Chapter 7: Impact of Computing

The World Wide Web

• At its origins in the early 1960s, the World Wide Web was intended only for rapid and easy exchange of information within the scientific community.
• The internet is a global connection of networks, while the World Wide Web is collection of information that is accessed via the Internet.
• The uses of the internet are changing all the time and have changed forever how we do business and how people communicate.

Digital Divide

• The digital divide is the difference in access to technology including access to computers and the internet.
• Variables affect the digital divide:
  • Infrastructure—Some parts of the world do not have access to the internet.
  • Education—A person could have access to the internet but not have the education to use it.
  • Indifference—A person could have access to the internet but choose not to use it.
  • Cost—The cost of accessing the internet could make using it unaffordable.

Beneficial and Harmful Effects

• A computing innovation can have both a beneficial and a harmful effect on societies, cultures, or economies.
• An effect may be an impact, a result, or an outcome.
• Beneficial and/or harmful effects are contextual and interpretive.
• Identification includes both the classification of the effect as either beneficial or harmful and justification for that classification.

Human Bias

• Computing innovations can reflect existing human bias.
• Algorithms are helping people make decisions that can have extreme ramifications.
• An algorithm can determine where to place police resources; it may decide who gets into a college or who will get a job.
• Algorithms can be intentionally or unintentionally biased.
• Algorithms can be used to determine starting salaries for large companies.

Crowdsourcing

• Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining input or information from many people via the internet.
• Crowdsourcing offers new models for connecting business with funding.

Citizen Science

• Citizen science is scientific research using public participation in scientific research.
• The research is conducted in whole or part by distributed individuals, many of whom may or may not be scientists.
• They contribute relevant data to research using their own computing devices.
• Since many of the contributors might not have scientific training, usually the data collected, although vast, are not necessarily technical.

Legal and Ethical Concerns

• Material created on a computer is the intellectual property of the creator or organization.
• Ease of access and distribution of digitized information raises intellectual property concerns regarding ownership, value, and use.
• Algorithms on legitimate sharing sites have an obligation to safeguard intellectual property.
• Sites do this by scanning for content that matches intellectual property and removing the illegally shared content from their site.
• Computing innovations can raise legal and ethical concerns.

Safe Computing

• Security is needed to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information.
• Security protects that data from cyber attacks and hacking.
• Privacy is the right to control data generated by one’s usage of computing innovations and restrict the flow of that data to third parties.
• PII can be analyzed and processed by businesses and shared with other companies.
• The information collected has enabled companies to gain insight into how to interact with customers better.
• PII and other information can be used to enhance a user’s online experience.
• PII can also be used to simplify making online purchases.
• Cyber criminals are creative in their methods for stealing PII data.
• Authentication measures protect devices and information from unauthorized access.
• Multifactor authentication is a method of computer access control in which a user is granted access only after successfully presenting several pieces of evidence to an authentication mechanism, typically in at least two of the following categories:
  • Knowledge—something the user knows
  • Possession—something the user has
  • Inherence—something the user is

Encryption

• To increase security, encryption is used.
• Encryption uses cryptographic algorithms to encrypt data.
• Encryption is the process of encoding data to prevent unauthorized access.
• Decryption is the process of decoding the data.
• Symmetric key encryption uses the same key for both encryption and decryption.
• Public key encryption (also called asymmetric encryption) uses two keys—one private and one public.

Malware

• Malware is malicious software intended to damage a computing system or take partial control or its operations.
• Malware can be spread over email, executable files, instant messaging, social media, freeware, shareware, and many other methods.

Computer Viruses

• Computer viruses are malicious programs that can copy themselves and gain access to a computer in an unauthorized way.
• Viruses often perform some type of harmful activity on infected host computers.
• Computer viruses often attach themselves to legitimate programs and start running independently on a computer.

Phishing

• Phishing is a technique that directs users to unrelated sites that trick the user into giving personal data.
• Phishing is a technique used by cyber criminals posing as a legitimate institution to lure individuals into providing sensitive data, such as PII, banking and credit card details, and passwords.

Keylogging

• Keylogging is another method involving unauthorized access to a computer.
• Keylogging is the use of a program to record every keystroke made by the computer user in order to gain fraudulent access to passwords and other confidential information.

Rogue Access Point

• Data sent over public networks can be intercepted, analyzed, and modified.
• One way that this can happen is through a rogue access point.
• A rogue access point is a wireless access point that gives unauthorized access to secure networks.

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