Amrit Ahluwalia

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Wiki Article #1: Simulating Detroit, A City with Cars & Crime, but No Races

Game Summary

Micropolis was the reporoduction of the first version of Sim City. Sim City is a game in which you are given a city entering a crisis situation. Your objective is to avert the crisis and make your city a success. Micropolis was the open source game given by EA as part of the One Laptop One Child Program. Most coding languages can now code Micropolis. Micropolis was popular because it allowed people to be positioned in a place of power to revert the success of a city. This game used real historical situations as well. The most relatable being Detroit in 1972. I think the relatability of these situations were what made Micropolis a popular game.

Article Summary

Author Mark Sample lays out an interesting argument in his article: why is race not portrayed as factor in Micropolis. Historically, race was the main factor that lead to the riots in Detroit in 1972. The game links the riots directly to the decline of the automobile industry rather than race. Mr. Sample does highlight that Detroit is known for automobiles and the auto industry was in decline in 1972. Detroit's economy was directly linked to the auto industry in 1972, and the decline of the auto industry led to plummeting land values, increasing crime rate, and increasing unemployment. In 1967, Detroit had riots that destroyed the city. The riots were linked to a mismanagement by Michigan Governor George Romeny of the Black Power Movement; this led to racial tension in Detroit for years to come. This is where the problem in Micropolis stems. There is no factor that takes race into account for the handling of Detroit in the game. Race was probably the biggest factor that led to the detriment of Detroit. The game gave you 10 years to reduce crime and this was mostly done through the handling of the auto industry. Race had no impact on your success. Sample highlights that there should have been some sort of algorithim that would take into account race as a factor in the success of handling the success of Detroit. The main argument that Mr.Sample was setting up was that race had a huge impact in the failure of Detroit in 1972 and that Micropolis not factoring that into the game was a huge misrepresentation and maybe even a problem that needs to be corrected. I think that this problem could be corrected by somebody as the game is left as open source currently.


Social, Political, and Cultural Importance

Mark Sample tries his best to highlight how important race was in the demise of Detroit in 1967-1972. This game was being given out for free as part of the One Laptop One Child program. Sample believed that it was important to highlight what really occurred in Detroit in 1967-1972 into the handling of the Micropolis situation that portrayed Detroit. As I highlighted earlier, race was the biggest reason for Detroit falling apart and the fact that it is not even a factor in the game is a huge misrepresentation. The auto industry is valued very highly, and Sample believes that it should be. The auto industry did directly coincide with the demise of Detroit; as it began declining, so did Detroit. To have the auto industry not only being valued higher than race and being practically the only factor in how Detroit does is a complete abhorration. Sample seems to be irritated by this lack of social and cultural accuracy and has written this article to combat what the creator of Micropolis has as the Detroit situation.

Debate

I agree and disagree with Mark Sample. I agree that leaving race out of the equation in the success of Detroit in Micropolis is misrepresentation and a problem; but I also have to highlight that this game would be rediculous to make if the creator had to take into account EVERY possible factor that should be included into the success of Detroit. I feel that for game purposes, the auto industry is something easy to understand and connect with and an easier factor to control than race is. By adding in race, this could open the floodgates on other factors that other people think are just as important as race and the auto industry. I think that you cannot satisfy everyone, so this is a fine portrayal of Detroit in 1972 for video game purposes. One comment highlighted that in the 20th century race=crime. It was the easiest way to portray race as a factor and therefore race was practically represented in the game. I disagree with this comment, because there are factors within separate races that will lead to separate successes and failures of a society. I think there was no real debate, but more a Q & A session as people try to figure out how to represent race the best in the game. Seeing the discussion makes me realize why the creator did not include race as a factor in the game.

Works Cited:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_(1989_video_game)#Micropolis

Wiki Article #2

Defining SOPA,PIPA, and Anonymous

Most people can admit that they have heard of SOPA, PIPA, and Anonymous; but most don't know what these really are.SOPA stands for "Stop Online Piracy Act." SOPA was an act proposed to Congress that aims to crack down on copyright infringement by cutting access to sites that hosted pirated content. SOPA mainly targets foreign websites. The problem that arises is that since the websites are foreign, America cannot take them down. What America tries to do however, is to flag these sites so that payment sites cannot process payments to them and so that search engines cannot return these rogue sites as results. SOPA's biggest weakness comes in how they distinguish between foreign and domestic sites. They say that any site that uses ".com" ".us" or ".org" type names that are registered in the United States are domestic, while all other end domains are foreign. This is bad because domestic sites like bit.ly are considered foreign and foreign sites like piratebay.org are considered domestic. Powers given by SOPA are given to the Attorney General. Under SOPA, the Attorney General must state that a US site is committing a crime and then he can obtain a court order to seize the site. PIPA is the Protect IP Act. This act practically serves the same purpose as SOPA. What PIPA does is grant the Attorney General further expanded powers. Now the Attorney General does not need to specify if the site is domestic or foreign; all he must do is say that the site is facilitating in distributing counterfeit products or copyright infringement OR the site is designed to facilitate copyright infringement. This is then enough to obtain a court order against the website. Anonymous is a political activist hacker group. Anonymous is a group of skilled hackers that act like the modern day Robin Hood. A good example of this is when a produce salesman in Tunisia had his cart taken away for no reason. The produce salesman saw that he had no other way to provide for his family and lit himself on fire in the middle of the street in protest. The Tunisia government stopped news of this from getting out and around so that the dictator would not look bad. Somehow the news did come across a member of Anonymous. This member gathered up Anonymous and together they hacked their way past the Tunisian Government screens and enabled normal citizens of Tunisia to spread the news of the atrocities they were facing in their country. This is only one example of how Anonymous acts and what they do. They act to protect the people, in their beliefs. They have proven through acts of their subsidiary Lulzsec that they do not fear anyone, not even the government.

Hacker Groups & Movements to Protect Online Privacy

I feel that the movements by people to protect against invasion of their internet privacy is really geared against the government. What hackers are to the movement are the people's army. Hackers, like Anonymous give people a true voice and force against the government. When the government tries to invade privacies by forcing companies like Facebook to provide them information, it takes a hacker group like Anonymous to send a proper message to the government that what they are doing is wrong.

Snowden

Edward Snowden is very relevant to the readings we were assigned. What Edward Snowden did was hack and steal documents from the NSA and distribute them to journalists. This was a very Anonymous style move. I spoke of what Anonymous did in Tunisia and this is very similar to what Snowden did to the NSA. Snowden found what he thought were injustices against the American people and let the world know, so that justice could take place. Snowden views his actions as patriotic and this is viewed as a controversy. What Snowden has really raised is a question of transparency that Americans believe that the government should have with them. The programs and documents that Snowden uncovered were data mining programs used by the government to track people. The data was mined from phone and email providers without user knowledge. So is it wrong that Snowden brought it to the average American's knowledge? Just like in SOPA and PIPA the government cannot touch Snowden now, because he has asylum in Moscow. So, they did the SOPA equivalent and cut his passport back to the United States. In SOPA they cut illegal sites funding and presence in American search engines.

Works Cited

http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/edward-snowden-interview http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/17/technology/sopa_explained/ http://www.redditblog.com/2012/01/technical-examination-of-sopa-and.html