C-11

Many of us take advantage of free media sharing. Seriously, if you can get stuff for free, why pay. Although this is a perfect way to save big bucks on publications, this violates the rights of owners/ artists and it is more than just a moral issue. But many of us don’t pay attention to this or sometimes tend to neglect it purposely, so we should be cautious here. Obviously, this illegal downloading action has been considered as ‘stealing’, yet how do we judge and why should we bring awareness to downloaders?

So I looked into the bill C-11 (the Copyright Modernization Act). Off the ‘copyright’ topic a bit, I found it is always nice to hear new terms in class and then when I look them up on the internet, it helps me more in understanding the course material. The new bill, C-11 is rather the amendment that has been introduced to Canadians striking digital piracy. The bill is a new and good provision by being ‘a bill of two tales’ (paracopyright and copyright), in other words, it’s the compromise on copyrighted digital goods for non-commercial use. In a lot of ways, C-11 is amended elaborately, yet unfortunately, the most controversial part of C-11 (digital locks) still remains unsolved. Under C-11, breaking digital locks is considered as the action of against legislation. What is ‘digital locks’? ‘Digital locks’ is an approach to crack down illegal copies by providing technological protection methods, for example, CRIA and GNU. Some people think the digital locks are overwhelmed oppressing piracy and the rests credits digital locks keeping their business thriving. Do the digital locks go too far? The debate goes on.

Cyber Privacy

Blog time again. As most things pretty much turned computer-based /networked, our physical labor places shift significantly. Network indeed makes our life a lot easier. If you still find someone who doesn’t share /download, shop or even vent on the internet, you are talking to a wrong species. However, while virtual collaborations dramatically ease our life, problems also occur, like nefarious uses of private information resources.

As much as I love internet shopping, privacy somewhat becomes the biggest concern. As we’ve learned in class, many companies only send out little samples or coupons in order to retain buyer’s loyalty. The story lies behind: to achieve possessing customer profile, updating mailing list, etc, shoppers’ information have already been shared and passed on to other cooperators.

Therefore, in order to protect ourselves from being violated or any kind of fraud or tort, we hafta learn cyber privacy ahead of time. Read terms and conditions before we click on ‘accept’, be aware of hidden catches and be considerate while using public computers. Also, to understand privacy better, I’m thinking the only way is to read more and always be prepared.

Text Encryption - ROT 13

In previous classes, we’ve discussed hardware and operating systems. However, what really caught my eyes was the text encryption part, ROT 13.

Ultimately, encryption is used to encode a message to the unreadable cipher text so that to achieve data security.  ROT 13 as an algorithm, it encrypts data by swapping positions of the first 13 letters to the next 13. Because of its super simple encryption schemes (you can obtain the original message just by encrypting the encrypted message again), ROT 13 is not expected to be used for the purpose of security.

It is a bit confusing that now that the cipher text is so simple, yet why would people still want to use ROT 13? What is the implementation of ROT13? Ergo, I checked it up on the internet, and found out that the feature of ROT 13 allows us keep messages that contain obscene/ sensitive matters from unnecessary disputes, block spams, discourage show spoilers or hide the answers to riddles. Surprisingly, many cellphone apps we’re using today implements ROT 13 just because it provides such a simple way to obfuscates data, par exemple, Apple. In the iPod Notes Feature Guide, it states that ROT 13 is “used to make a "museum mode" presentation a little harder to steal and modify.” 

My plan for Wikipedia edition

This week I learn how to edit articles in Wikipedia, and this is my plan for Wikipedia editing.


My plan for Wikipedia edition is as follows:

I am going to work with the article: “Chinese bridge”, it is a chinese language competition for foreign college students.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_bridge 

This article is an orphan , as no other articles link to it.This article need to introduce links to this page from related articles; suggestions may be available.

I want to improve this article in following ways:

1)  I will add some images to the article.To include an image in a page, here is a example  a link in the form (standard usage shown):[[Image:file.jpg|thumb|descriptive text]]. 

2)I want to  update more history and information about this article. This article now has the information of first 7 contests from 2002-2008. I will add the information of the contests after that, from 2009-2012. 

3)I will link to other articles. From "learn how", I know how to edit this part. Firstly, I will find related articles; then add links ,use the "edit summary" :Adding link to orphaned article, Wikiproject Orphanage: [[WP:ORPHAN|You can help!]] . Thirdly, I can remove the orphan template.