Python.org website. We recommend you take the time to read the ‘Beginners Guide’ if you are still new to Python. Practical hacking: Free online hacking practice servers There is a saying in the world of information security that the best defense is a good offense. This is what has inspired many cyber security companies to make available deliberately vulnerable websites and servers to encourage developers, auditors, pentesters, system admins, and security professionals to practice their hacking skills online.

Kali Linux: The hacker’s toolbox Frankly speaking, learning and practicing to become a proficient hacker is not as easy as becoming a software developer. This course takes you through the initial steps of discovering hidden vulnerabilities and beating sophisticated security systems. It demands sophistication and creativity among other skills. It goes without saying that Linux is the most preferred operating system for daily use by programmers, hackers, and other computer professionals. This is because of the incredible control the operating system accords the user. If you are new to Linux and are looking to learn all the basics and how to make it work for you, then Kali Linux may not be the ideal starting point for you. It is recommended that you learn the basics with a Ubuntu or Debian-based operating system instead. Having said that, you will find it practical to follow the instructions on how to use Kali for specific hacking purposes in this book whether this will be your first interaction with the OS or you have experience with Linux.

I am reading less and less books because of having a Desktop Computer and Smartphone. I now know that their programs are designed to make me addicted, so must overcome this or never know knowledge that will be deeply ingrained ever again.

Children have the knowledge but not the power to use the computer. As parents, you have to monitor what they do on the computer, always and at all times.

The computer itself exerted a strong hold on people, presenting a palatable alternative to human companionship. Many code writers agreed that their enthusiasm for computing bordered on obsession. More than a few spent vacations writing code or weekends doodling away at a half-baked program. This was sometimes merely a way for code writers to teach themselves about new tools or techniques. But often, a person could not resist programming. “It’s an addiction. What else can I say?” said one team member. The

Use social media for your increase, not your decrease. Be mindful of what you post, use socials for good, and be proud of what you share.

The earliest people to report porn-related problems in online forums were typically computer programmers and information-technology specialists. They had acquired high-speed internet porn ahead of the pack

When you flip hamburgers, sit at a computer all day, unpack and shelve merchandise from China year after year, you manage the tedium better if you have a shallow inner life, one you can escape through booze, drugs, sex, media, or other low level addictive behaviors. Easier to keep sane if your inner life is shallow. School, thought Harris the great American schoolman, should prepare ordinary men and women for lifetimes of alienation. Can you say he wasn’t fully rational?

I kept zoning out as the various shapes and symbols flashed across the computer's glowing screen. My most strenuous efforts to combine those symbols into words failed drastically, sentences eluded me, and time passed in a chirping swirl of incoherent madness.

My assumption with smart phone teenagers is they suffer from distraction issues.

As a computer scientist, I make a living helping to advance the cutting edge of the digital world. Like many in my field, I’m enthralled by the possibilities of our techno-future. But I’m also convinced that we cannot unlock this potential until we put in the effort required to take control of our own digital lives—to confidently decide for ourselves what tools we want to use, for what reasons, and under what conditions. This isn't reactionary, it’s common sense.

What this means for cognition and learning can be best understood by looking at machine learning, or artificial intelligence, Gopnik suggests. In teaching computers how to learn and solve problems, AI designers speak in terms of “high temperature” and “low temperature” searches for the answers to questions. A low-temperature search (so-called because it requires less energy) involves reaching for the most probable or nearest-to-hand answer, like the one that worked for a similar problem in the past. Low-temperature searches succeed more often than not. A high-temperature search requires more energy because it involves reaching for less likely but possibly more ingenious and creative answers—those found outside the box of preconception. Drawing on its wealth of experience, the adult mind performs low-temperature searches most of the time.

The Archons keep people distracted with pornography and drugs, with sports and alcohol, with material possessions, exotic vacations, artificial reality, addiction to various pleasures, along with dreams of the artificial technological paradise of: radical life-extension, transhumanism, nootropics and Brain Computer Interfaces.

For many years, video games gave him a person and a place to be, as well as things to do. But an event happens to a pair of eyes after enough hours before a computer screen—they will scan the display and mid-game, shatter. Consoles crack men. It’s massacre. Andrei would thumb plastic so often that his mind would flee reality, as well as the virtual world he was in, and enter a dimension of empty euphoria. But one euphoric day he felt games were a sophisticated way to keep a pig in its own corner. The videogames advanced to become more realistic—but one must not be fooled by decorations. The detail-rich galaxies he found himself investing his life in were in fact the same galaxy as Pacman or Tetris: 1s and 0s.

Via our machines— be it phone, television, or computer— we receive an enormous amount of information every day. But we don’t have the time, the energy, and the emotional resilience to deal with all of this information. We do triage as best we can, but we still are flooded with more stimulation than we can process and integrate. Still, many people are hooked. Scientists have discovered that every time we hear the blip or ding of an e-mail or text message a small amount of dopamine is released into our brains. We humans are programmed to be curious and it is natural to want to know more, more, and more. Therapists have coined a phrase for a new addiction: FOMO, or “fear of missing out.

Professor Peter Cohen, a friend of Bruce’s, writes that we should stop using the word “addiction” altogether and shift to a new word: “bonding.”28 Human beings need to bond. It is one of our most primal urges. So if we can’t bond with other people, we will find a behavior to bond with, whether it’s watching pornography or smoking crack or gambling. If the only bond you can find that gives you relief or meaning is with splayed women on a computer screen or bags of crystal or a roulette wheel, you will return to that bond obsessively. One recovering heroin and crack addict on the Downtown Eastside, Dean Wilson, put it to me simply. “Addiction,” he said, “is a disease of loneliness.

Work is satisfying. Staying up late until your eyes beg you for sleep, sitting constantly in front of your computer till your back aches, rushing hurriedly until you sweat hard, or drudging till you become tired. Yes, work is compelling, satisfying, and sometimes, even addictive. Working hard makes you realize that you’re playing your part, it protects your belief of being a dedicated person, and above everything it shows that you take responsibility for what you do. This all gives you the satisfaction of work, doesn’t it? But unfortunately, the truth is, sometimes it’s nothing more than false satisfaction of work.

Twitter is not just for Journalists. You don’t have to be a writer to Tweet.[Social Media]

He is a very senior member of faculty; has an added degree in Computer Science; a supposed scholar; addicted to Google and the Internet; dislikes the library, but, I looked like a magician to him when in a twinkling of an eye I gave him a book from the trolley that contained 90% of what he couldn't get from the Internet for a long while, and ever since, he respects librarians and visits the library almost on a daily basis.

I have a virus,” I mumble and cringe, too embarrassed to rephrase it to my computer has a virus.

Now nearly naked, I pull my hand away, and he playfully folds the hem of his boxer-briefs. I gasp and he grins. “On or off, love? Your choice.” My brain zeros out into nothingness. It cannot compute his question. “I’ll take that as a you can’t handle it,” he says huskily and leaves his underwear on. No. I definitely cannot handle seeing his dick right now. I can barely handle breathing at this point.

Psilocybin Project crashed and burned in 1963. Not even Berkeley, it seemed, was ready to go there again, at least not yet. Third data point: The dinner table conversation jogged a vague memory that a few years before somebody had e-mailed me a scientific paper about psilocybin research. Busy with other things at the time, I hadn’t even opened it, but a quick search of the term “psilocybin” instantly fished the paper out of the virtual pile of discarded e-mail on my computer. The paper had been sent to me by one of its

The World Wide Web can be a helpful place for statistics and facts, helpful hacks, and tips, but the digital world is also a place where security measures should be put in place, especially for youth.

pattern of thinking as normative, logical, and surely true, even when it does not fully compute. We keep doing the same thing, over and over again, even if it is not working for us. That is the self-destructive, even “demonic,” nature of all addiction—and of the mind,

As a way to practice saying “no,” consider small fasts. You could give up food, desserts, computer games, or other activities important to you. This is not a way to punish yourself for what you have done. It is simply a way to have more practice at self-control. Remember that self-control is a skill that develops with practice.

There are currently 3.5 billion smartphone users in the world. Pretty much every one of those phones does something for its owner that they used to do for themselves. Before all the apps, algorithms, and websites we have today, we used our brains to do things like remembering and recalling (phone numbers, calendar events, and other facts). We also figured out how to get places without GPS and we made more of our own decisions about what to buy instead of clicking on ads and making impulse purchases. While there certainly are benefits to having tech- nology take care of many of our needs, we should be aware of what we might be losing. What types of thinking are we no longer doing on our own? Are there unintended consequences to letting computers (and the corporations behind them) do so much of our thinking?

Ronnie is in the living room now. He has satisfied his computer addiction and is shifting through channels. We have something like four hundred or so choices, but he rarely finds anything he thinks he’ll enjoy. It’s difficult to watch television with him because, like someone with attention deficit disorder, he’ll abruptly flip the channel to something else, calling what he started to watch ‘crap’ or ‘boring’. Between him and Kelly, the word ‘boring’ seems to characterize ninety percent of life. I think they expect to wake up and go to sleep to fireworks. They’re both always looking for distractions, action, excitement and noise. I know what they believe: stillness is dangerous. Silence encourages people to start getting philosophical which always leads to being maudlin and depressing. Ugh. Usually

Education psychologist and author of Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children’s Minds, Dr. Jane Healy, spent years doing research into computer use in schools and, like Jobs, had expected to find that computers in the classroom would be wonderful for learning. Yet she found exactly the opposite and was dismayed by the lack of research indicating any benefit

Though Rembrandt worked closely with other painters in his studio in Amsterdam, each artist was assigned a private space for working alone. When consultants compared six hundred computer programmers across ninety-two companies to pinpoint what separated the top performers from the pack, they found the secret ingredient was not higher pay or more experience but having a private work space that minimized interruptions. Human beings are profoundly social, but we also crave privacy and personal freedom. Research shows that open-plan offices can make us anxious, hostile, tired, and prone to illness. They also bombard us with distractions that undermine deep thinking.

Stop looking for others to validate or verify you. You were already somebody before your social media account was created.

Loss of Privacy and Self-Direction While loss of privacy may not seem like a serious “survival” hazard, it can defeat one’s efforts to prepare for or deal with threats as an individual. To a true survivalist, survival is more than a biological imperative. If a human is completely observed, monitored, and directed by a system or network, no matter how benign, then he or she is no longer free and therefore has not survived. Technology has evolved to the point where it is using people, rather than being used by people. Those who frequent the internet, carry smartphones, and respond to various online programs are profiled by massive computers to analyze how they think and therefore how they react to various ideas. Human engineering and logarithms can manipulate buying habits, political preferences, social associations, and even emotions. Think about the implications of being wired to systems that have their own agendas. If you dismiss this as simply paranoia, then you are exhibiting typical addictive behavior. This is one of the most insidious and stealthy hazards to humanity.

And is there really any possibility of discovering something in cyberspace? The Internet merely simulates a free mental space, a space of freedom and discovery. In fact, it merely offers a multiple but conventional space, in which the operator interacts with known elements, pre-existent sites, established codes. Nothing exists beyond its search parameters. Every question has an anticipated response assigned to it. You are the questioner and, at the same time, the automatic answering device of the machine. Both coder and decoder - you are, in fact, your own terminal. That is the ecstasy of communication. There is no 'Other' out there and no final destination. It's any old destination - and any old interactor will do. And so the system goes on, without end and without finality, and its only possibility is that of infinite involution. Hence the comfortable vertige of this electronic, computer interaction, which acts like a drug. You can spend your whole life at this, without a break. Drugs themselves are only ever the perfect example of a crazed, closed-circuit interactivity.

People tell you the computer is just a handier, more complex kind of typewriter. But that isn't true. The typewriter is an entirely external object. The page floats free, and so do I. I have a physical relation to writing. I touch the blank or written page with my eyes - something I cannot do with the screen. The computer is a prosthesis. I have a tactile, intersensory relation to it. I become, myself, an ectoplasm of the screen. And this, no doubt, explains, in this incubation of the virtual image and the brain, the malfunctions which afflict computers, and which are like the failings of one's own body. On the other hand, the fact that priority belongs to the network and not to individuals implies the possibility of hiding, of disappearing into the intangible space of the Virtual, so that you cannot be pinned down anywhere, which resolves all problems of identity, not to mention those of alterity. So, the attraction of all these virtual machines no doubt derives not so much from the thirst for information and knowledge as from the desire to disappear, and the possibility of dissolving oneself into a phantom conviviality. A kind of 'high' that takes the place of happiness. But virtuality comes close to happiness only because it surreptitiously removes all reference from it. It gives you everything, but it subtly deprives you of everything at the same time. The subject is, in a sense, realized to perfection, but when realized to perfection, it automatically becomes object, and panic sets in.

The same indifference to content, the same obsessional and operational, performative and interminable aspects, also characterize the present-day use of computers: people no more think at a computer than they run when jogging. They have their brain function in the first activity much as they have their body run in the second. Here too the operation is virtually endless: a head-to-head confrontation with a computer has no more reason to come to an end than the physical effort that jogging demands. And the kind of hypnotic pleasure involved, the ecstatic absorption or resorption of energy - bodily energy in one case, cerebral in the other - is identical. On the one hand, the static electricity of skin and muscles - on the other, the static electricity of the screen. Jogging and working at a computer may be looked upon as drugs, as narcotics, to the extent that all drugs are directly governed by the dominant performance principle: they get us to take pleasure, get us to dream, get us to feel. Drugs are not artificial in the sense of inducing a secondary state distinct from a natural state of the body; they are artificial, however, in that they constitute a chemical prosthesis, a mental surgery of performance, a plastic surgery of perception. It is hardly surprising that the suspicion of systematic drug use hangs over sport today. Different forms of obeisance to the performance principle can easily set up house together. Not only muscles and nerves but also neurons and cells must be made to perform. (Even bacteria will soon have an operational role.) Throwing, running, swimming and jumping have had their day: the point now is to send a satellite called 'the body' into artificial orbit. The athlete's body has become both launcher and satellite; no longer governed by an individual will gauging the effort expended with a view to self-transcendence, it is controlled by an internal microcomputer working by calculation alone.

Building on the anatomical data known to drive the typical shift from planning to procedural decision systems, Piray et al. (2010) proposed a computational model in which drugs disrupted the planning-valuation systems and accelerated learning in the procedural-valuation systems. This model suggested that known changes in dopaminergic function in the nucleus accumbens as a consequence of chronic drug use could lead to overly fast learning of habit behaviors in the dorsal striatum and would provide a shift from planning to habit systems due to changes in valuation between the two systems.

Multi-system models suggest that addiction is a question of harmful dysfunction - dysfunction (vulnerabilities leading to active failure modes) within a system that causes sufficient harm to suggest we need to treat it. They permit both behavioral and pharmacological drivers of addiction. The suggestion that different decision-making systems can drive behavior provides a very interesting treatment possibility, which is that one could potentially use one decision-system to correct for errors in another. Three computational analyses of this have been done - changing discounting rates with episodic future thinking, analyses of contingency management, and analyses of precommitment.

The fact that addicts show fast discounting functions with preferences that change over time suggests two interesting related treatments: bundling and precommitment. Bundling is a process whereby multiple rewards are grouped together so as to calculate the value of the full set rather than each individually. A similar process is that of precommitment, where a subject who knows in advance that if given a later option, the subject will take the poor choice, prevents the opportunity in the first place. Economically, precommitment depends on the hyperbolic discounting factors that lead to preference reversals. Although many experiments have found that the average subject shows hyperbolic discounting, individuals can show large deviations from good hyperbolic fits. Computationally, an individual's willingness to precommit should depend on the specific shape of their discounting function.

People I interviewed—and I don’t have to back up this claim because you know people like this, too—have developed emotional and sexual relationships with their computers and handheld devices. We are building our sexual fantasies around machines. The chilly glow of the iPhone establishes in our thoughts a subconscious desire to interact with it more and more. If Pavlov were alive he would study arousal patterns around that cobalt illumination.

Wiki also has a pseudoreligious aspect: it helps Internet users to give penance. For the droves of web addicts seeking to mortify their flesh after another sticky bout of D-listing, Perez Hilton, "12 Things to Do Before You're 25," "8 Reasons to Have a One-Night Stand," bath-salt hysteria, pressing "Like" buttons, or some other such nitwit distraction, Wikipedia is a Sunday-morning salve—for the lies, betrayals, and self-defeating debauchery which implicate each and every user of a computer, and for which we all feel shame, contempt, disgust, and chagrin.

If the solution to all of Africa’s illegal practices and crimes is to legalize them, then we are a doomed continent. Human trafficking; buying, selling, and consuming illegal addictive drugs; fraudulent financial transactions, computer hacking, identity theft—would legalizing these destructive behaviors improve society? If not, why would legalizing abortion improve the lives of Africans?

It can even lead to a complete recasting of the original problem. If a client requests a new, improved toaster, IDEO might flip the question around to ask: Is there a better way to make toast? Or how could breakfast be different? IDEO took a similar tack when helping Apple develop its revolutionary computer mouse in 1980. “Right from the start we ask ‘What is the real problem we need to address?’” says Fulton Suri. “There is always a danger that the solution is already embedded in the way we frame our original problem. If we take the time to reframe it, we can open up alternative and often better ways to address the real need.

Like other ingredients of the Slow Fix, collaboration takes time. You have to find and marshal the right people and then manage the creative collisions that ensue. But it works even in the fastest-moving sectors of the economy. Steve Jobs once observed that Apple’s revolutionary Macintosh computer “turned out so well because the people working on it were musicians, artists, poets, and historians who also happened to be excellent computer scientists.” Nearly three decades later, the company is still thrashing the competition with the same recipe. “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough,” Jobs declared after the launch of the world-conquering iPad. “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.” Bottom line: the more people who come to your problem-solving party, and the more varied their backgrounds, the more likely it is that ideas will collide, combine, and cross-pollinate to spawn the Promethean flashes of insight that pave the way for the best Slow Fixes.

The hardest rule for me to keep at Onsite wasn’t about computers or cell phones. It was that we couldn’t tell people what we did for a living. Bill asked us at orientation to keep our jobs a secret. He said if we had to talk about our work life, even during therapy, to just say we were plumbers or accountants. It’s a genius rule, if you think about it. Right from the start we weren’t allowed to wear a costume. And let’s face it, most of us wear our jobs like a costume. My entire identity—my distorted sense of value—came almost exclusively from the fact I wrote books. It was torture to not tell people what I did. I never realized how much I’d used my job as a social crutch until the crutch was taken away. I must have hinted that I thought my work was important a thousand different ways. I kept saying, “As a plumber, there’s a lot of pressure on me to perform.” I did everything but wink when I said it. I must have been nauseating to be around. But deep inside, I wanted so desperately to talk about what I did because I knew people would like me if they only knew. I knew people would think I was important. Slowly, over the week, I realized I was addicted to my outer shell, that without my costume I felt vulnerable.