This is not the average blog post on Blogsessive and it’s not going to become a habit approaching such matters. Ramblings are not what I love doing. This is merely a way to express my concerns about online discrimination. My thoughts about certain things that many people take for granted while other wish they could do or have.
Ever since I started in the online business I had to face certain fears and concerns that the international public had about eastern european people, people coming from the ex-soviet block. More specific, we Romanians have been seen in every movie or TV news as orphans, beggars, gypsies and fortune tellers. Believe me, that stamp is quite hard to fight sometimes.
When the internet era came along, we had to fight one more prejudice: the Romanian hacker. It would be hypocritical of me not to admit that we had (have) our share of “hackers” and lowlifes trying to scheme other honest people in the online environment. But are we all hackers? Are we all gypsies? Beggars? Orphans? NO!
Is every Arab a terrorist? Is every black man a drug dealing gang-banger? Some people can’t help thinking that they could be.
That’s prejudiced. And prejudice leads to mass discrimination.
You might wonder where did this blog post came from? What does it have to do with Blogsessive?
In just about a couple of weeks, Blogsessive is going celebrate its one year anniversary and I with it, along with you all. And since SitePoint have such an amazing offer, I’ve decided two take the offer for 2 reasons:
- 100% of the sales go to the Victorian Bushfire Assistance Fund;
- I wanted to offer the books as gifts here with the 1 year anniversary.
But wait a second. I cannot buy them. I’m from Romania. My credit card smells of hacking intentions and my PayPal account uses fake virtual money. My question to you dear folks is: If PayPal trusted us to do business, isn’t it discriminatory to think otherwise?
I know the answer. Freedom of choice. You choose to do business with whomever you want. Still, that doesn’t help me feeling a bit frustrated, feeling helpless being considered a thief without ever being charged of anything. Can’t help feeling sad for putting the best I can here on Blogsessive and never asking for anything in return and being denied the right to buy a PDF book.
And their service is not the only one with this kind of country based judgment. There are hundreds more services that we would love to join, use, contribute to, but we can’t.
Yes! We Romanians have hackers among us. Germans have them too. British, French, Indian, Chinese Americans, they all have them. But you choose your battles carefully.
Well my friends, the battles should not be carried with a nation, any nation for that matter. The battles should be carrier with your own security systems and the security of the services you use.
Bad will and skills to do bad things can be found in any place of the globe, and if your service or the services you used are not prepared for “Romanian hackers”, why would they be against anyone else?
Meanwhile, I can deal without that PDF book, and I’m still proud of being Romanian for at least one thousand reasons from past history to present. And I’m still thankful that this blog gave me the chance to meet so many wonderful people from allover the world – YOU!
My apologies to those looking for another “blog tips” post. The one that should have went public is still in the drafts, almost finished, as I really needed to take this of my chest, hoping that you the one who reads this will see things a little bit more different from now on.
Stay safe, helpful, open-minded and blog on!
PS: If you have any thoughts on the topic of discrimination – any kind of it – would love to read them in the comments section or in a blog post on your own blog.