Failure

Think back to your experiences in middle and high school. How many opportunities were you given to experiment and “fail” in solving a problem? How could a school work today where students were regularly offered such opportunities?

In middle school and high school, students are constantly assigned tasks in which we could experiment with and either succeed or fail at. These tasks mostly were ones with greater success rates than others, but it was up to the student to fail or to ‘not fail’. The problem with many of these tasks was that students have to succeed in order to succeed at school. There was no option for failure and even if the student started to slip, a teacher would be right there to help.

I think that if today, there were schools that regularly offered students these opportunities; the students would come out of school with a slightly greater education. It would be much more productive in a higher education but to prepare students for that, upper levels of high school could implement these programs too. It would teach students how to succeed for themselves and not just to get a good grade in a class. Student’s would probably take longer (more failures) before they adjusted to this system but if picked up upon, it could be very beneficial to students.

FOAF-Style Networks & the Professional Benefits

What professional benefits do you see by investing time into a FOAF-style network?

The six degrees of separation is something that always sparks an interest in both parties. The book describes this ‘six degrees of separation’ theory as not completely random. It begins with homophily (the grouping of like with like). In other words, the six degrees of separation is not a probability taken from the whole world. It is more distinct and selective. Where you work, live, travel to, attend school all are places where you are more likely to meet someone who knows one of your friends.

Friend of a Friend Networks can be extremely beneficial in social networking as long as professionally networking, only if implemented correctly. ‘’Tools that rely on FOAF networking work better when they augment human social choices rather than trying to replace them” (pg 220). One main benefit that can be gained by investing in FOAF-style network is if you know someone and their work ethics, work style, etc., their friends are more likely to have those characteristics as well. If you can trust someone, there is a higher chance that you can trust their friends as well.

Print Media & Online Media

While younger people today may not make distinctions between online and real-world friends according to Shirky, do you make distinctions between online vs. print media? Why or why not? Is there an advantage to one or the other?

The younger people today have grown up completely with the online world. Our age (current college students) were probably the intermediate generation in which our computer and internet knowledge didn't expand until middle or high-school, yet the younger people have started on the internet at a much younger age. Because of their age, they are probably much more susceptible to the dangers of the internet and the people on the internet.

Although today we are completely computer savvy, I don't think that our generation can make distinctions between print media and online because they all technically come from the same source. Almost any article you find in print media can be found online. The slight advantage of using online media is that it is much cheaper and much more easily accessible, which is why most print media outlets are leaning towards online media sources as well.

The Prisoner's Dilemma & Online Auctions..

Considering the Prisoner’s Dilemma in this chapter, provide your own insight on how sites such as eBay “work” for most participants of this popular online auction site. Do they really work? Or is there too much risk?

A big part of the prisoners dilemma is having knowledge of what the other person will act on. For example, if a buyer on EBay knows the history of the other bidder and/or seller, then they may act differently than if they didn't know anything about them. Although there is still a big risk of the unknown, sites like Ebay allow users to research each other before they make transactions. In the end, it comes down to trust. If you research a buyer or seller and can honestly trust them enough to make an online transaction, most people would do it.

An interesting tool which I think people use to make themselves look more trustful are returns. If someone is looking at something on an online site and is unsure about it, they are much more likely to purchase that item if the item can be returned. The return policy ensures trust among sellers and buyers.

Online auction sites always do have slight risk but I think as they become more popular, people are becoming more and more trustworthy of the sites themselves and the people on them.

Digital Media & Copyright Protection

What’s the value of a bit? It seems that going after folks who have traded songs or movies online is a huge expenditure of effort and money. Is DRM-protected content the way to go? If you don’t agree, propose another method for the distribution of digital multimedia so that content creators can still be compensated.

According to PCMag, a bit, or a binary digit is "The smallest element of computer storage. It is a single digit in a binary number (0 or 1). The bit is physically a transistor or capacitor in a memory cell, a magnetic domain on disk or tape, a reflective spot on optical media or a high or low voltage pulsing through a circuit." Because the data is so small, it has made it extremely easy for ordinary users to share data and even harder for legistlation to catch who is distributing that data.

This problem has affected the music industry greatly. DRM technologies try to control the use of digital media by prohibiting the access, copying or converting of media. I think that DRM is one way for people in the music and movie industries to protect themselves from consumers illegally downloading their data. Although there are still flaws in the technology, if it wasn't there, it would be much easier for people to take their music. Along with DRM technologies, a fine is a good way to prevent people from downloading illegally. It would be tough for the government to punish every single person that is doing it, but by fining $750 per song, people at least get the hint that the government is taking action.

DVD & Optical Media Protection..

The copy protection originally designed to protect content on DVDs has been overcome some years ago. What other methods can you find today that movie studios are using to protect their content on DVDs or other optical media?

In the 1970's, the Data Encryption Standard (DES) was adopted as a protection system of digital media. This system worked for the time being but soon became obsolete because new technology made hacking much more feasible. In 2002, a new system called Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) was adopted. DES and AES "have been subjected to both professional analysis and amateur experimentation, and no serious deficiencies have been discovered" . Today, there are many more systems that are being used to protect content on DVD's and other optical media. The following list comes from PC Tech Guide (link below) :

• Analogue Protection System (APS): A system developed by Macrovision to prevent copying onto consumer VCRs.
• Content Scrambling System (CSS): Method for protecting DVD-Video content via authentication and content scrambling developed primarily by Matsushita and Toshiba.
• Copy Guard Management System (CGMS): A "serial" copy generation management system (SCMS) designed control the amount of legal copies allowed.
• Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP): Specifies robust encryption of content passing between domestic digital devices via IEEE 1394, through the use of copy control information, authentication and key exchange, digital encryption and system renewability.
• Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM): Specification enabling protected exchange of audio/visual content recorded on various portabledata storage media types, including DVD, SD Memory Cards, CompactFlash and IBM Microdrive media.
• Content Protection for Pre-recorded Media (CPPM): Specification for robust protection of DVD-Audio content stored on DVD-ROM media. Specifies encrypted storage of content, protected storage of content management information, system renewability and methods to prevent playback of bit-by-bit copies.
• High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP): A specification developed by Intel Corporation that encrypts each pixel as it moves from a PC or set-top box to digital displays across the DVI interface. The HDCP specification provides a robust and transparent method for transmitting and receiving digital entertainment content to DVI-compliant digital displays.
• Verance Watermark: Selected for use as a worldwide industry standard in copy protected DVD Audio and for the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI). The Verance watermarking technology is inaudible, robust and tamper resistant and capable of surviving translation from analogue to digital, compressed to decompressed and encrypted to unencrypted.

http://www.pctechguide.com/34DVD_Content_protection.htm

WEP vs. WPA

If your mother uses wifi at home to send you e-mail, and your home network is not protected by WEP or WPA, what reasons would you suggest to her for enabling one of these two protocols at home if the liability of reading those e-mails still exists once her message leaves your home, on it’s way to school?

I would definitely suggest that she enable one of these protocols at home for security purposes, even if the information that she is sending is not valuable. The purpose of these protocols is to protect our wireless from intruders, but it was clearly found that a WEP (Wired Equivelent Privacy) had flaws and making it very easy to evesdrop on the network.; making this the worse choice of the two. In using a WPA (WiFi Protected Access ), there seems to be much more security and privacy for our network. "The Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) standard, and subsequent WPA2 standard, overcome these flaws by adding stronger authentication and encryption and should be used whenever possible in preference to WEP." (Windows IT Pro). It is extremely important that all of our information at home is protected because we do almost anything online. From ordering items using credit card information to signing up for things that ask for our Social Security Numbers, we have to make sure that our network is protected.

(http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/50105/reaping-the-benefits-of-wpa-and-peap.html)