Web Attacks and the ASCII Files

Introduction

One of the fields of the new technologies where a myriad disciplines converge is multimedia, whether from the technological point of view “union of media” and from the communicational point of view “intersection of media” (Cipolla-Ficarra, et al., 2010). The other one is the human-computer intersection. In both cases the focus is the user, who through a computer or another last generation interactive communication media such as can be a Tablet PC, a multimedia mobile phone, etc., gets wired to the net to come into play with other users. In the generation of those products and/or services we can see several well differentiated groups, for instance, those who design new products and/or services (a small elite), users who buy those goods and services (including the small elite who designs them), and also those users who are excluded from that consumption by the digital divide. This constant inclusion and exclusion of people or users from the latest breakthroughs of the new technologies generate conflicts, from the design stage to the access to the online information.

Now part of those conflicts stem from the scarce professionalism of the members of the former elitist group, belonging to the university teaching, software engineering, computer science and systems engineering, architecture and telecommunications, audiovisual and the fine arts, etc. They have joined the ranks of an exponential marketing which runs contrary to the principles that rule the sciences. Directly or indirectly, they have destroyed the multimedia term, in Spain, since the democratization of the internet in the 90s, for instance. In that same country, in the first decade of the new millennium, they have also underrated or trivialized the term human-computer interaction, out of simple commercial reasons. An analogous reality not only in other countries of Southern Europe, but also in many other places in the north of Europe, where currently it is impossible to draw the boundaries between private business and public university research, for instance, when it comes to transfer of knowledge and technologies.

The scarce professionalism of the members of the ICT (Information and Communications Technology) who constantly devote themselves to the attack inside the scientific environment can be glimpsed in certain negative patterns of behavior, such as (alphabetical order):

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  Cloning of alien experiences and trainings, especially of those ICTs professionals who are the target of the attacks.

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  Copy and glue the syllabuses from other universities.

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  Establishing access control mechanisms to the websites, in a explicit or implicit way, where they publicize continuous training courses, masters, workshops, conferences, etc. with high costs but low quality and work prospects practically equal to zero. For instance, the mechanism where are controlled the seconds of connection to a website.

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  Making up destruction fraternities against all those who stand for the fundamental principles which rule the formal and factual sciences.

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  Persecuting the real ICT professionals for decades, copying their activities, research results, meddling and destroying their work team, slandering and smearing them privately and publicly.

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  Underrating or trivializing the knowledge and/or experience of those scientists who are daily attacked.

These are some of the negative patterns of behavior that have been detected in Southern Europe, for a quarter of a century and which the interested reader can widen in the following bibliographical references (Cipolla-Ficarra, et al., 2011; Cipolla-Ficarra, & Kratky, 2011; Cipolla-Ficarra, Ficarra, & Cipolla-Ficarra, 2011).