I’ll be perfectly frank. I love MIT. It’s like entering geek/nerd paradise where you’re pretty much guaranteed to be on the cutting edge of cool new technological innovations. If you’ve ever visited the campus, you’ve probably heard the stories of MIT’s legendary hacks (”clever, benign, and ‘ethical’ prank or practical joke”) such as playing tetris on the side of a building or turning the big dome on campus into R2-D2. So far we’ve got cool, geeky innovations and extremely cool pranks and practical jokes… nerd style! It sounds like a blast to me, too. 
Well, MIT has recently made the news for adding some new features to their wireless network that tracks the location of users on campus. The concept is really cool, but it’s also what I’ll term a “lazy innovation”. Essentially, it’s now possible to find out how many people are currently logged onto the network at any point on campus. Are you too lazy to see if the library is packed? Being that no good nerd goes anywhere without his or her laptop, you can check online to see how many people are in the library rather than walking there yourself. In fact, you can even find out specific information about who is logged on in a particular location if the user has opted to give that information. Yep, cyber-stalking just got a whole lot easier. 
Okay, so privacy is a small issue. Afterall, you wouldn’t want anyone to know that you were the one who stunk up the public restroom after a rather heavy serving of Mexican food. That’d just be plain embarassing! Oh well, I guess nothing’s perfect.
0 Responses to “Lazy Innovation”