CS 106P

Review for Final Exam

Review

Privacy

• Definition: privacy is the power to control what other people know about you. More specifically, it's about controlling personal information that is true. It's illegal for others to spread false information about you (defamation).
• There are two categories of private truths.
  1. Those things we voluntarily give out (name, age, address, phone number, salary, tastes in books, tastes in movies, etc)
  2. Those things we choose to keep private (What we say in private telephone conversations, what we do in the privacy of our homes, etc)
• Why are we talking about privacy in a computer class? Computers make category #1 above much more vulnerable.
• How much control of information that you willingly give to others do you have? Not much. There is the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 that makes it a crime to pass along the video rental records of an individual, but much of the other information you willing give out can be bought and sold. Why the video law? (Judge Robert Bork) The law does little to protect information you voluntarily give out.
• The law has not caught up with technology. Historically, it has been hard to collect and organize this public data.
• Sometimes data can be combined to reveal new information. (It is illegal to record a phone call without a warrant. But, what if you would record who you called, the frequency of calls, the duration of the calls, the time of day, etc. All those together may be just as revealing as a wire tap.)
• You are entitled by law to a "reasonable expectation" of privacy.
  • 1968 it was decided you have a reasonable expectation of privacy when talking on the phone.
  • 1986 the Electronic Communications Privacy Act broadened the protection to private electronic communications.
• What is encryption? What is the good and the bad consequences of having access to encryption?
• What are some key recovery schemes?
• Discuss anonymity, pseudonymity, and traceability. Anonymity - your activities can't be traced back to you. You make up a name each time you initiate a correspondence. Pseudonymity - You use one persona for all your communications. This persona can't be traced back to you.  Traceability - if necessary is it possible to trace an anonymous communication
• Why is privacy important? (obvious situations. Something is to be gained or loss)
  1. Protect personal interest in competitive situations. Example, high school debating team should be allowed to prepare in private
  2. Avoid embarrassing situations.
  3. Medical records. Could lead to discrimination
  4. Irrelevant information. i.e. political persuasion.
• Privacy is also important in ordinary situations. It's needed to maintain different social relationships. You need to be able to control who has access to what information about you so you can control the patterns of behavior that are necessary to maintain specific relationships.
• Give an example of how technology has conspired to reduce privacy. (1890 newspapers created a market for gossip. Privacy of well-known people were invaded. It's easy to store/transmit/process databases of information.)
• Name some ways private information about you can be gotten.
  • Motor vehicle registration
  • Voter registration
  • Credit reporting agencies
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Copyrights

• Special problem in digital age: Networks give access to more information. Easy to copy. Copies are perfect.
• A copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. (A patent can be used to protect the idea itself. It takes a looong time to get a patent.
• Specifically, "a copyright gives the owner of a work of expression the exclusive right to copy, distribute, display and perform the expression, and to prepare alterations (derivative works) based on it."
• Your work is copyrighted once it is written down. No need to register, file, etc.
• If you don't register three months after publication or before infringement,
  • No statutory damages (money you get according to the law) may be awarded
  • You can't recover court costs or attorney's fees
  • No criminal penalties or fines can be assessed.
• It costs $20 to register a copyright.
• A copyright is collection rights which can be given away, sold, leased, or licensed.
• (don't need to memorize exact numbers) For works created on/or after January 1, 1978, a copyright is good for the rest of the author's life plus fifty years. For work owned by a corporation the term is seventy-five years from publication or one hundred years from creation.
• Fair use doctrine: works can be used for non-commercial reasons (i.e. journalistic, educational, even parody). Use shouldn't interfere with owner's ability to earn revenue from the work.
• You may also use a "fair use" defense if
  • You copied only a small part of the original
  • The original was mostly fact
  • You copied an insignificant part
  • You added a lot of your own work
• Can't copyright facts. Even if you spend a lot of money to discover a fact.
• Implied license to copy - Some works have an implied license to copy. If a reasonable person would assume it's OK to copy the work, it probably OK to copy. For example, if I post a message to an electronic bulletin board, I should expect that others may copy my message in subsequent messages.
• Does personal email fall under fair use or implied license? (No)

• Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988
  • Changes U.S. copyright law as it applies to works published after March 1, 1989.
  • U.S. authors receive copyright protection in all Berne member countries.
  • Main change: you don't need to add a copyright symbol © to your work.
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• Courts are showing a willingness to interpret copyright laws the same for works in cyberspace as works in the "real world"
• If you send an email to a friend, is it copyrighted? (Yes)

History

• Who is Grace Hopper?
• Augusta Ada Byron
• Charles Babbage
• Steve Jobs
• First, second, third, and forth generation of computers. (vacuum tubes, transistors, IC's, Microprocessor)
• Name and date some of the most significant advances
  • Jacquard's Loom (1801) - punch cards controlled the patterns in the fabric, first example of stored program. Same idea used in Charles Babbage's analytical engine
  • Slide rule 1654 (circular slide rule introduce 1622) - analog computer
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Free Speech

Computers and work

Human genome project