Current Event 2

This post is in response to class discussion and information found at the following site: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/02/lenovo_superfish_scandal_why_it_s_one_of_the_worst_consumer_computing_screw.html



    Lenovo, a multinational computer tech company, released computers and tablets for several months which included the software Superfish. At a glance, this is not a problem, except for the fact that Superfish has a substantial security issue in its code. This hearkens back to similar issues in The Cuckoo's Egg, except that book took place thirty years in the past. Clearly, software isn't always going to be perfect. People make mistakes, but those who are making or perpetuating them still won't own up to the issue. In Cuckoo's Egg, Stoll told many people about the issue and received almost no help or concern. In like manner, Lenovo was made aware of this security problem and drug their feet until the issue exploded. Had someone exposed a massive hole in the mail system, where anyone could read or make copies of our mail, bank cards or identification documents, there would be alarm. There would be action taken. Yet when the same thing happens on the digital front, it seems like nobody cares. Nobody with authority to act cared about Stoll's concern, and nobody cared now. Our way of life is stored online: bank transactions, medical history, music, mail and more; people should care when someone threatens to pirate this information.

Journal 3: One-day Post

1. Patents are horrible in that they can stop someone from marketing their own creation if someone else made something similar enough, even if that was completely unknown.
2. Patents should expire sooner than they do, people can sit on ideas they own for far too long, and it can deprive people from enjoying their own versions.
3. Trade secrets seem like such an unsecured means of security. All it takes is one leak and your whole corner on the market can be destroyed.
4.  If Oracle really had an issue with people using their API, they should have spoken up sooner; there should be a window of time when these suits can be brought against companies. Some sort of "you snooze you lose" policy.

Post 1 (Class Discussion Review): Free Software VS Paid-for Results

A goodly portion of time was given in lecture to people's views on Free Software, with the Unix crowd in favor while Microsoft/Apple opposed. While I understand the stance of Free Software being more than just cost of product delivery, the fact remains that their statutes include freedom to distribute any possessed software openly. For any appreciable software, I find this unethical. Good software is hard to create. In Mythical Man-Month, Brooks says a programmer is "creating by exertion of the imagination." Why should an individual or group's work of imagination, refinement and time be free to the masses? We pay to see or own movies and books, which are the "exertion of the imagination" of authors, actors and producers. Why should software be any different? Think of the chaos that would have ensued had Harry Potter been free, open to public modification and redistribution. We would drown in fan-fiction. Yet this is the very concept that the Free Software movement wants software engineers to embrace. They claim you make your money from supporting the software, but many of use want to write software well enough that it is intuitive to use and doesn't need maintenance. For us, the Free Software movement strips everything away and leaves us unable to fulfill the simple command to eat our bread “by the sweat of our brow.” Creating software is work, and if the result is desired, the software should be purchased.

Module 2 in Review

1. The announcer said that people can work "...any 80 hours a week" they wanted in the software industry, but this flies in the face of Demarco's Peopleware, where he states that overtime is a myth, and productivity plummets after 40 hours.
2. People took years and waited patiently for such large breakthroughs when the computer industry was young. Does society have the patience for such things now? As a people, we are so geared towards immediate gratification now.
3. It's interesting the hype around early computers, even before they did anything.
4. Most of the early innovaters weren't chasing money, they just had an idea that they wanted to see come to life.

1. IBM's dress code seems kind of stuffy in hindsight.
2. Once again, software (the first OS) was written for personal use, not as a market goal.
3. People say that Microsoft ripped the guy off at $50k for his OS, but that seems like pretty good money for four months of work.
4. KLocks is a horrible metric for measuring code progress.

1. How could Xerox not see that a GUI based computer would be what everyone wanted?
1. Steve Jobs got it. Sorry, Xerox.
2. Steve Jobs readily admitted they they stole ideas, but seemed so put-off when other people would take from his ideas or steal their things.
3. People would justify a multi-thousand dollar purchase for a single piece of software. I cannot think of anything like that anymore. People spending a thousand dollars on a nice computer that does almost everything is a hard sell at times.
4. Microsoft really played both sides of the OS war for a while, which seemed really financially smart.

1. Why would you password-protect a closed-house computer? I don't think that people had accounts yet, so wasn't it essentially like a glorified screensaver password?
2. Bill Gates had every right to want payment for his company's work. People aren't just entitled to the capacity of others at no charge.
3. With Linux, the writers of the software are almost never those who offer support. There's no obligation to help you with it, which can make Linux a really unsettling OS for people.

1. Nothing in life seems to function under the "Free Software" principle; people don't generally dedicate their lives and time to giving away everything they think of for free.
2. If hardware was standardized, would it create a monopoly-based vacuum or free companies up to pursue newer ideas?
3. With people trying to limit or throttle the capacity of others in order to give the "little guys" a chance, are we moving towards a society like that depicted in Atlas Shrugged?