M150: Data, Computing and information

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M150 Data, Computing and information

• Outline
• Unit fifteen.
• Whats next.
• Some questions.
• Your questions.

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1- Unit Fifteen Introduction

• This unit draws on real-life examples to show how
  technologies affect society.
• We have chosen to look at the consequences of
  computing and networking technologies from two
  points of view
• How they affect privacy.
• How they affect the ownership of information and
  intellectual property rights.
• The application of technology involves a number
  of interacting areas of human concern ethics,
  moral principle, politics, political systems and
  law.
• Ethics and moral principles will be discussed at
  greater length in Unit 16.
• This unit is concerned primarily with the
  political and legal aspects.

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1- Unit Fifteen Introduction

• Virtually everyone has a set of principles ideas
  about what constitutes right or wrong behaviour.
• For most people, these principles arise out of
  social conditioning in their childhood, and this
  conditioning could in turn be based on religious
  beliefs and/or life practices.
• Morality is about the degree of conformity to a
  set of principles that determine rightness.
• Ethics is about choosing between behaviour that
  is morally right and that which is morally
  wrong.

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1- Unit Fifteen Introduction

• Political systems are also based on principles.
• In most societies, the legal system supports the
  predominant moral principles.
• However, even within a single culture there are
  tensions between different moral principles, and
  these may be reflected in the cultures legal
  system.

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1- Unit Fifteen Introduction

• Early users of the internet viewed it as a forum
  where anything could be said. (disagreements /
  flaming).
• As use of the internet spread to a wider, and
  more international, public, the user community
  began to feel that the entirely free exchange of
  views was in some ways harmful.
• Further, governments began seeking to regulate
  websites which contained material that would be
  illegal.

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1- Unit Fifteen How private is private?

• Typically we think of privacy in terms of the
  separation of information from public interest.
• However, Felix Stalder (2002) argues that it is
  better defined in terms of access to information
  and its fair use.
• Surveillance on the other hand implies not merely
  observing someone, but doing so in order to
  influence, manage or control their behaviour.
• There are many things about us which, in the
  past, were more private. For instance what one
  bought or sold would only be known to those who
  witnessed the sale or would be stored on paper
  records such as bills of sale or invoices.
• Now we depend upon third parties, whom we may not
  even be aware of, to record such things. Ex. the
  credit card company, the bank, the sellers
  company.

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1- Unit Fifteen Transactions and agents

• Daily life is now largely conducted through
  transactions remote exchange of data to
  accomplish some goal such as purchase or sale,
  transfer of funds, making a booking and so on.
• Transactions occur both between an individual
  and commercial organisations such as a bank,
  airline, car rental company or retailer, and
  between an individual and government departments.

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1- Unit Fifteen Transactions and agents

• Technology enables organisations to gather,
  store, copy and disseminate data about us. Some
  examples include the following.
• The use a credit card or withdraw money from an
  ATM.
• Filling in a survey.
• Transacting business by phone, email or the web
  usually involves giving your postcode or zip
  code.
• Switched on mobile phone.
• If you connect to the internet, your ISP keeps a
  record of the time and location of your
  connection.

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1- Unit Fifteen Invading privacy

• Spam is junk email (sometimes referred to as
  unsolicited commercial email or UCE) that is sent
  automatically to thousands and thousands of
  recipients at once.
• Once your email address falls into the wrong
  hands, you are likely to become the target of
  spam.
• Why is spam any more of a problem than
  unsolicited mail? Next ---gt

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1- Unit Fifteen Invading privacy

• According to one website, the most common uses of
  spam are for
• Schemes purporting to make money quickly.
• So-called low-cost loans or other forms of
  credit.
• Offers of software for collecting e-mail
  addresses and sending spam.
• Offering shares in unknown start-up corporations.
• Health products and remedies.
• Illegally pirated software.
• Spam is a cheap way to reach thousands of
  potential customers. The spammer may pay for
  connection time, but every recipient pays the
  costs of dealing with spam, and the cost to the
  recipient exceeds the cost to the sender.

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1- Unit Fifteen Invading privacy

• At an internet service providers site, spam
  increases the workload on mail servers, causing a
  delay to all the mail in a queue.
• Filtering consumes resources, so few ISPs provide
  it.

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1- Unit Fifteen Invading privacy

• The majority of recipients dont want to receive
  spam. As a result, spammers trick the recipient
  into opening their messages. Common tricks are
  to
• Tricky subject line (put spaces between each
  letter, Hi! or Especially for you, John.
• Disguise the origin of messages by relaying them
  through the mail server of an innocent third
  party.
• Forge the headers of messages, making it appear
  as though the message originated elsewhere.

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1- Unit Fifteen Invading privacy

• Cookies are short text files exchanged between a
  web server and client program, designed to permit
  the customisation of web information.
• For example, cookies store shopping lists of
  items a user has selected while browsing through
  a virtual shop.
• Cookies are based on a two-stage process.
• The cookie is generated by a web server, sent to
  the client program (the browser), and stored in
  the users computer.
• During the second stage, when the user directs
  the browser to display a certain page from the
  server, the browser will, without the user
  knowing, transmit a copy of the cookie containing
  personal information to the web server, which
  then uses it.

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1- Unit Fifteen Invading privacy
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1- Unit Fifteen Invading privacy

• The exchange of cookies is done without a users
  knowledge. However, cookies cannot harm your
  computer or pass on private information to third
  parties.
• Cookies were designed as a simple mechanism to
  make it easier for users to access websites
  without having to go through a lengthy process of
  identifying themselves every time they repeat a
  visit.
• A user can set browser preferences to filter or
  reject cookies or can use browser facilities to
  manage the cookie list.

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1- Unit Fifteen Invading privacy

• Data flow refers to the gathering of information
  from different sources, combining, manipulating
  and (often) passing it on to others, usually in
  the interests of commercial activities.

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1- Unit Fifteen Invading privacy

• Trusted third party (credit card company)
• You entrust the credit card company to pay the
  merchant for the goods while the merchant trusts
  the card company to have the resources to pay for
  the item. (And, of course, the credit card
  company trusts you to pay them at some time in
  the future!)
• Trusted third parties could be set up to hold
  encryption keys. This contrasts with the original
  publicprivate key method discussed in Unit 14,
  where the private key always remains under the
  control of its owner.
• Under normal circumstances a private key is only
  accessible to the holder. However, the key could
  be released to police or intelligence agencies if
  they needed it for an investigation. The process
  of handing a key to a trusted third party is
  known as key escrow. The key itself is said to be
  in escrow.

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1- Unit Fifteen Invading privacy

• A proposed compromise between personal privacy
  and the need for intelligence was the Clipper
  chip, a specially designed microprocessor which
  would be built into telephones, modems and the
  like.
• In normal use, it would ensure the privacy of any
  two parties sending and receiving a message.
• However, in the event of suspected criminal
  activities, Clipper provided a method for
  government agencies to decrypt encrypted
  messages.

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1- Unit Fifteen Invading privacy
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1- Unit Fifteen Invading privacy
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1- Unit Fifteen Invading privacy
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1- Unit Fifteen Invading privacy
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1- Unit Fifteen Invading privacy
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1- Unit Fifteen Invading privacy
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1- Unit Fifteen Invading privacy
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1- Unit Fifteen Invading privacy

• Key escrow appears to offer a compromise between
  individual privacy and the necessity for law
  enforcement bodies to prevent potentially
  criminal activities.
• However, there are three major problems with such
  systems.
• Who holds the keys?
• How are the keys accessed?
• How secure is the escrow agency?

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1- Unit Fifteen Owing and controlling
information

• The other side of the coin of privacy is the
  desire to publish.
• There are probably as many reasons for publishing
  information as there are people who want to
  publish, but the main ones are to
• Make money, for example by selling what one
  publishes.
• Further an interest, such as a hobby.
• Advertise ones products or services.
• Enhance ones own fame.

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1- Unit Fifteen Owing and controlling
information

• Rights to a brand name or a designating symbol or
  phrase are established through the so-called
  trade mark.
• Trade mark is a legal term which means that a
  name, symbol or phrase is registered as belonging
  to a particular company and cannot legally be
  used by any other.
• Trade marks have to be registered, renewed and
  defended in law .

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1- Unit Fifteen Owing and controlling
information

• The web grew with such speed that many major
  companies were unaware of the value of protecting
  their corporate and trade mark names in a new
  domain.
• Companies often registered the main commercial
  domain (.com) with their name, but omitted to
  register other similar domains such as .co.uk,
  .org, .biz or .net.
• Quick-witted individuals paid low prices to
  register domain names for major companies and
  brands, usually hoping to resell them to the
  owners of the name or brand at inflated prices.

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1- Unit Fifteen Owing and controlling
information

• Individuals, for example, registered every
  village name in Britain in several domains,
  hoping to get the village or parish council to
  pay to claim the name at a later time.
• Even some surnames were bought up, as were names
  of famous people. This practice is known as
  cyber-squatting.

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1- Unit Fifteen Owing and controlling
information

• Technologies have transformed piracy by removing
  some of the limitations of analogue technologies.
  For instance, digital copies can be as good as
  the original, whereas analogue copies are always
  of poorer quality than the original.
• MP3 the pirates friend MP3 is a format for
  storing audio data that is extremely useful for
  legitimate purposes, but it is best known for
  aiding the pirating of music.

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1- Unit Fifteen Owing and controlling
information

• How many bits are used to store one second of
  audio on a compact disc?
• The sample frequency for a CD is 44,100 samples
  per second, each sample is comprised of 16 bits
  and one sample is taken for each of the stereo
  channels.
• The answer can be calculated as follows. 44,100
  samples per second x 16 bits x 2 channels
  1,411,200 bits.

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1- Unit Fifteen Owing and controlling
information

• How many bits are there on a full 74-minute
  compact disc?
• The answer will be the number of bits recorded in
  one second multiplied by the number of seconds in
  74 minutes.
• There are 74 x 60 4,440 seconds in 74 minutes
  and 1,411,200 bits/second x 4,440 seconds
  6,265,728,000 bits.

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1- Unit Fifteen Owing and controlling
information

• How many seconds would it take to transmit the
  number of bits in the previous exercise over a
  conventional modem (running at a maximum speed of
  56,600 bits per second)?
• The answer is the total number of bits on the
  disc divided by the number of bits that can be
  transmitted in one second. 6,265,728,000 bits /
  56,600 bits per second 110,702 seconds

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1- Unit Fifteen Owing and controlling
information

• Greater compression can be achieved using lossy
  algorithms. (You met one, JPEG, in Unit 4.)
• Lossy algorithms achieve greater compression by
  discarding some information.
• MP3 is a lossy algorithm that relies on quirks in
  human hearing to help achieve its compression.
• This process is known as perceptual encoding.

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1- Unit Fifteen Owing and controlling
information

• For instance, the human ear is not equally
  sensitive to all frequencies of sound, therefore
  the MP3 compression may discard inaudible and
  less audible frequencies without an appreciable
  loss of quality.
• In addition, if a piece of music has two
  simultaneous sounds, a listener may notice only
  the louder noise, so MP3 compression may discard
  the quieter noise.
• Music on a compact disc can easily be reduced to
  an MP3 file occupying one-tenth of the original
  size. Consequently, MP3 files are better suited
  to transmission over slow modem links.
• It is simple to convert conventional compact disc
  music into MP3 format using a program known as a
  ripper.

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1- Unit Fifteen Owing and controlling
information

• Napster consisted of a small client program
  downloaded to users computers and a powerful
  central database.
• When someone installed the Napster client on
  their computer, the software searched their hard
  disk for MP3 files.
• Napster client was able to correctly identify the
  music, and send the information back to the
  central Napster database.

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1- Unit Fifteen Owing and controlling
information

• The Napster server searched through its database
  of registered Napster users, looking for those
  who had copies of the music and compared this
  with the list of Napster users currently online.
• The server returned the internet addresses of
  active users to the client, which then displayed
  their details, as shown in Figure 4.2 (next).

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1- Unit Fifteen Owing and controlling
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1- Unit Fifteen Owing and controlling
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• A user could download a number of pieces of music
  simultaneously.
• At the same time, their computer could well be
  sending music to other Napster users.
• The process was known as file swapping or file
  sharing.
• Napster was an example of what is known as a
  peer-to-peer network, where information is
  exchanged directly between individual computers
  without the need for servers.

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1- Unit Fifteen Owing and controlling
information

• FreeNet allows senders of information to hide
  their identities, so that they cannot be
  persecuted.
• FreeNet documents cannot be accessed through a
  web browser.
• Instead, anyone wishing to view FreeNet pages
  must download and install a client program that
  can search for, recover and read FreeNet pages.

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1- Unit Fifteen Owing and controlling
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• FreeNet uses a unique serial number assigned to
  each document its global unique identifier
  (GUID).
• When a user requests a FreeNet page, their client
  searches for that documents GUID.
• So FreeNet is not concerned with a documents
  physical location.
• FreeNet documents can be moved or copied but
  remain accessible.

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1- Unit Fifteen Owing and controlling
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• A FreeNet node contains both copies of some
  human-readable documents and a table listing
  other nodes in the FreeNet system with the GUIDs
  it believes to be held on those nodes.
• This is known as a routing table.

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1- Unit Fifteen Attempting total control

• Digital rights management (DRM) is a concept
  whereby the original publisher of material
  retains control of how that material is accessed.
• The most mature technique was the Secure Digital
  Music Initiative (SDMI), developed by a
  consortium of hardware and software
  manufacturers.
• It was an attempt to secure all parts of the
  music market
• SDMI was an industry body comprising all the
  major electronics manufacturers, the record
  publishers and software companies.

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1- Unit Fifteen Attempting total control

• A watermark is often used to establish the
  authenticity of paper documents.
• Digital watermarks are streams of bits added to
  the informational bits in a file when it is
  created.
• Ideally the watermark is undetectable during
  normal use, but it can be retrieved using
  specialised software.
• SDMI used two watermarks in every file.
• The first was known as the robust watermark. The
  robust watermark would survive compression,
  decompression, changes in file format and copying
  between devices.
• The second watermark the fragile watermark. The
  fragile watermark would not survive the process
  of being copied, compressed or altered.

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1- Unit Fifteen Attempting total control

• Microsoft has added DRM to its Windows Media
  Player, and has proposals to include such
  features in future versions of Microsoft Windows.
  
• The proposals, known as Next-Generation Secure
  Computing Base, NGSCB (formerly known as
  Palladium), would allow software vendors to
  control the way information is processed inside a
  computer.
• it is not impossible to imagine a corrupt
  organisation issuing NGSCB certificates to virus
  writers or developers of spyware.
• Spyware is a type of software that sits in the
  background of your computer and monitors the
  machine and your use of it it then sends this
  information back to its originators. This
  information can then be sold on to software
  development companies and marketing groups.

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2- Whats next

• Unit 16 Realistic expectations
• Can everything be computerised, given enough
  technology, time and effort?
• What can go wrong when we trust computer-based
  systems?
• Are we in danger of becoming over dependent on
  technology?
• Are there things which should not be computerised
  even if they could be?
• What makes humans different from machines?
• Where can we go from here?
• Where should we go from here?

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3- My questions

• What is a set of principles?
• What is Morality?
• What is Ethics?
• Define privacy and surveillance.
• What is Spam (UCE)?
• Which is higher the cost of the spammer or the
  cost of the recipient?
• What are cookies and how do they work?
• What is an example of a Trusted third party?
• What is the job of the Clipper chip?
• What is Trade mark?
• What is cyber-squatting?
• What is Lossy algorithms and what does it rely
  on?
• What is ripper and what is it used for?
• What is peer-to-peer network?

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4- Your questions

• ?