Hijacking the heart

The day after tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. In commercial establishments, signs have begun to proliferate where everyone is being exhorted to participate in the celebration of love. Hearts are all over malls and shopping places. Is the heart really the human organ that is the repository of the wonderful feeling that love evokes? Isn’t it the mind that dictates to the heart, or is it the other way around?

A friend told me just the other day as we were leaving a restaurant and saw a lot of hearts on display in the stores that the heart often knows things before the mind does, and that to love is to admire with the heart and to admire is to love with the mind. I asked him, because I was getting confused with this play of words, whether it was the heart that thinks and the mind that feels. Or is this an interchangeable situation?

Whatever it is, I’ve always liked the word "love." I firmly subscribe to the statement of Victor Hugo that "The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved." Even stronger support comes from my favorite poet, Robert Browning, who said: "Take away love and our earth is a tomb."

One of the most enjoyable films I’ve seen is You’ve Got Mail starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks who discovered each other via the Internet. They did not know each other at all, but eventually fell in love through the Internet, met each other in person, and fell more helplessly in love.

I also remember having read a love story in a Boston newspaper about five years ago, which narrated the story of a couple and how they discovered each other on the Internet and how, after about a thousand exchanges of e-mail, the words that finally won the heart of the female, who was then a professor at Boston College, were use by the guy in his e-mail: "I’d like to hijack your heart… may I?" The guy was an engineering professor in Maryland.

The lady professor e-mailed back: "Come hijack me and be my love." Borrowing the slant of Christopher Marlowe’s "Come live with me and be my love," he won the heart of his woman. The Boston paper reported that it turned out to be a match made in heaven.

"Hijack," to me, sounds unromantic and too strong a word to use in connection with all the gentleness that love provokes. "To hijack," the Webster dictionary tells us after all, is "to steal especially by stopping a vehicle on the highway, or to commandeer a flying airplane." And, hijacking is a crime, as Internet hijacking could be a crime. This, by the way, is my subject matter today.

Internet hijacking, sometime called cyberjacking is, by the way, different things to different people. In one instance, it is an electronic reconnaissance program. In another instance, Internet hijacking is the unauthorized use of another’s e-mail system. To another, it is the theft of information using the Internet.

The unauthorized use of trademarks on the Internet and/or domain names has been called Internet hijacking. Taking control of the entire Internet has been called cyberjacking. It should be noted that, in some instances, Internet hijacking is lawful, as when legal consent is given.

A program that was called RingZero, and which allegedly has a file name of Ringo.vxd, hijacks an Internet access computer. It then forces the hijacked computer to systematically send search signals through the Internet requesting a particular type of computer. To be specific, RingZero is designed to automatically search the Internet for proxy servers, which are computers that operate as secondary sources or substitutes, for high-traffic Internet sites. It is well known that unscrupulous people have used RingZero to find proxy servers to hide their e-identity.

Cyberjacking of remote computers was also evident when a boy from Massachusetts pleaded guilty to hijacking a Bell Atlantic computer system and shutting down the Worcester Airport’s communication system for six hours. My friend Dr. Josie Bunuan teaches in Worcester and gave me details of what had transpired. The boy was given a two-year suspended sentence, fined, and required to do community service.

By the way, each time an Internet access computer is used, it continues to perform its electronic reconnaissance. The use of another’s property in this manner is unlawful. A criminal and civil action can be instituted against the cyberjacker.

In the United States, the Kansas City Star’s e-mail system was hijacked in 1999, and forced to send out junk e-mail bearing the newspaper’s Internet address and pitching a diet supplement. This transaction resulted in a theft of services. Another more recent example was the hijacking of the sites of Amazon.com and CCN.com, which resulted in denial of services to users everywhere including the Philippines for many hours.

The hijacking of Internet information is yet another form of cyberjacking. With such hacking instruments as proxy servers, Internet communications can be intercepted and e-information may be unlawfully diverted, copied, altered and/or destroyed.

In the same vein, the Internet has been used to hijack unsuspecting investors’ financial transaction communications. This could be violative of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) rules and statutes all over the e-world.

In 1998, the unauthorized use of trademarks on the Internet and/or domain names was called Internet hijacking. A US court ruled that a party had violated the trademark rights of a religious group called "Jews for Jesus," by operating an Internet web site with a domain name that was confusingly similar to the group’s name and federal trademarks. The Internet website consisted of a one-page plea for wavering Jews to return to Judaism, and was named www.jewsforJesus.com.

Given all of the above, although in most instances Internet hijacking is unlawful, it is important to determine if the alleged misuse was lawfully authorized. That seems to be the cyber law for the moment.

Certainly, heartjacking and cyberjacking are at opposite ends. And I have decided not to sort out the confusion between the heart and the mind. I have just decided to believe what one wise man said: that the good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

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