News Report #3

"Report: US Would Make Internet Wiretaps Easier"

September 27, 2010 by the Associated Press

http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/report-us-would-make-internet-wiretaps-easier/19649649

Next year the Obama administration plans to submit a bill that would allow for the government wiretap more internet communications. This includes encrypted emails, social networking websites, and direct communications. Affecting companies such as BlackBerry, Facebook and Skype respectively. The reason for this new wire tap on Internet communications is to better equip law enforcement and national security. As there are more terrorists and criminals that are dropping their usage of their cell phones and connecting more by way of Internet. Some of the expected requirements that the bill would require are that any encrypted messages be able to be unscrambled, foreign communication companies must have an office in the US be capable of providing intercepts, and peer-to-peer communication providers redesign their programs to accommodate for the new policy.

At first glance, this new bill may seem like an intrusion of the public's freedom, but all wiretaps of communication must be "lawfully authorized intercepts." The government is not going to completely monitor everything at once. It is something that that they would go back and look at the information for. It is not clear as to who or what will authorize these intercepts.

I personally believe that this new policy would bring about a lot of chatter about whether this is fair to the privacy of the citizens of our nation. At the same time, I have a complete understanding of the reason for this wiretapping. Being a student worker for the Information Technology Systems Division at UNCW, and as the article states, this will increase the number of 'holes' in technology allowing for not just hackers, but anyone tech savvy to access important information.

News Report #2

"YouTube Set to Broadly Roll Out Live Streaming Service"

September 13, 2010 by Tahir Riaz

http://business2press.com/2010/09/13/youtube-testing-live-streaming/

YouTube is ending a two-day pilot project on September 14th, 2010 that tested a live streaming service. This service was only available to several accounts. This new service is not completely new to this very popular website. They provided this service during President Obama’s inauguration. This service is to help make YouTube more competitive against live streaming services like Justin.tv and ustream. Also, YouTube’s live streaming service allows users to communicate with each other instantly. It is a project/service that will not fully be undertaken yet as the owner of YouTube, Google, does not think it makes YouTube profitable yet.

Though YouTube does not own a large market share of the live streaming market, if they decide to go forward with the service, I believe they will win the majority quickly. YouTube’s quality of videos and amount of people that already have accounts with YouTube would help propel this. I am a little skeptical of how soon Google claims this service to be available on YouTube. They say ‘soon’ in this article, but the article mentions their continued delays to release an paid movie rentals service online (similar to Netflix). At the same time, Google is looking to release Google TV by the end of this year. Google TV would have streaming capabilities of YouTube. Therefore, showing that maybe they really are attempting to release a live streaming service soon. It would be a wise move to make before they release their TV. A live streaming service provided through YouTube is definitely a service we should keep an eye out for. The service would make the ability retrieve information even faster. For example, if you are working in your office with no work, but would like to have the news running, then all you would have to do is log in to YouTube on the Internet.

Reading #2

Wikipedia a general large source of information used by many people has been on the decline. It peaked in 2009, but has been losing users and article authors/editors. The cause of this decline can be attributed to many reasons. One of the main reasons that stood out from the reading was Wikipedia's new process of accepting posts and edits. Wikipedia used to allow complete freedom on editing and publishing articles on their website. After a real, alive person was defamed in one of the articles recently, they enforced the same filter they do for significant people like President Obama. Posts and edits now must be reviewed by Wikipedia before they make it to page. Another reason for a decrease in edits and posts is a possible peak in knowledge. You can search just about anything and find some kind of posting about it on Wikipedia and it just seems like 'knowledge' has reached it's cap.

I believe because of these two reasons that Wikipedia is becoming just a bit more of a reliable, credible source of information. It is still a great source to get a quick general idea of a topic, but because there is now a filter before publication then you can trust it a little more. The issue still is what is this filter? Are the people filtering the post reliable and what makes them a credible source to filter and edit? The proof of credibility is still yet to be figured out. Even though credibility may not be there up front for Wikipedia it is a good source because it provides related links at the end of most articles. These links lead to the source of some of the information and some of the links are credible and reliable. It is how I find information for my papers and research. If I see information in a Wikipedia article that I like I will scroll to the bottom and try to find the same information in the provided links.

Reading #1

A big piece I gained from this reading is that misinformation is necessarily always wrong, it just might be biased toward a political party or certain point of view on a topic. I thought this is important because I am very passionate about what I believe in as a Christian. There are many topics that are argued in this area of belief and sometimes many people are not looking at the real source of information like the Bible. Instead, they turn to some scholarly work that may be biased towards a certain side of the argument.

An interesting story in the reading was the false story about Guy Lockey and deer hunting. It was reported that this store owner, Guy Lockey, who did not even exist, put orange vests on over 400 deer to make hunters believe they were humans and not shoot. This story was supposedly reported by the Associated Press, reliable news source, but it really wasn't. The story streamlined through to Fox News, ESPN.com and Wall Street Journal Online. The reading states a profound statement of "...we as a nation depend on a free press to give us a dose of daily facts." I believe this statement is very true, and it is because of this that college students including myself will take anything we find on the internet and use it for our schoolwork. Whether it may be true or not, we are in such a rush to do our work that we do not pay attention to the source. At the same time, we are comfortable in the state that all information is reliable. It's a belief that if it's printed somewhere, even the Internet, it is somewhat reliable. Except Wikipedia which has really been a source being drilled into students heads by professors that it is not reliable.

These are two areas in which, starting with myself, as college students we need to get out of our comfort zone and really do our research on not just information for our papers, but the sources of the information.