Pros and Cons of Computer Gaming

Ten years ago, when you write ‘gaming’ as your hobby, you would probably be getting blank stares. But nowadays, I dare say that gaming has definitely become one of the top hobbies among teenagers. With more and more games popping up everywhere like Half-Life, Medal of Honour, PS3 etc, one should not be surprised by the amount of people being ‘lured’ as they are able to choose their favorite games from a myriad of sources with different themes. While teenagers think of them as a way to kill boredom, most parents think of these games with a vengeance. Instead of doing useful things like revising the newest chapter taught in school or helping mum cook dinner, they waste their spare time sitting in front of a glowing screen, possibly getting backaches and sore eyes.

 

But parents, playing games on the computer has its good effects as well as its bad influences. Researchers have discovered that playing these games actually improves the hand-eye coordination of the players, enhances their logical thinking skill and makes them more alert to little details that take a non-player longer time to notice. War strategies found in certain games help them to think more logically, educational games assist in their communication and problem solving skills, alertness and so on. Teachers have also found improvement in mathematics, reading and spelling skills of those students. These students can process visual information thirty percent faster than non-gamers and generally score better in eye tests.

Researchers of University of Rochester have recruited some gaming fanatics and performed two tests. In the first test, an image would appear on a video screen for 1/160th of a second, after which the subjects were asked to locate where they had seen the image on the screen. In another test, twelve images were shown for a fraction of a second and the subjects were asked to assess how many images they had just seen. The gamers had shown a higher accuracy in answering correctly than non-gamers. 

Before the gamers open champagne and celebrate, the bad side of spending too much time on playing games is very real as well. Some of the games are extremely violent in nature, and it has a rather huge negative impact on the young minds. Apart from this, spending too much time on the couch or the bed playing these games will also result in obesity, which in turn leads to other illnesses like diabetes. Other than that and the usual eye strain, wrist and neck pain, playing the game for too long will also result in headaches, hallucinations, muscle and nerve damages. Gaming does help to develop the brain, but instead of developing it uniformly, it only develops the sections related to vision and detecting movements. Specialists have also confirmed that children who spent too much time on those games also have a much higher chance of developing a bad posture and also cause disequilibrium in their daily routine. To cure these problems will not be an easy process as they might have to go through simple relaxation exercises or even undergoing physiotherapy and also hydrotherapy treatment.

 

What do you think of computer gaming?

 

Cybercrime

The cyberattacks that bombarded Estonia, knocked out the websites of government departments, political parties, media groups and banks of the world’s most wired countries, according to TIME magazine. The sophistication of the attacks was unprecedented, and it marked the first time the power centers of a country were targeted simultaneously. The attacks began on April 27, when the Estonian authorities removed a controversial war memorial from a park. The bulk of the strikes involved what are known as Distributed Denial of Service attacks, in which websites were overwhelmed by a number of requests for information far higher than normal, bringing the sites’ networks of servers and routers to a complete halt. On May 10, during the peak of the cyberattacks, hundreds of thousands of computers from all over the globe were barraging targeted Estonian websites with thousands of times the normal flow of data.

 

 

This should not be the cause of concern for the Estonians only, but to everyone in the world as well. The attacks have shown us how vulnerable the Internet is in the face of an assault. The “tools and instructions are readily available at low cost”, says Oliver Friedrichs, a director at the security response unit of Symantec, which makes it all the more easier to lay siege to targeted websites. According to timesonline.co.uk, the number of computer viruses has reached one million for the first time. Symantec has reported that just over 711,000 new viruses were discovered, an increase of 468 per cent on the number identified the previous year, and they are all capable of creating havoc. For example, the blasé and infamous Trojan e-mail attacks are used to purloin confidential data from secure networks. Free to perform tasks reserved only for the owner, the invader is able to steal passwords, upload documents and transmit new attacks.

  

 

Defending against these attacks is not all that easy either. Large companies have the modal to invest in state-of-the-art hardware that detects off patterns of requests for its websites and steer away from dubious ones. Smaller firms, however, will face problem to fend against these malicious attacks. They are not used to large volumes of traffic and they also lack the money to help face the onslaught of the incursions. Facing massive bombardments like what happened in Estonia, even well-equipped government networks can be brought down.

 

 

Head of the Asia Security Programme at the Royal United Services Institute in London, Alexander Neill worries that this kind of cybercrime, breaking into top-secret networks for reconnaissance, could serve terrorists logistics or research cells. Given their command and control over things, we are left with no doubt that the terrorists have experts capable of causing such damage. Fortunately, there is reason to assure us that the terrorists might not attempt the sort of online blitzkrieg experienced by Estonia. “Terrorism is about creating true fear with spectacularly lurid attacks,” says Oxford’s Zittrain. They would “rather do something physical.”  

 

What do you think of cybercrime and the problem it poses?