A study has revealed that internet addiction can lead to depression. This adds to the already catalogued list of psychological problems associated with the condition, including ‘relationship problems, health problems, aggressive behavior and other psychiatric symptoms’.

The research results of the social science can be very enlightening, but sometimes they simply confirm what we all already knew. Excessive internet usage can lead to psychological problems.

The more important truth in this case is that a bad addiction to anything will lead to psychological problems. The problems associated with drinking alcohol, work addiction, gambling, comfort food, blackberry emailing and comfort buying are all well documented. Society’s virtues and vices are all in the same boat here. All result in social and financial problems to varying degrees as the semi-conscious obsession causes those suffering from it to neglect their friends, spend money unwisely and generally stagnate or slide backwards in life. Internet addiction is nothing special in this regard.

All of us have an addiction to something. It could be a mysterious need to update our Facebook page everyday, reading comics, playing games or drinking coffee. Satisfying our addiction emerges us in a familiar, comfortable world where we can relax and take our mind off other worries. Having an addiction to these things is not inherently harmful.

The important thing is not to let our addiction consume our lives. Through discipline and moderation, we are able to afford these diversions while still maintaining a healthy, socially active and financial stable lifestyle. Such actions, going against the grain of our weaker selves, are what seperate us from what society calls the ‘addicts’. Instead, we get to call our addictions ‘likes’ and ‘hobbies’.

Note: This article is not intended to encourage the use of illegal drugs in any way. Heroin, cocaine and their like will destroy your body whether you master your addiction or not.

Donnie Yen recently found himself being ground against hot coals for his comments during an interview about his latest movie, Ip Man 2. The movie is based loosely on the life of legendary martial artist Ip Man, who practiced the art of Wing Chun.

According to XinMSN Entertainment, Mr Yen said, “I feel Ip Man‘s success had nothing to do with Wing Chun. If I had fought in Hung Kuen, Hung Kuen would be popular. Summer, autumn or winter (joking about the ‘Chun’ in Wing Chun’s Chinese name, which literally means spring), the result would have been the same.”

Everyone from Grandmaster Ip Chun, eldest son of the the title character, to co-star Sammo Hung has responded with hostility, accusing Mr. Yen of arrogance.

Personally, I think the whole issue is overblown. No actor in his right mind would disrespect the martial art displayed in a movie he starred in. If Mr. Yen, who is an accomplished martial artist himself and experienced in the behavior expected of people such as himself, was trying to elevate his own importance over that of martial arts in the movie, then one should worry more about his mental health rather than mere narcissism.

When Mr. Yen’s words are viewed dispassionately, an alternative interpretation easily presents itself. He was saying that Wing Chun could have been replaced by any martial art and the movie would still have been popular. The assertion then becomes that the key to Ip Man’s success lies not in the specific school of martial arts chosen, but in the traditional pillars of a good movie; plot, pacing, acting, set design and other such factors.

Whether such an assertion is true is debatable. One of Ip Man’s selling points was that it was based on a real life legendary figure in martial arts. Ip Man taught Wing Chun; taking away the martial art would necessitate a retooling of the story and marketing strategy. It is possible but by no means certain that under similar circumstances, the same film production team and cast could have produced an equally successful movie with a similar storyline about a Tai Chi or Long Fist master.

What is highly likely however, is that Mr. Yen would not torpedo his career with such the faux pas as it has been reported in the news. It would be best to let the matter drop. Aside from the issue of false accusation, Mr. Yen has plenty of good movies left in him. It would be a tremendous waste if his career was sunk by this episode.

Several hundred years in the future, Earth has become a wasteland due to humanity’s abuse of the environment. A commercial company is now extracting an extremely valuable mineral amusingly known as unobtainium from the alien world of Pandora, home to alien tribes known as the Na’vi. The corporation’s callous profit-centered mining policies cause significant damage to the lush wilderness of  the planet, bringing it into conflict with the aliens who revere every tree and animal as sacred.

Beneath its state of the art film technology, gorgeous visuals and brilliantly choreographed sequences, it raises deep and powerful messages on some issues we  face in the present and may face in the future.

Corporatism vs Environmentalism

Perhaps the most obvious theme in Avatar is that of environmentalism. Lush, fantastic forests dominate the world of Pandora. They capture the imagination and show viewers a glorious world full of life and fantastic things to discover. The human cooperation has little respect for this ecological wonder.. This attitude sees them devastate vast tracts of vegetation for the sake of expedience, leaving little but death and wastelands in their wake.

In this there is real meaning. Corporations exploiting natural resources have long held little regard for the environment beyond an excessively bad PR image hurting their bottom line. Gold mining companies allow poisons to seep into the ground they mine, rendering vast tracts of land incapable of supporting life and often ruining water sources. Oil companies have created vast oil slicks and damaged coastal waters through callous approaches to safety and environmental protection.  Prince William Sound is still feeling the effects of the famous Exxon Valdez oil spill, Bhopal still reeling from the leaking of poison gas at the Union Carbide chemical plant.

Yet we should remember that nature is often not all that it is cracked up to be. For all its beauty and glory, nature is not a clean thing. Though the various parts of an ecological system might benefit one another overall, nothing so noble takes place on an individual level. Avatar more than shows how savage and dangerous the wild can be, but it fails to show its drudgery. The disease, the infections, the starvation, the non-existent hygiene. Humanity did not progress past its tribal roots for nothing. Nature does not provide us with what we need. It is through our will and industry that we take what we need from nature. Nature tries to do the same thing, they’re just not as good at it.

 Aliens and Human Rights

In Avatar, the native Na’Vi are often referred to as ‘savages’ by the humans. They are regarded as fairly intelligent animals rather than sentient creatures whose lives are worth as much as humans. Thus, the humans have few qualms about driving them from their homes when convenient and slaughtering them when they try to defend it. While this is obviously an allegory for how western colonials treated natives in the past, it also directly raises the question of how we decide what the lives of other species are worth as well as how we should apply this judgement should we colonise an alien world.

We kill chickens, cows, deer, fish, kangaroos and countless other animals everyday with little regret. We keep them in captivity, drain them of milk and steal their honey. They are a means to an end: satisfying our tastebuds and sustaining our bodies. Surely, if we truly wanted, most of us could switch to a vegan diet, abstaining from killing our fellow not just living but thinking creatures. Yet we do not, for we do not believe them worthy of the same rights and protections afforded to us. We exterminate ‘pests’ and drive animals from their homes to access resources for the same reasons. I agree that this is acceptable conduct so long as it is done in a manner the overall environment can sustain.

Yet in much of the world also lies the sentiment that killing dolphins and whales is wrong. Eating dog meat has become rarer. Why this distinction between these species and the rest of the animal kingdom? The answer lies in what we deem as their level of intelligence. We have decided that these animals do not do us much harm and in some cases actually help us. We are impressed by their grace, power or cuteness. Thus, we extend to them extra protections and benefits not afforded to lesser species and are outraged when Japan kills dolphins like we do fish. I too, agree that dolphins and whales are close to our level of intelligence and should be treated differently.

Yet how should we make these distinctions in worthiness of respect when we encounter new species? It would be easy to respect aliens with advanced technology, visiting our planet in flying saucers. What if we encountered primitive aliens? Their scientific value aside, how would we decide if they should be treated like wild-life or a foreign civilization? How developed would they have to be for us respect their rights as native owners of the territory instead of wild life?

Within this context, the Wall Street Journal’s discovery that Iraqi Insurgents had managed to hack into U.S. drones comes as a particular shock. The U.S. air force employs remote controlled drones known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) capable of sending video intelligence back to military command centres and destroying enemy targets with missiles.

Using nothing more than a portable satellite dish, modem and a $26 satellite internet program known as Skygrabber easily available over the internet, the insurgents were able to capture and view the drone’s visual transmissions; they could spy on what the drone, and hence the U.S. military, was seeing. This was possible because the transmissions sent out by these flying drones are unencrypted.

Encryption is essentially a form of digital encoding that prevents unauthorised access and is already used in many military and public service communication tools, such as police radios. Without this, a single enterprising insurgent with some cheap, easily available equipment and the right location would find it no harder to access the military drone’s video feed than the internet at your local Starbucks.

While the general public might only be starting to know about this now, the issue itself is not new. The system was designed in the 1990s and encryption was consciously not used as it was in its infant stages at the time. According to Declan McCullagh of CBS News, the video feed was hacked into on at least 2 documented occasions: in 2002 when a British engineer accidentally accessed footage of the Kosovo war and at an unknown time when Iraqi officials under Saddam’s regime were shown real-time footage of U.S. bases in Kuwait, Qatar and Turkey.

The U.S. military chose not to do anything about the problem because upgrading the system to allow for encryption would have been expensive. It should be noted however that this is coming from the same military that bought a fleet of B-2 stealth bombers worth $2 billion each and developed the costly F-22 air superiority fighter at a time when its existing jets made it easily unmatched in that role.

Military officials said that only the video aspect of the UAV was hacked into during this incident. Control of the drone was never disrupted nor were its weapons systems compromised.

Personal Comments:

This is one of those things I think people assumed was taken care of. Issues can sometimes seem so blatantly obvious that the thought is quickly put to rest under the assumption that surely nobody could be stupid enough to not have taken care of it with some tech that you already know of. Surely if you’re going to build a remote controlled military vehicle you would want to prevent the link between the vehicle and the controller from being hacked into right? Apparently not.

The reason for the lack of an upgrade till now seems to me to not be just about cost, but also politics. Encryption is hardly a flashy thing to invest in. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make an upgrade that would likely remain unheralded would hardly seem appealing when compared to all the other demands for funds in the American military. Of course, such political decisions can often backfire later on, this incident being just one of a long history of such cases.

However, the likelihood of this hacking vulnerability encompassing more than the video transmissions is very slim. While the video function requires the broadcast of a continuous stream of data from the drone, actually affecting its actions would require hackers to somehow disrupt or override the UAV’s existing link with the control centre. Very specific commands would need to be transmitted to the UAV to control it. Such equipment would be very expensive, almost impossible to procure and difficult for untrained users.