Milestone VI: Chapter 17 October 16, 2006
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Snyder Chapter 17: Shh, It’s a Secret- Privacy and Digital Security
This chapter touched on the very delicate subject of privacy with computers, a subject we (the IT class) discuss frequently. To some, privacy has no place when it comes to technology, while others will blog you to death preaching about the Fourth Amendment. Snyder states that there are two real threats to privacy regarding IT; Governement and Business. And while our country has a long list of laws such as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, or the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, ecetera, ecetera, information technology breaks new ground in advancement everyday, so the laws hardly have the capacity to keep up with the change. Therefore, it becomes the private citizens of this great country to become aware of slick monitoring schemes and protect themselves and their private materials extracted from technology against the government or business’s prying eyes.
Snyder first makes it an obligation to inform the reader of devices like cookies and code breakers that monitoring services use to track a person’s every move on the computer. I personally thought before reading the chapter that cookies were something that helped you access information easier on the Web due to its ability of remembering your transactions. I was wrong however, and suprisingly found out that these cookies serve as a signaling mechanism to notify pop-ups and other annoying advertisements to appear on my computer that perhaps I might find interest in due to my recent searches online. Additionally, they also take up a significant portion of hard drive space on my computer, which may slow my connection speed down. As soon as I read this, I searched for the cookies on my laptop and erased all 588 of them. Needless to say, my computer runs a little faster than before, and I can now read online articles from my favorite newspapers without being interrupted by advertisements asking if I need new dentures.
Snyder also dives into the encryption process, which conceals personal information such as bank account statements, credit card numbers, medical records, and so forth from the public through a type of password. The process of encrypting is complicated, especially with the RSA system that uses the product of two prime numbers to develop a public and private key to the information. However, the important and fascinating thing about encryption that I discovered while reading the chapter is that even with all this complex procedure, there still are ways for the governement or business to bypass the encryption in order to access the hidden information. These techniques include trapdoors and key escrow, which are supposed to be last resorts for both parties to reach information concealed in emergency situations. Still, the concept remains that monitoring of private information can be done with programs that are meant to keep such things as observance out.
The main theme that I concluded with this chapter is that although we have the abilities to protect ourselves against surveillance, there are always way around these firewalls we stage against business and government. Cookies will always return onto my computer after I visit a few sites on the Web, and although I keep erasing them, they will continue to register my personal information with several servers. Moreover, I may take the time to encrypt some information I want to keep from the public (I really don’t have anything to hide though), and yet the government or my employer has the ability to access that information anyways through loopholes in the system. I have discovered through this chapter that we may be capable of protecting our privacy to the extent of it being temporary, but in the long run, there are breakdowns in the processes we take to guard ourselves that make us vunerable to government and business. Therefore, I ask myself, is it really worth trying to protect our privacy when we know it will never truely be protected in the way we want it to?
“I did not have sexually explicit im conversations with that woman.” October 7, 2006
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Ohhhh yes you did Mr. Congressman. If you haven’t heard already, this past week former Florida Republican Mark Foley resigned from Capitol Hill due to the leak of printed instant messaging conversations he had with a (I’m sure very attractive) subordinate. Although AOL instant messaging is a quick, rapid-fire way to converse with others over the internet, it now is subject to monitoring and logging by employers and governmental agencies that, well, for one, can obviously ruin a political career.
Not too long ago we, the Information Technology class, had a nice nonviolent debate about the Fourth Amendment and the line it draws (or does not draw) between privacy and today’s technology. Written recently by Amol Sharma and Jessica E. Vascellaro in The Wall Street Journal, this article discusses the observance of instant messaging in the employment sector, and what is being done to help employers keep tabs on employee conversations through im. According to the article, a survey done by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute found that “more than a third of employees use instant-messaging services at work, but only 31 percent of organizations have policies in place that specifically restrict the use of IM.” The issue before instant messaging was the abuse of email in the workplace, and already 26 percent of companies have fired employees due to misuse. But employers are slow to catch on to instant messaging monitoring, because only 13 percent of companies have the ability of log IM conversations. So, some instant-messaging services are offering tools and software to businesses to track IMs in the office. “AIM Pro, a new free version of AIM for businesses and individual at-work users, is, by default, set to archive conversations on a local hard drive for 14 days. WebEx AIM Pro Business Edition, will store all of a company’s IM conversations on servers hosted at WebEx and can block messages that contain certain keywords from being sent at all.” Even Microsoft is getting in on the action. The Microsoft Live Communications server allow companies to log and search through employee’s im conversations even if they are from Yahoo or AOL.
On top of establishing firm-wide policies that make employees aware of monitoring of emails and now instant messaging, businesses are willing to go as far as increasing their 2.5 billion dollar budgets to 3.3 billion by 2009 to incorporate the purchase of tracking software for instant messaging. They should increase their budget by that must because these available monitoring devices don’t run cheap. “One appliance, offered by San Diego-based Akonix Systems Inc., tracks the traffic that goes through a company’s firewall, scans it and logs it for compliance and liability issues at a starting cost of around $5,000 plus $20 to $70 per employee.” Ouch.
I’m sorry folks, but I’m going to have to reiterate my position I established earlier in the discussion we had. If you are not abusing the communication devices you are privledged to have at the workplace, you have nothing to hide. I’m telling you, if Congressman Foley was doing what he was supposed to be doing at work, which is representing the state of Florida and not hitting on his staff through im, maybe, just maybe, we would have a little more respect and faith in politicians to do their jobs. Perhaps that is a bit of a stretch, but the theme holds true. Government agencies and employers would not have to go out of their way to purchase and enforce monitoring devices for instant messaging and emails if they had trust in their employees not to misuse them. But people like Mr. Foley and all the other employees that have been caught abusing emails and ims have set the tone for the rest of us. We are forced to be monitored because some people cannot wait to conduct their personal business at home. Therefore, we must sacrifice our privacy in order for businesses to verify that we are being productive and not overly social, or adulterous, for that matter.
Milestone V:Searching for Guinea Pig B October 1, 2006
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Snyder Chapter 6: Case Study in Online Research
This chapter provides a relevant lesson in researching on the web through a case study. Snyder takes us through the process of finding information about Richard Buckminster Fuller, or RBF, and illustrates the various kinds of materials that we can come up with by either investigating primary or secondary sources. What’s interesting about these findings that the chapter reveals is that even though we are researching one person, the information provided varies with each source. None are exactly the same, and some are controversial with data given. For example, when discovering how many patents the RBF obtained, one biographical site said 2000, while another stated 25.
You can also see the difference between primary and secondary resources that relate to RBF. With primary, the information reveals more of his personal characteristics, thoughts, ideas, and some even include quotes or actual conversations.These sources may come from personal friends, relatives, or others that have personally encountered the subject of research. Secondary sources seem to only include basic information such as date of birth, marriages, acedemic history, and lifetime achievements. These types of legitimate sources are rooted in the information provided by scholars, biographers, and experts that may of not had personal contact with the subject but have extensively studied the subject.
I noticed though that both secondary and primary resources are needed though to complete the entire picture of whoever or whatever is being researched. Each make up for what the other lacks in information. I also noticed that it is the secondary sources that are controversial in information, which makes me come to the conclusion that secondary resources are more likely to be wrong than primary resources.
This chapter, like the last chapter, serves as another valuable resource in teaching developing IT masters like myself about obtaining information from the web and what can be expected from these sources. Primary and secondary are certainly good to distinquish when researching, or just, as the chapter stated, “serving our curiosity.”
The New Age of War has Arrived… October 1, 2006
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South Korea (Thank God this is not North Korea) has recently released their newest form of border control; a robot.
The robot “can fire a machine gun or rubber bullets and sound an alarm when it detects suspicious movement, could dramatically improve surveillance capability. It also can distinguish people from moving objects such as a vehicles from up to 1.2 miles away in the daytime, half that distance at night, and can identify an enemy up to 30 feet away through a password.”
This new technology is HUGE. South Korea made a statement that the robot, at this point of time, is specifically used for supressing intruders along the border between North and South Korea. But the South Korean army is currently enhancing the robot to create military robots that can be used to patrol or even engage in full combat.
With this high-tech mechanical soldier, the 650,000 South Korean army can actually stand a chance against the 1.1 million North Korean military if by chance the North decides to become hostile.
Good news: With a robot like this, human casualties can be dramatically reduced and the value on a human life will no longer have to be a consideration when engaging in warfare.
Bad news: This may be the gateway to the new, high-tech wars that every country is itching to test their highly developed nuclear weapons in. One of the major factors in considering nuclear weapon usage is the devastation it will wreak on human life, especially those involved militarily. But with this robot, humans are out of the immediate equation, and blowing up a massive amount of robots is alot easier on the conscious than blowing up a massive amount of humans. The problem is, are these robots erasing the line that is drawn as to how far to take a war? Will these robots only instigate bigger and badder weapons to be built to now destroy not only humans but robots as well? The main question that this robot article provokes however, is are we going to get in over our heads by inventing new technology to fight our wars and forget that human life, although in the backdrop, is still in the balance to reap the consequences of combat? Robots may in fact lessen the lives at risk during military engagment, but it seems that this new tool in warfare may only increase the length and intensity of wars, which leads to no winners in the end.
Milestone IV: Searching the Web for Truth September 23, 2006
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Snyder Chapter 5: Searching the Web for Truth.
I found this chapter extremely helpful. I remember numerous occasions where I would be searching for some valuable information on the net, and when I reached the results page, I would get 50,000 hits and not one of them were relevant to me. I very much appreciated the 5 tips for an efficient search on page 144, because I feel that I am primarily responsible for what I make the crawlers and the query processors capture. Usually, if I were to search, say, basket weaving in college, I would load a search engine and type “basket weaving in college.” But after reading the chapter, this type of wording would not allow me to obtain the adequate results I would want, since the search engine would display all web pages that have the words basket, weaving, and college in their information. I would end up with a countless number of pages to look through, and half of them would have nothing to do with basket weaving in college because the search engine would treat this phrase as three separate and independent words.
Instead, I should use logical operators, such as AND and OR and apply them as infix operators that sit inbetween the phrase I typed in. For example, to search for basket weaving in college, I would type (basket AND weaving) AND college in the search window. Say if I just wanted to learn how to basket weave, I can exclude words by including in the search. For instance, I would type basket AND Weaving AND NOT college. Using infix operators are a new thing to me. I was niave enough to think that just typing what I wanted in a phrase would give me the results I wanted. But now I see that in order to narrow down your search to the most relevant, you must adapt your phrase so that the search engine can find matching webpages that relate in the best of ways. I will definitely remember to use logical operators, as well as the the other four tips listed in the chapter to refine my searches and make it easier on myself to find the information I am searching for.
Skype, the new way to call around the world September 23, 2006
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This article from the Wall Street Journal (via Post Gazette) intriqued me. The article investigates the downloadable software Skype, which is a free way to call people over the internet. I’ve never heard of this so-called Skype before, so I did some research, and found a website that gave a video-like tutorial on the program. You can visit it at http://www.skype.com/. According to the article and the Skype webpage, you can download the software online, and then, right aftwerwards, make phone calls over the internet to those who also have Skype. The Wall Street Journal also includes the phones that you can now purchase to connect to Skpe on your computer. Before, you had to sit by your desktop or laptop and talk to the other person through a headset or a phone that attaches to the USB port. But now, there are cordless phones available that can access Skype through wireless networks. They can range in size between a regular flip phone to a apple mini-ipod. The best part about this program, it is as of now FREE! (if you are calling other people who have Skype. For those who do not, there’s a small fee, only a few cents a minute) Now, I ususally pay between 50 to 60 dollars a month for service on my phone. Yes, I get unlimited weekend and weeknight minutes, and it is free to call anyone in my network. But I was charged an activation fee to use my phone, I’m in a “you-will-never-escape-us” contract, and I pay a rediculous amout of taxes with each phone bill. But to be able to set up this program for free, use a wireless phone for free, and call around the world for free … we are talking about a great deal here. Imagine what Skype will do as far as competition is concerned with regular phone companies now that you can use a wireless phone to connect to the program on your computer. Once this internet calling starts to catch on, we are talking about a communication revolution in the way we contact people all over the world. Free service, no activation charges, no contracts, just you and your computer, talking to people around the globe.
Milestone III: HTML September 17, 2006
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Snyder Chapter 4: Marking it up with HTML
Wow. I was definitely overwhelmed when reading this chapter. Before covering all this jazz about tags and brackets and slashes, I was vaguely aware about what went on behind the scenes when typing non-HTML language. I’ve created a webpage or two in my day… when I was in third grade. I honestly have never had to experience using the basic HTML tags in my undergraduate career because I used this beautiful thing called Word or Web authorizing software that did it all for me. But after reading this chapter, I can see what I was missing out on. I can agree with Snyder as to why tags are important to recognize and apply, and what they are capable of doing. This type of format is basically a universal language that can be understood by any tech-wizard or an average 8th grader. It allows us to achieve the same results in a text-only webpage as with a program that automatically converts HTML.
Furthermore, HTML gives us another insight as to the raw functions of a computer and how it processes and interprets a tech-language to reflect a more understandable one. My goal? Becoming more fluent in HTML, so that once in a blue moon my computer and I can talk without an interpreter (HTML writing software). 
Government Not Prepared for Cyber-attacks! September 16, 2006
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The link http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06259/721858-96.stm brings us to a fabulous article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette that discusses the imperfect cybersecurity that the US Government is offering to its citizens. It recently underwent a three day $3 million-dollar simulated internet attack, performed by “activist groups, disgruntled employees-turned-hackers and bloggers,” that attempted to hack apart and dismantle the security systems. Although the Department of Homeland Security’s undersecretary George Foresman stated that the test was to strengthen the existent cybersecurity, the fake hackers did one helluva number on the department’s computers. “An internal agency document shows the simulated attacks bombed or otherwise infiltrated computer servers, crashing the Federal Aviation Administration’s control system, defacing newspaper Web sites and threatening power outages.” Moreover, the responders to these hackings (which stereotypically are the best of the best of the best of geeks) were sluggish in response communication and could not identify whether the simulated attacks were either isolated or part of a collaboration with other hackers.
This is just super. We got a simulated internet attack on the US Government, particularly on the Department of Homeland Security and its entire computer system by amateur hackers and the geek gods can’t stop the destruction. Well, on a positive note, at least we know this now, instead of later, when it’s just too late. And just think what the Government has on those hard drives; citizen social security numbers, addresses, financial records, governmental business, maps, corresponding letters, strategies, confidential plans, codes, … the list is infinite. Computers are a miraculous wonder when it comes to storing data and personal information. The Government is no exception to utilizing this tool with organizing the information it collects internally and externally. However, there is a huge problem with this usage by the Goverment . First, according to this article, the Government’s servers are just as vunerable as yours or mine when it comes to viruses, worms, and hackers. To be honest, shouldn’t their systems be better protected than the average citizen’s, knowing darn well that illegal access to the information their computers carry can create extraordinary chaos, just like it did with the simulated attempt? It just seems that, in this advanced day and age where sensitive data is now being stored on computers rather than on tangible documents, the Government would guarantee cybersecurity to ensure the information it holds for and withholds from the public is safe and sound from the bad guys who could use that data in much worse ways than the simulated hackers. In today’s world, our whole lives are now stored on computers. This article certainly opened my eyes by illustrating the fact that my life, stored on the Government’s system, is not safe as of yet. And that’s just down-right scary.
Milestone II: What the Digerati Know September 10, 2006
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Snyder Chapter 2: What the Digerati Know-Form Follows Function
For the most part, Snyder’s chapter 2 discusses the major functions of computer programs, including the locations of command buttons and what to do to select certain applications. Yet, in one section, it stops to take time to explain the principle “form follows function,” which means that most software on a computer have the same or similar functions and operations when solving a task. I’ll admit, this is something I vaguely knew, but never applied the knowledge. Sometimes I would recognize similar patterns in procedures when performing a function, but would continue the process as if I’ve never done it before. Or, perhaps I am so used to knowing what some interfaces or metaphors mean that I use for certain functions for several tasks that I do not acknowledge the fact that one application may be the same as other applications on a different software program.
Prime example: File; Save. I know that when I would like to save my work on Microsoft, I find File, and then scroll down the task bar to highlight save. Or, if I’m feeling ambitious and risky, I’ll hold down shift and then “S.” This process is the same on a Macintosh or any other word processing application like Perfect or Notepad. Although they are all different programs, the function of saving is the same.
Now that I recognize the fact that programs admittedly use similar functions as well experiencing this principle of “form follows function” firsthand through previous unacknowledged encounters, operating new versions of familiar software, performing familiar tasks on never before used software, and switching between one software and another to complete a function are just a few tasks I can perform by being aware of a general function and then applying it to all software.
Scammers move in on online video games September 10, 2006
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The following link, http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06253/719491-96.stm provides an article from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette that illustrates the lack of limited places where scammers can’t steal personal information from you. Chapter 12 in Snyder gives examples of scamming attempts through email to obtain personal passwords, addresses, phone numbers, and banking account numbers by distributing realistic “fake” emails that request personal information. Now, scammers are hitting the online games to capture this information from devoted members. Since most online games now include synchronous communication, or instantaneous and interactive talk, gamers can exchange friendly words while playing the games. But as advantageous as it may seem to be able to communicate directly with other game-mates to strategize, coordinate plans of attack or similar actions, or just BS, the ability to free-talk indroduces the high risk of personal information exchange.
Says Robert Garriott of NCsoft North America, “The single biggest mistake people make is, they meet people online, and once they start communicating, they slip up.”
Although gamers’ real names are concealed by fake fantasy names, “there’s nothing to prevent players from probing for personal information.”
Great. Another environment for scammers to steal property from you. I guess it’s not good enough now for online thieves to try to steal personal information through email. At least you have time to check out the attempt and actually see if its real or fake, since the communication is asynchronous. With instant chatting however, the scammers are actually talking to you, and slippage of private information is more likely since you probably don’t suspect the people you don’t know on the other end of the communication line to be malicious enough to use the information you have given them verbally. And even if you are cautious enough as an adult to not reveal passwords, credit card information, or other private information, what’s to say about adolescents not handing out that kind of information such as names and addresses since they don’t know any better? With online games including instant communication, scammers have stepped up their “game” to now directly interact with potential victims. Maybe it’s time for us to refer back to the wise-old saying that our mothers taught us, which was “Don’t Talk to Strangers.”
