charlotteng@buffalo.edu=me?

Nowadays, it is very easy to sign up to any forums or websites using our emails. As pointed out by Donath (1996), our email@domain is the most basic Identification in the virtual world. Having the .edu affiliates me with a school or university and hence making my statements regarding education subjects more persuasive and convincing. Whatever posting I made with this email address, people would trust me as much as they trust University of Buffalo. Hence, this can be exploited very easily.

I haven’t really participated much in any forums, but if I do, there would be a certain pattern or lingo that I would use and these would be associated with me. My discussion contents, like the one in this blog would form the reputation for me.

With the current level of consumer market security, identity theft can occur easily. In emails, spammers can easily use my email address as the message headers and everyone would have thought that it was sent by me. There are a lot of possible malicious acts that can be done with this. For instance, if I am very lazy to do my group project, I can send out a hoax email using my prof.’s email to my groupmates saying that I have to participate in some competition and hope that they would help me out by not giving me too many works. They would never know that it is from me not the prof. This hasn’t happened in SIM-UB yet, but I have heard of one such case happened in one of Singapore’s university.

As defined by the USA Social Security Administration, “Identity theft occurs when a criminal uses another person's personal information to take on that person's identity. Identity theft is much more than misuse of a Social Security number-it can also include credit card and mail fraud” [Social Security online , 2006 ] The above case is certainly one potential example of identity theft. I could also use someone’s email address to post irrelevant or annoying messages on forums too. This act of trolling may destroy whatever reputation my victim has online.

Some of the possible solution, especially for email is to use digital signature. Every message we send or post shall have a certification sign. Receivers or readers shall then look at the certificate and its roots to ensure that it is a genuine certificate that has not been revoked and the sender is who he claims to be. Hackers, certainly would find ways to break the signature code and masquerade as the senders. Hence, strong encryption for the signature would be required.
To sum it up, our online reputation is generally shaped by our contents and track records. However, this can reputation that we built painstakingly can be gone in one night if someone masquerade as you and did everything that would tarnish your image. Hence, we have to be really careful with it. Lastly, the one sending email may not be the sender, and may not have his/her consent. Hence, don’t always assume that charlotteng@buffalo.edu is me. Look at the certificate.

REFERENCES:

Donath, Judith S. (1996). Identity and deception in the virtual community. MIT Media Lab. Retrieved February 22, 2007 from http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html

Social Security online (2006),Identity theft in social security online. Retrived February 22, 2007 from
http://www.ssa.gov/pubs/idtheft.htm

Masum, H. & Zhang, Yi (2003). Manifesto for the reputation society. Retrieved February 22, 2007 from http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue9_7/masum/

Qotw4" Is gift economy blessing or curse to our world?"

A gift economy is something that we share information and advice to each other, techincal support on the Internet. " While gift giving as classically defined certainly occurs in the Internet(e.g colleagues e-mailing each other useful infromation),much of help and sharing that occurs in actually different than traditional gift"(Kollock , 1999). When people pass on free advice or offer useful information, the recepit is often unknown to them and the giver may never encounter the recepit again. For example, if the information is posted on a World Wide Web page , the infromation may be offered to an unknown set of recipients.



Ecommerce is also known as a gift economy

Global competition has spur companies to be more efficient in every department. Despite the fact that distribution process is one of the most important fundamentals to a business' success, it has always been overlooked. However, in the 1990s, the sudden appearance of e-commerce (a development brought by a convergence of EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), Internet, e-mail, and the www), has transformed the traditional distribution system (a systems depended heavily on warehouses to store components and products and from which deliveries were made to customers on an infrequent basis. It is expensive because large amount of capitals would have been tied up in large inventories. On top of this, the warehouse is often a source of waste in terms of faulty products that were not discovered until they came to be put into use) However, "E commerce consists primarily of the distributing, buying, selling, marketing and servicing of products or sevices over electronic system such as the Internet and other computer network" (wikipedia,2006). E-commerce has the same regualtion as gift economy which allowes the consumer to share and post their views on the product. They can exchange the information and ideas freely on the website. However, Ecommerce is more than a gift economy. "The information technology industry might see e- commerece as an electroinc business application aimed at commercial transactions; in this context, it can involve electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, e-marketing, online marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), automated inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems" (wekipedia, 2006 ).Today e-commerce is dominated by B2B and B2C. Roughly 80% of all e-commerce transactions are B2B. B2B is a system that allows transaction between businesses, for instance Ford to their retailers. Covisint, developed by Ford and GM is one such example. B2C, on the other hand, is simply the selling of consumer products and services directly over the internet by some form of web-based firm. The best example is probably Amazon and Dell.


Certainly, there were some doubts for the future of traditional retailers. However, for those that actually embraced the e-commerce wave, they actually found new ways to add value to their business. Some traditional intermediaries have adapted to the new situation in the form of logistics, information or financial services providers, and new intermediaries have also involved with e-commerce: infomediaries

The perception that all traditional intermediary organisations would be replace by the new technological forms is an illusion. There are several ways of fulfilling an e-commerce orders, and one the few prevailing ones, "brick and mortar model", actually combines both the conventional retail stores, fed by distribution centres, with an internet website that channels orders to the same distribution centres. Indeed, gift economy gives blessing to this world.

The Gift Economy makes a huge marjor changes in world economy. Infact it makes the world become very competitive



I believe that wtih the advent of internet , innovation of gift econmy , the world is becoming more interconected. Infact, there is a huge major changes in world economy. Since, everyone can access the online information , most of the compaines outsource where the labor charges are very cheap. The availability of cheap telecommunications is driving the services sector. Consequently, corporate capitalism is now spreading quickly to China, India and Russia where factory workers, engineers and software developers are paid a fraction of what their American counterparts earned. Telemarketing, accounting, engineering, R&D, and especially computer programming and data management will continue to be outsourced, primarily to India where English is commonly spoken. Beside that, offshoring to China (where the labor and infrastructure cost is much lower than that of developed nations) will continue. These offshoring and FDI has greatly elevated China's economic status. Long gone are the days when one can do simple coding, or prepare tax returns as daily jobs in America or other developed nations. All these grunt work will be outsourced to India or some other countries where it can be done more cheaply and efficiently. People in the developed countries, should instead look into providing or designing creative complex strategies, like tax avoidance or tax sheltering, or managing customer relationship, where higher level thinking and experience are required. These may seem bad news for employees




This improvement of gift economy is not good for everyone, like traditional retailers in ecommerce, the undereducated and those whose talents are not now in demand are losing ground.However, as I mentioned above, " brick and mortar models of combining traditional retailers and internet website in distribution channels .And if we look from a bird eye view, this is done to make our economy leaner and ensure that the best people get the best jobs; all in the spirit of free market economy.


Reference

Kollock, Peter (1999). The Economies of Online Cooperation; Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace. Communities in Cybrespace. Retrieved February 10, 2007 from http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/papers/economies.htm


Dicken,Peter(2003)Global Shift, 4th Edition , chapter 4 ,Technology, the Engine of Change


Wikipedia: Electronic commerce(2006, July). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved February 10, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia/E-commerce

Qotw3 "SHOULD WE HAVE COPYRIGHT OR NOT?"

The world is pre-occupied with protecting copyrights nowadays. Content creators or owners, like Sony BMG, Warner Bros, Walt Disney, are lobbying very hard to protect their Intellectual Property (IP). The world may have forgotten about why we have copyright in the first place. According to the constitution law, Copyright laws’ main purpose is to ultimately benefit the public by promoting "the progress of science and useful arts;" that is, learning and knowledge (Ovalle,2005 ). Nowadays, however, especially with the backing of Hollywood big boys and other content creators, lobby groups like MPAA are tilting the balance in their favor. “To ultimately benefit the public” is too far away from their mind.





The world may have forgotten that some of those in favor of stronger copyrights law were actually copycats themselves. Mickey Mouse was first born in 1928 in a silent flop called Plane Crazy. Walt Disney then have a second try with Steamboat Willie, the world’s first synchronized cartoon with sound starring Mickey Mouse. This is smashing success. Little did we know today that Steamboat Willie was actually a parody of Steamboat Bill, Jr., a masterpiece by Buster Keaton and the sound effect was actually copied from the Jazz Singer. Are we allowed to do so? Chances are we have to find Buster Keaton and look for the Jazz Singer’s producer to pay them royalty. Otherwise, when our version of movie released, expensive compensation package will arrive at our doorstep, making all our efforts wasted. To add on, A whole catalog of Disney work was actually drawn from works of others, e.g. Snow White (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Peter Pan (1953), Mulan (1998), Treasure Planet (2003).

Am i promoting piracy here?No, stealing from a shop is outright wrong. The same case applied with unauthorized used of other people works; it is similar to stealing except that there is no physical loss. Disney was able to legally create those movies by ripping, mixing and burning the content because those content were already in the public domain. Most of the content from the nineteenth century was free for anyone to use and build upon regardless of your status; rich or poor, connected or not. On the other hand, "copyrights nowadays lasts 50 years at least and is extendable". (Cipro,2003) This means the next Disney or Charlotte’s Picture would need to wait a generation later before the work is released.



In the book called, Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig argues "how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity." Lessig argues that "if "piracy" means using the creative property of others without their permission…then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy" (Lessig,2004). He showed how film, recorded music, radio, and cable TV went to many tribulations and oppositions throughout their developments. Certain group of copyright holders would feel threatened by the emergence of new technology. Yet, as pointed out by Lessig, in most of these cases, the law has always been striking a good balance in ensuring that authors and content industries get their deserved rewards while letting the new technology develop to its full potential. In most of these cases, "common sense" prevails.




One of the biggest havens for pirates is China ; CD that may costs us S$30-40 was actually sold there for an equivalent of S$0.50. This shocks me during my visit to China . However, if you step back and think are those Chinese able to buy these CD if it was priced like the way it is here, S$30-40. Chances are they won’t even bother to. Hence, the general public would be benefited here, and the content creators are not really at disadvantage, because those are sales that would not be made after all. In fact, the CDs were acting as marketing tools for the singers or actors such that when the singers come for a gig or concert they would have already know who they are and would be dying to go to the concerts. (I went to China on 1998)



What about pirated software? Would Microsoft be able to gain such a strong foothold in China if there is no piracy? The Chinese are now so used to the Microsoft world that they would dread learning other operating system. Without piracy, the Chinese would have used Linux instead. True, Microsoft lost prospective revenue. But, on the other hand, they gain life long Microsoft users, who might think of purchasing the original software as they get economically stronger.




The P2P software is incurring the wrath of the media big boys. Certainly, by stealing content online they are wrong. But are all file-sharing network users are illegal users? Yes, some people that I know of preferred to download freely than purchase. However, there are also people who use the P2P network to download copyrighted contents or songs that are not available in the market. Isn’t it great to get our grandparents’ favorite oldies that we cannot get otherwise? Lastly, there are people who download contents that are no longer copyrighted.



The content creators want to get their royalty for all the effort they have put in. However, they should learn to embrace the change and the law should give a balance between the content creators and the public such that both the current innovators are satisfied with their paycheck for the hard work and for aspiring innovators to have access to materials required to create the next big thing.



My suggestion to balance the interest between the content creators and public is to have a central online library with clear distinction between works in the public domain and copyright domain. The copyright domain should allow the general public to purchase the content (music, video, books, etc.) for innovation at a reasonable rate. (Consider market price, depreciation and distribution). In this way, both the creators and public would benefit as the creators have another source of revenue and the world would have a chance to see more Walt Disney.



We should also let the world know that piracy is wrong and there is a better way to get our content that is legal, a one-stop solution and is of higher quality.

REFERENCE

Ovalle, C. (2005). “What is copyright?”. University of Texas at Austin, Course INF 312. Information in Cyberspace. Retrieved on February 3, 2007, from
http://sentra.ischool.utexas.edu/~i312co/3.php

Lessig, L. (2004). Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. New York: Penguin Press. Retrieved on February 3,2007,from
http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf

CIPRO (2003) " Gateway to economic participation" Economic Companies and intellectual properety registration office. Retrieved on February 3,2007 from
http://www.cipro.gov.za/products_services/copyrights.asp