In 1820, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, a textile manufacturer in France, produced the loom. This device allowed the repetition of a series of steps in the weaving of special fabrics. This resulted in a fear amongst Jacquard's employees that their traditional employment and livelihood were being threatened. They committed acts of sabotage to discourage Jacquard from further use of the new technology. This is the first recorded cyber crime!
Today, computers have come a long way with neural networks and nanocomputing promising to turn every atom in a glass of water into a computer capable of performing a billion operations per second. In a day and age when everything from microwave ovens and refrigerators to nuclear power plants are being run on computers, cyber crime has assumed rather sinister implications. Cyber crime can involve criminal activities that are traditional in nature, such as theft, fraud, forgery, defamation and mischief. The abuse of computers has also given birth to a gamut of new age crimes such as hacking, web defacement, cyber stalking, web jacking etc. A simple yet sturdy definition of cyber crime would be: “unlawful acts wherein the computer is either a tool or a target or both”.The term computer used in this definition does not only mean the conventional desktop or laptop computer. It includes Personal Digital Assistants (PDA), cell phones, sophisticated watches, cars and a host of gadgets.
Source:http://www.asianlaws.org/
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