Copyright and File-sharing

This week I am going to talk about file-sharing, especially concentrating on music and pictures.


LimeWire is a peer-to-peer file sharing program that allows people to download songs from it. This seems innocent enough. However, what most people don't know is that it is actually illegal, and those who know this do not understand why this is so, so continue to do it anyway. A common speculation and indeed my theory, is that people do not think that they are stealing, because a song is not a physical object.

THIS IS WRONG!!!

Downloading a tune without paying is the same as walking into a music shop, taking a CD and walking out again without paying. It simply doesn't seem morally wrong to take an object with no physical form.

Not only this - people who use these programs and share them with other people are even more in the wrong. The process where people obtain these illegal files is called 'seeding', and the process where people share these illegal files is called 'leaching'.

Many people own i-pods. In a survey of 11 average 14 year olds, 8 owned iPods and 3 owned up to downloading tunes from programs such as LimeWire. And with more advanced technology and more people finding out about it, there are bound to be many more in the near future.


Another common problem is that people copy and paste pictures from the internet and use them. The most likely case is that these pictures have been copyrighted by their owner. In order to use these photos, you would have to contact the owner and ask them for permission to use the picture.

Alternatively, if you want to look for pictures free of copyright, the best place to look for them is Flickr Commons; a site where people put their photos up and allow other people to use them. It is a very good website, and I would recommend using it if you are one of those people who want to be safe, stick with the law and have access to legal photos.



So, in conclusion, I would have to say that you should not use illegal programs such as LimeWire. Although it may seem good, it will leave you in a sticky situation at the end. If you are in need of obtaining legal photos without the hassle, visit sites such as Flickr Commons, which will let you do so.

Wikipedia

I have talked about Wikipedia previously, but this week I’m going to go a bit more in depth.

Wikipedia was first launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales (at the bottom of this page) and Larry Sanger. Since then it has now become the most popular general reference work on the web. The name Wikipedia is derived from the Hawaiian word for fast, wiki, and encyclopaedia. It now has 12 million articles, 2,770,000 of which are in English. It was originally meant to fuel the website Nupedia, but this site quickly failed and Wikipedia number one. If you would like some more information on Wikipedia, try Wikipedia’s page on it. The Wikipedia logo is below.

However there is a lot of vandalism on Wikipedia. Although usually Wikipedia can filter out obvious vandalism in seconds, it may take a lot longer to find less obvious vandalism, such as deliberate mistakes on particular topics. Some pages have been vandalised so much that Wikipedia has locked them, meaning that no one can edit them anymore. This subtler vandalism means that many questions are raise on the reliability of the source.

One way, and a much advised way of checking if something is reliable is to check the references at the bottom of the page. If there are references, this usually means that the source is reliable. However it is not good enough to check if there are references. By clicking the hyperlink, you may check where the author(s) have gotten information from.

You can also check using your own knowledge. If you know, for example, that William Shakespeare was in fact baptised on the 26th of April, and no the 23rd of April, you know that this source should not be trusted completely and that you should look for an alternative source for finding out information.

However not all Wikipedia pages that aren’t vandalised are reliable. Something else you should check is the date that the wiki was last edited, because it may have been outdated. For example, Beyoncé’s page on Wikipedia was last updated 15th February 2009, which means that it doesn’t mention anything about her latest song ‘Still in Love’. You can check the update history of a page by clicking the tab named ‘history’ at the top of the page.

But now turning to the scale of Wikipedia. Clay Shirky tells us in his book Here Comes Everybody that less than 2% of all Wikipedia users contribute. Out of this 2%, very few make large contributions. In fact about 200 users have made 100 or over contributions. The second most active user contributes only half the amount of the most active user, and the tenth most active user contributes a tenth. This shows that without the top ten contributors, Wikipedia would quickly become useless.

And so to conclude Wikipedia is incredibly successful. It has had over 2,800,000 articles and raised £6,000,000 last year. Vandalism is an issue that the few Wikipedia staff are working on. However most of Wikipedia is left to the volunteers who help contribute to Wikipedia. If you help to contribute to Wikipedia, it will help fuel it for longer.

Tags and Del.icio.us

Today I'm going to tell you about how tagging is useful for sites such as flickr, when you search for photos and how websites can be tagged on Delicious.

First I will quote what a 'tag' is, using wikipedia. A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file)'. If you would like to find out more about tags then this link will bring you to the wikipedia page about tags.

Tagging a photo allows people to search for an image that they thing would be represented by a particular word and would come up with related searches. Well, Delicious does the same, except that instead of images, you have web sites and u have all the possible tags listed down in a column.


First, some history of Delicious. It was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003, but just 2 years later was bought by Yahoo on 9th December 2005 for approximately 15-30,000,000 (US) dollars. It has over 5 million users, and is one of the most popular social bookmarking services. Some people say its essential, others say that it is simple and useful.

Delicious allows you to store your bookmarks and tag them, while sharing them with friends and colleagues. This makes this not only useful and academic, but fun and social. However there are some advantages and disadvantages of Delicious.

First the advantages: Delicious is very easy to use, and you don't have to have a great knowledge of computers to use it. It can also save useful links that you could forget. It can also be accessed on any computer with internet connection in the world. However, some disadvantages are that it requires online connection, and when someone tags they could be thinking only about themselves and not of what others might tag it as if they were to search for a particular site.

Overall, I would say that Delicious is a great website that can be accessed anywhere in the world and is useful, simple and fun. I, along 5,000,000 others, would recommend most people, whether good with computers or not, to join now for free and try it out.

Flickr

Flickr is a site that allows people to post their videos on and share photographs. It is so popular that by one month it had 7,445 photos and now it claims to have over 3 billion (that’s three followed by nine noughts!!) images (the 3 billionth is on the right). It was created by ‘Ludicorp’, a German company that was bought by yahoo in 2005 (which meant that Flickr was theirs too). Flickr itself was launched on February 2004.

Posting photos meant that different people looked at them differently. They could start discussions about them, and photo sharing was fun and social. The photos are stored safely and stay there permanently, so if your computer crashes, the photos will still be on the web. And with Flickr you can adjust your privacy to let people see them, whether it is the whole public, family and / or friends, or maybe just yourself.

Posting photos onto Flickr is much more of an advantage than just letting them rust in their barely intact albums. And when they’re seen once, they are soon very quickly forgotten. And so it would be better if there was somewhere that you could store them where everyone can see them ... aha! Flickr! It is a great place for placing old photos of your history and I repeat that you choose who gets to see them and who doesn’t. If you just want your friends and family to see them, you can select that option. However if you want to be a bit more adventurous and want to find some honest feedback, you could chose the public option, letting anyone see and comment on your pictures.

Also, photos can be tagged and you can look these photos up. So for example if we took a picture of a lighthouse, we could tag ‘sea’, ‘harbour, ‘Portsmouth’ and ‘lighthouse’. That meant that every time we searched for ‘Portsmouth’ we would get this photo along with many others.

As you can see, Flickr is a very popular site, primarily because it is useful, fun and social. It can store photos and let other people comment on them. It is a great way of sharing your memories with those who you love, or of showing off all the fantastic holidays that you’ve been to with the reast of Flickr users.

Facebook: looks so innocent and yet so deceptive

In this blog, you will find out more about how facebook privacy settings.

However before I start with my blog, I urge you that if you have facebook, to look at this website on privacy settings. It tells you about how you can be removed from Google searches, who can see your embarrassing photos, how to keep your friendship private, or how to keep your contact information private. This website was really good and it was a lot of help to me when I was changing my facebook account.

Now let me start with a quote of what Facebook says about its safety. ‘Despite Facebook's safety and privacy controls, Facebook cannot guarantee that its site is entirely free of illegal, offensive, pornographic or otherwise inappropriate material, or that its members will not encounter inappropriate or illegal conduct from other members. Consequently, you may encounter such content and conduct.’ Frankly this is absolutely ridiculous. If Facebook can care enough to note what you are doing with your every move, then surely they can check every single post to scan for this.


Later Facebook redeems itself by putting these safety tips up:

• Never share your password with anyone
• Adjust your privacy settings to match your level of comfort, and review them often
• Be cautious about posting and sharing personal information, especially information that could be used to identify you or locate you offline, such as your address or telephone number
• Report users and content that violate our Terms of Use
• Block and report anyone who sends you unwanted or inappropriate communications

However it is no use of putting it where people rarely see it. I didn’t know about these privacy settings until a couple of weeks ago. They should be on display in an obvious place.

I hope that now you are starting to feel like you ought to adjust your privacy settings. If you would like a little help on doing so, this website is a lot of use, telling you what level of security is recommended and why you should do so.

I will finish by saying that you should be extremely cautious of Facebook. It has a surprising amount of tricks up its sleeves. Next time you use Facebook, think about your privacy settings. and if you are thinking of getting Facebook, think about what sort of privacy you want and if you are willing to give you online identity to Facebook.

Facebook and Privacy

Today, I’m going to tell you all about Facebook security and why you should keep it private. I will not talk about facebook, but if you would like to find something about it, like who created and what it is, you can go and visit Wikipedia’s page on it here.

I have facebook, and I decided to see if I could be found on the web through facebook. When I searched there were to pieces of information of me. One was of my profile and a display of all my friends, and the other was my profile picture on facebook. I realised that I’ve not only exposed my own information but all my contacts’ as well, so I immediately changed my privacy settings. However it was too late to stop my picture and I still have it on the internet that will haunt me forever.

However this isn’t the end. At the time, I didn’t realise this but if I add just one application, all applications on facebook get access to my details. It is too late for me, but I advise any facebook users to think twice, or even thrice before adding an app.

There is also the issue of people who tag you in photos. There might have been a time, when you carelessly got drunk and messed around, and your friend took some photos of you doing god knows what. Now it’s years later, and you look at your profile and you find you’ve been tagged in these photos. The problem is that everyone has access to viewing these photos, sometimes even regardless whether they are your friend. Business managers who sneakily spy on people who are signing up for a job can check on facebook, see these photos and immediately make you an unsuitable candidate for the job.

It is important that you change your privacy settings on facebook, or you may be very surprised. Try typing your name in Google and see what comes up. There are many privacy settings, all of which you may not want to apply, but before you ignore them once again, have a think about the consequences of your actions.

Online Identites

This week I’m going to talk to you about online identity and the positive and negative aspects of it, as well as how people can get hold of it.

Every time you sign up for an account on Facebook, or Bebo, or most other sites, you generally have to give personal details such as your full name, your date of birth and where you live. Using this, the site can make you an online identity. There are both positive and negative aspects of this.

Let’s start with the positives. If you are looking to be reunited with an old friend that you bumped into yesterday on facebook, typing in their name in the search box lets facebook scan through all the profiles and comes up with a list of people who share the same name. Also Facebook uses your network to search for people, since you are most likely to know them. And so this limits the number of people that show up in the list. This is very useful. Also, banks can use your online identity to check whether it really is you who is withdrawing money. For example, the bank may require that you answer a specific question out of a number, and you have to answer it. Choosing this question makes it even more difficult for hackers. However hackers are still able to hack in to your accounts. And this is where the negatives start.

Hackers are able to hack into your account in a number of ways. For example, they can use decoders, which decode your password (picture on the right).There is also a bug which notes down every single key you press on your keyboard. Banks soon found out about this, so they started recommending to their customers that if they want to sing into their account, they should click or drag and drop the numbers. Then hacker found out about this, and they have now invented a bug that takes a snapshot of your screen every time you click. A really obvious and most common way of obtaining someone’s password is by looking over their shoulder. This proves how easy it is for people to get hold of your online identity, so do anything to protect it!

Overall, I believe that online identity can be useful, but people must be very careful not to abuse it. For example, people shouldn’t sign up for accounts they haven’t heard of, or make sure that nobody is spying on you whenever you use your password.