3.  IT Social, Legal, Ethical, & Privacy News Clippings: Topics about People and the World of IT

• Is the Internet governable?  As Larry Seltzer points out, despite images presented in movies and TV, the Internet is still largely ungovernable.  As you read his short column, think about the social and security impacts that the state of the Internet as ungovernable presents us - information sharing,  e-commerce, constant contact, etc.
  
  
• Questions of bureaucratic efficiency and state-control surfaced again recently in the UK (the name still valid as long as England, Scotland and Northern Ireland stay united).  The British government has moved to merge two  offices and their databases tracking "life events" (such as births and deaths) with identity and passport functions.  This increased power of information has evident up- and down-sides to it -- efficiency and greater ability to track subjects of the Crown (the citizens).  This greater power, with its concomitant possibilities of abuse, stands as a model for the British who reject many of the aspects of the expanding European Union.  Similar issues are at work in the United States as expanded informational tracking powers are acquired by the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the Intelligence Community.  Here trade-offs and protection mechanisms encoded into the body of law seek to restrict government power to that which is necessary for "National Defense and the Common Weal" (stated priciples of our national founding).  Add another dimension of the North American Union (NAU) mechanisms of Canada, the United States, and Mexico; the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA); the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); the World Trade Organization (WTO); and various powers ceded to the United Nations under such treaties and protocols as the Montreal Protocol, the Kyoto Treaty, the proposed Law of the Sea, and many others, and we see a gradual transformation of our rights, privileges, sovereignty, privacy, and othe American principles into new forms that we may or may not desire for our future and that of coming generations.  The issues sure are complex and demand a great deal of serious scholarly study by all!
  
  
• Another sign of the growth of the Internet as an international/global phenomenon is the need that many organizations have finally come to recognize - standardized (or should I say, standardised?) websites.  Read about the developments in this oft-overlooked area of E-commerce and Web-presence.
  
  
• The Internet Goes International/Global!  If you thought that the Internet was already international and global, perhaps you missed one characteristic that has held the Internet back a bit.  It is unable to use languages that are not Roman character (8-bit ASCII)-based for representation at the top-level-domains (TLDs); as result all domains must revert to such function and countries TLDs as .com, .org, .uk, .ru, and other ASCII character domain names.  Now the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has created a .test domain that will perhaps eventually lead to domain names in other alphabets with the fuller use of 16-bit Unicode built on ASCII and maybe even offering a implicit expnsion to 32-bit extended-Unicode.  The expansion from ASCII to Unicode expands the character-set from from 256 characters to 65536, and further the expansion to extended Unicode expands the character-set 4 billion+ characters, which should be sufficient to accommodate a growing number of alphabets used by peoples now accessing the Internet for the first time.
  
  
• Food for Thought - Minnesota jury orders woman to pay RIAA $222,000 for illegal music sharing
  
  
• Should you work longer and harder OR smarter?   That is the basic question of this article ["Step Away From the Keyboard (and Other Productivity Tips) -Tony Schwartz explains how to do good work and still have a life)]. Your key come-away should be very cogent advice for living now as a student and with life's challenges later on. 
  
  
• The Y2K for Retailers and Credit Cards?  New Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards for data security have to be implemented by merchants that deal with PCI bank credit-card systems (such as MasterCard, VISA, American Express among others).  Depending upon the number of financial transactions that various merchants process per year, the deadlines are either September 30th or December 31st.  Many are finding that the actions needed for PCI compliance, such as end-to-end encryption of key information, also helps to meet other security  requirements such as the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX or SarbOx) legislation, the Kennedy-Kassebaum Act of 1996 (HIPPA), Gramm-Leach-Bliley (GLB), and other compliance regulations aimed at public corporations under the purview of the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), the health-care industry/profession, financial industry.
  
  
• In the article "Persuasive Games: Designing For Tragedy". Georgia Tech Professor Ian Boost delves into some powerful and personally gripping questions about videao game in view of the release of two school-tragedy games - one about the Columbine High School (Super Columbine Massacre RPG (SCMRPG) massacre and the other about the recent Virginia Tech massacre (V-Tech Rampage).  The first by Danny LeDonne focuses somewhat on serious issues while the latter by the  21 year-old Australian hobbyist animator and game developer Ryan Lambourn is a cheap knockoff moneymaker.  A thoughtful reading of the article will inspire many ethical questions about the good and evil faces of modern Information Technology.
  
  
• Should retailers be allowed to put RFID chips in your shoes?  A retailer in Europe is planning to do just that.  What started with product tracking by Walmart and Target might still have some more ominous possibilities - I'm not saying that it will, but IT MAY!  Note the name Checkpoint Systems -- where have we seen that before?  Hmmmmmm.....  
  
  
• More privacy, less privacy, more privacy, less privacy, ...  which way are we going, which way should we go?  This article - Pendulum Swinging Toward Privacy - looks at some of the derimental aspects of increasing privacy while it achieves some benefits
  
  
• Internet evangelist and "Father of the Internet," Vincent Cerf says that the Internet is a reflection of society - it reflects our thoughts, our personality, our ills, our legal problems, our ethical values, and our culture.
  
  
• Finding a job (whether in IT or not) demands that you are aware of the problems of the marketplace in general.  The article referenced ("IT Turkeys: Technology Issues That We Don't Give Thanks For") has a theme of Thanksgiving - or its negative - but there are several issues raised that are especially relevant:  the resume, Indian offshoring, outsourcing, and finally, IT and the recession.  Even though the subject matter is addressed to corporate CIOs, the ideas presented are meaningful to all of us if we are thinking about the job market both now and later.

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[For many of the websites (above) you can make a good clean copy for saving/printing by clicking on their "print this" or the equivalent.]