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This unit explores the consequences of computing and networking technologies on privacy and the ownership of information. Topics include invasion of privacy, owning and controlling information, and attempts at total control.
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Outline of Unit 15:Too many secretes • Introduction • How private is private? • Invading privacy • Owning and controlling information • Attempting total control Arab Open University - Riyadh
Introduction • This unit draws on real-life examples to show how technologies affect society. • We have chosen to look at the consequences of computing and networking technologies from two points of view: • How they affect privacy. • How they affect the ownership of information and intellectual property rights. • The application of technology involves a number of interacting areas of human concern: ethics, moral principle, politics, political systems and law. • Ethics and moral principles will be discussed at greater length in Unit 16. • This unit is concerned primarily with the political and legal aspects.
Virtually everyone has a set ofprinciples: ideas about what constitutes right or wrong behaviour. For most people, these principles arise out of social conditioning in their childhood, and this conditioning could in turn be based on religious beliefs and/or life practices. Moralityis about the degree of conformity to a set of principles that determine ‘rightness’. Ethicsis about choosingbetween behaviour that is morally ‘right’ and that which is morally ‘wrong’. Introduction
Political systemsare also based on principles. In most societies, the legal systemsupports the predominant moral principles. However, even within a single culture there are tensions between different moral principles, and these may be reflected in the culture’s legal system. Early users of the Internet viewed it as a forum where anything could be said. (disagreements / flaming). As use of the internet spread to a wider, and more international, public, the user community began to feel that the entirely free exchange of views was in some ways harmful. Further, governments began seeking to regulate websites which contained material that would be illegal. Introduction
Outline • Introduction • How private is private? • Invading privacy • Owning and controlling information • Attempting total control
Privacy and surveillance Typically we think ofprivacyin terms of the separation of information from public interest. However, Felix Stalder (2002) argues that it is better defined in terms of access to information and its fair use. Surveillanceon the other hand implies not merely observing someone, but doing so in order to influence, manage or control their behaviour. There are many things about us which, in the past, were more ‘private’. For instance what one bought or sold would only be known to those who witnessed the sale or would be stored on paper records such as bills of sale or invoices. Now we depend upon third parties, whom we may not even be aware of, to record such things. E.g. the credit card company, the bank, the seller’s company.
Daily business: transactions and agents Daily life is now largely conducted throughtransactions:remote exchange of datato accomplish some goal such as purchase or sale, transfer of funds, making a booking and so on. Transactionsoccur both between an individual and commercial organisations such as a bank, airline, car rental company or retailer, and between an individual and government departments.
Technology enables organisations to gather, store, copy and disseminatedata about us. Some examples include the following: The use of a credit card or withdrawing money from an ATM. Filling in a survey. Transacting business by phone, email or the web usually involves giving your postcode or zip code. Switched-on mobile phone. If you connect to the Internet, your ISP keeps a record of the time and location of your connection. Daily business: transactions and agents
Outline • Introduction • Howprivate is private? • Invading privacy • Owning and controlling information • Attempting total control
Spam: invading your email Spamis ‘junk’ email(sometimes referred to asunsolicited commercial email or UCE) that is sent automatically to thousands and thousands of recipients at once. Once your email address falls into the wrong hands, you are likely to become the target of spam. Note that if you subscribe to a service that sends email notices of new products or a regular newsletter, whether or not these emails irritate you, they are not spam. You have solicited them by subscribing to the service.
Why is spam any more of a problem than unsolicited mail? According to one website, the most common uses of spam are for: Schemes purporting to make money quickly. So-called low-cost loans or other forms of credit. Offers of software for collecting e-mail addresses and sending spam. Offering shares in unknown start-up corporations. Health products and remedies. Illegally pirated software. Spam is a cheap waytoreach thousands of potential customers. The spammer may pay for connection time, but every recipient pays the costs of dealing with spam, andthe cost to the recipient exceeds the cost to the sender. Spam: invading your email
At an internet service provider’s site, spam increases the workload on mail servers, causing a delay to all the mail in a queue. Filtering consumes resources, so few ISPs provide it. The majority of recipients don’t want to receive spam. As a result, spammers trick the recipient into opening their messages. Common tricks are to: Make the subject line look as if it is not an advertisement or else ensure the subject line does not trigger a spam filter (common ways are to put spaces between each letter, use a familiar greeting e.g. ‘Hi!’) Disguise the origin of messages by relaying them through the mail server of an innocent third party. Forge the headers of messages, making it appear as though the message originated elsewhere. Spam: invading your email
Cookies: not necessarily a treat Cookiesare short text filesexchanged between a web server and client program, designed to permit the customization of web information. For example, cookies store shopping lists of items a user has selected while browsing through a virtual shop. Cookies are based on a two-stage process: The cookie is generated by a web server, sent to the client program (the browser), and stored in the user’s computer. During the second stage, when the user directs the browser to display a certain page from the server, the browser will, without the user knowing, transmit a copy of the cookie containing personal information to the web server, which then uses it.
The exchange of cookies is done without a user’s knowledge. However, cookies cannot harm your computer or pass on private information to third parties. Cookies were designed as a simple mechanism to make it easier for users to access websites without having to go through a lengthy process of identifying themselves every time they repeat a visit. On your computer, you may find cookies from sites you never visited. Such sites collect data on all web users to sell to other firms for use in marketing. A user can set browser preferences to filter or rejectcookies or can use browser facilities to manage the cookie list. Cookies: not necessarily a treat
Behind the scenes: data flows ‘Data flow’refers to the gathering of information from different sources, combining, manipulating and (often) passingit on to others, usually in the interests of commercial activities.
Keeping things private:Trusted third parties and key escrow A credit card company is an example ofa trusted third party. You entrust the credit card company to pay the merchant for the goods while the merchant trusts the card company to have the resources to pay for the item. (And, of course, the credit card company trusts you to pay them at some time in the future!) Trusted third parties could be set up to hold encryption keys. This contrasts with the original public–private key method discussed in Unit 14, where the private key always remains under the control of its owner. Under normalcircumstances a private key is only accessible to the holder. However, the key could be released to police or intelligence agencies if they needed it for an investigation. The process of handing a key to a trusted third party is known askey escrow. The key itself is said to be in escrow.
The Clipper chip A proposed compromise between personal privacy and the need for intelligence and law enforcement was theClipper chip, a specially designed microprocessor which would be built intotelephones, modems and the like. In normal use, it would ensure the privacy of any two parties sending and receiving a message. However, in the event of suspected criminal activities, Clipper provided a method for government agencies to decrypt encrypted messages.
The Clipper chip • The encryption to be distributed on the Clipper chip contained three pieces of identification: • an 80-bit unit key unique to each Clipper chip; • a family key common to all Clipper chips; • a unique serial number. • Clipper was a key escrow encryption systemsince copies of the unit keys would be held in escrow. The unit key would be divided into two parts and sent to two escrow agencies (for more privacy).
Whatever happened to Clipper? Clipper foundered (failed) as a result of disapproval from civil rights activists, the computing community, major media organisations (such as The New York Times) and Congressional opposition. Public opposition had already made Clipper deeply unpopular. Then researchers discovered a flaw that made it possible to ‘crack’ Clipper protection without access to the unit key. Its security was an illusion. Problems with key escrow: Who holds the keys? How are the keys accessed? How secure is the escrow agency?
Outline • Introduction • Howprivate is private? • Invading privacy • Owning and controlling information • Attempting total control
Owing and controlling information The other side of the coin of privacy is the desire to publish. There are probably as many reasons for publishing information as there are people who want to publish, but the main ones are to: Make money, for example by selling what one publishes. Further an interest, such as a hobby. Advertise one’s products or services. Enhance one’s own fame.
What’s in a name? Rights to a brand name or a designating symbol or phrase are established through the so-calledtrade mark. Trade markis a legal term which means that a name, symbol or phrase is registered as belonging to a particular company and cannot legally be used by any other. Trade marks have to be registered, renewed and defended in law.
What’s in a name? The Web grew with such speed that many major companies were unaware of the value of protecting their corporate and trade mark names in a new domain. Companies often registered the main commercial domain (.com) with their name, but omitted to register other similar domains such as: .co.uk, .org, .biz or .net. Quick-wittedindividuals paid low prices to register domain names for major companies and brands, usually hoping to resell them to the owners of the name or brand at inflated prices.
What’s in a name? Individuals, for example, registered every village name in Britain in several domains, hoping to get the village or parish council to pay to claim the name at a later time. Even some surnames were bought up, as were names of famous people. This practice is known ascyber-squatting.
Digital piracy Technologies have transformed piracy by removing some of the limitations of analogue technologies. For instance, digital copies can be as good as the original, whereas analogue copies are always of poorer quality than the original. MP3 – the pirate’s friend: MP3 is a format for storing audio data that is extremely useful for legitimate purposes, but it is best known for aiding the pirating of music. MP3 stands for Moving Picture Expert Group (MPEG) Audio Layer 3. The audio compression system chosen was the third selected by the group hence Layer 3.
Digital piracy How many bits are used to store one second of audio on a compact disc? The sample frequency (rate) for a CD is 44,100 (44.1 kHz) samples per second, each sample is comprised of 16 bits and one sample is taken for each of the stereo channels. The answer can be calculated as follows. 44,100 samples per second x 16 bits x 2 channels = 1,411,200 bits. The following series of calculations aims to illustrate the advantage of MP3 (as a way to compress audio and make it easier to transfer over the Internet) over CD format which is larger and slower to transfer.
Digital piracy How many bits are there on a full 74-minute compact disc? The answer will be the number of bits recorded in one second multiplied by the number of seconds in 74 minutes. There are 74 x 60 = 4,440 secondsin 74 minutes and 1,411,200 bits/second x 4,440 seconds = 6,265,728,000 bits.
Digital piracy How many seconds would it take to transmit the number of bits in the previous exercise over a conventional modem (running at a maximum speed of 56,600 bits per second)? The answer is the total number of bits on the disc divided by the number of bits that can be transmitted in one second. 6,265,728,000 bits / 56,600 bits per second = 110,702 seconds (about 1 day 6 hours!).
Compression as a solution The size of the file could be reduced by the use of a lossless compression system such as Zip. Greater compression can be achieved using lossy algorithms. (You met one, JPEG, in Unit 4.) Lossy algorithmsachieve greater compression by discarding some information. MP3 is a lossy algorithm that relies on quirks in human hearing to help achieve its compression. This process is known asperceptual encoding. For instance, the human ear is not equally sensitive to all frequencies of sound, therefore the MP3 compression may discard inaudible and less audible frequencies without an appreciable loss of quality. In addition, if a piece of music has two simultaneous sounds, a listener may notice only the louder noise, so MP3 compression may discard the quieter noise.
Compression as a solution Music on a compact disc can easily be reduced to an MP3 file occupying one-tenth of the original size. Consequently, MP3 files are better suited to transmission over slow modem links. MP3 supports different recording qualities; music requiring higher fidelity can be compressed using a higher bit rate at the expense of an increased file size. It is simple to convert conventional compact disc music into MP3 format using a program known as aripper.
The rise and fall of Napster Napsterconsisted of a small client program downloaded to users’ computers and a powerful central database. When someone installed the Napster client on their computer, the software searched their hard disk for MP3 files. An MP3 file contains tags that contain information about the recording artist, the album, track names, and so on; by reading these tags, the Napster client was able to correctly identify the music, and send the information back to the central Napster database. When the user connected to the internet while running the Napster client, the Napster database added the client to its list of active users. Users listed a song or artist they were looking for; the client then communicated with the Napster server. The Napster server searched through its database of registered Napster users, looking for those who had copies of the music and compared this with the list of Napster users currently online. The server returned the internet addresses of active users to the client, which then displayed their details, as shown in Figure 4.2 (next).
The rise and fall of Napster A user could download a number of pieces of musicsimultaneously. At the same time, their computer could well be sending music to other Napster users. The process was known asfile swappingorfile sharing. Napster was an example of what is known asapeer-to-peer network, where information is exchanged directly between individual computers without the need for servers. Napster was vulnerable to legal action because it held information about its users’ music on central servers. More recent file swapping systems have dispensed with the need for these servers.
Evading control? FreeNetallows senders of information to hide their identities, so that they cannot be persecuted (mistreated – offended). FreeNet documents cannot be accessed through a web browser. Instead, anyone wishing to view FreeNet pages must download and install a client program that can search for, recover and read FreeNet pages. FreeNet uses a unique serial number assigned to each document: its Global Unique Identifier (GUID). When a user requests a FreeNet page, their client searches for that document’s GUID.
So FreeNet is not concerned with a document’s physical location. FreeNet documents can be moved or copied but remain accessible. A FreeNet node contains both copies of some human-readable documents and a table listing other nodes in the FreeNet system with the GUIDs it believes to be held on those nodes. This is known as a routing table. (see page 49 for the details) When a FreeNet page is added to the system its contents are encrypted and multiple copies are distributed to several nodes on the system. FreeNet is an example of a peer-to-peer network. Evading control?
Outline • Introduction • Howprivate is private? • Invading privacy • Owning and controlling information • Attempting total control
Digital rights management Digital rights management (DRM)is a concept whereby the original publisher of material retains control of how that material is accessed. The most mature technique was theSecure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), developed by a consortium of hardware and software manufacturers. It was an attempt to secure all parts of the music market. The music would be protected by a series of digital watermarks. SDMI was an industry body comprising all the major electronics manufacturers, the record publishers and software companies.
Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI):Digital watermarks Awatermarkis often used to establish the authenticity of paper documents. Digital watermarks are streams of bits added to the informational bits in a file when it is created. Ideally the watermark is undetectable during normal use, but it can be retrieved using specialised software. SDMI used twowatermarks in every file: The first was known as the robust watermark. Therobust watermarkwould survive compression, decompression, changes in file format and copying between devices. The second watermark – the fragile watermark. The fragile watermark would not survive the process of being copied, compressed or altered. A player presented with an SDMI file without a fragile watermark might refuse to play the music.
Secure Digital Music Initiative Pirated SDMI materials could still have been played on older players. The music industry would have relied on the continual replacement of older machines by newer SDMI-compliant hardware. If the watermark could be removed from an SDMI file, or the watermark was altered sufficiently to lose its identity then the document would no longer be considered to be an SDMI file and therefore no longer under SDMI control. Without SDMI control, the file could be copied and distributed. The SDMI Consortium was so confident of their watermarking system that in September 2000 they issued a challenge to the computing community known as HackSDMI. In October 2000, SDMI had been defeated and the watermark removed. SDIM has failed.
Digital rights management hasn’t gone away • Microsoft has added DRM to its Windows Media Player, and has proposals to include such features in future versions of Microsoft Windows. • The proposals, known asNext-Generation Secure Computing Base, NGSCB (formerly known as Palladium), would allow software vendors to control the way information is processed inside a computer. • Once the operating system has started, the NGSCB enforcement system takes control of the computer. NGSCB contains a feature that will only allow a program to run if it has a corresponding valid digital signature. • It is not impossible to imagine a corrupt organisation issuing NGSCB certificates to virus writers or developers of spyware. • Spywareis a type of software that sits in the background of your computer and monitors the machine and your use of it; it then sends this information back to its originators. This information can then be sold on to software development companies and marketing groups.
What’s next? Unit 16: Realistic expectations • Can everything be computerised, given enough technology, time and effort? • What can go wrong when we trust computer-based systems? • Are we in danger of becoming over dependent on technology? • Are there things which should not be computerised even if they could be? • What makes humans different from machines? • Where can we go from here? • Where should we go from here?
