The Future of Computing

There are so many possibilities as to what the future holds in the technology realm. It’s possible that in the future DNA could be used in computing. DNA has the capability to perform different calculations. It has been used to find the shortest route between 7 cities as in the article located at http://computer.howstuffworks.com/dna-computer1.htm. Utilizing the abilities of DNA the shortest route to 7 cities was easilly discovered but it took time and a lot of assistance from humans in order to accomplish this goal. So, right now using DNA in computers may not be possible but it could be in say about 10 - 20 years from now.

I think that a computer based on integrated circuits will not be replaced in the short term. However, new computers such as superconducting computers, nano computers, optical computers, DNA computers, and quantum computers are currently being researched. I believe that no matter what kind of computer is developed in the future, it will become smaller faster and more energy-efficient.
Another possibility to examine as far as the future of computing is the browser based operating system in the 'cloud.' Increasingly, many functionalities of the computer are being moved to web servers. Document editing, presentations, image editing, storage, etc are all available as cloud based solutions and Google specifically seems to be spearheading these efforts. Recently, it released a beta version of its 'Chrome OS' - an operating system made up almost entirely of the Chrome Internet Browser and containing applications that really just function as bookmarks to other web services. There are some challenges with this new way of approaching computing however. One is security. Security on the Internet is increasingly becoming an issue, and with all our information being moved to the Internet, a tremendous security risk ensues. Another issue is ownership - once your content goes onto a companies web servers, who really owns it? Facebook has been involved in a few skirmishes about claiming in its terms of use that all content uploaded to Facebooks servers belong to Facebook, not the user. If this precedent is followed, what does that say for all our documents, pictures, and misc other personal files that we will be uploading onto these 'cloud' solutions? Bottom line is, its a very interesting time we live in as far as computing as there are efforts out there currently to redefine the computing experience. While there are definitely pros to this movement, there are also major cons; cons that indicate that adoption of cloud solutions, at least on the enterprise levels, aren't quite ready for primetime.

digital divide

It’s easier to think of the digital divide as being an international problem but it seems hard to believe that there is a digital divide in America as well. In America we still have schools in some low socio-economic areas that have problems with access to computers and most importantly to the Internet. In education it is important to have access to computers and the Internet. But it is also most important to teach students how to use the Internet wisely. Even if students were to gain access to computers and the Internet would they be able to do their assignments? That is a good question as sometimes it’s more expected that students already know how to do effective research on the Internet but in actuality they may not know ways of doing proper research. It’s important for a teacher to know their students and to know what they have access to and not. It may be a good idea to go over best practices for research before assigning a research topic to students. There are sites to avoid such as Wikipedia for research because it is a site that is easily changed an updated by other people and topics may not be covered accurately. Whereas scholarly research on google is an appropriate way for conducting research as well as JSTOR. There is a digital divide in America and it’s part of have nots and part not knowing how to properly use the tools that are available. As schools become more connected and teachers become more knowledgeable about the Internet it might help the digital divide in America but it will take time and it won’t happen over night.





IN China
About the digital divide between China and western country, the first thing that I thought it was the government control that what should be on the internet and what should not. Personally, I think it was not right even it can avoid something bad emerge on the internet by that way. I think most of Chinese hate that too. And I know something funny about what Chinese government does. For example, the cursed Forsaken in WOW was actually made up with a bunch of bones. But it’s not allowed in China and they add the body for cursed Forsaken.
And another thing is if something bad happened in China. You can’t search the related word on the internet. I think the government should not control the internet.


In China, the digit divide is quite serious. Some highly developed cities like Beijing and Shanghai have high rate of Internet access while one hardly has a computer at home in some districts north of Jiangsu Province. However, china is developing so fast that the digit divide has already improved a lot. I still remember when I was in elementary school, few of us have computers at home. My father bought one, using dial-up to get to the Internet. It was hard to believe at that time, Internet had been popular in United States. Anyway, I believe most of us are prefer to the world that has no digit divide because this is the lifestyle. We will be quite uncomfortable if we don’t have the access of Internet.

Information Assurance

Information assurance, IA: are proposed by US department of defense in 1990s. After several modifications, enhancements, have been widly recognized around the world. The human society has entered the information age. The information has become a very important strategic resource. Information and information systems security has become a 21st century national security especially a key factor in military security.
Information assurance is also key in voting. When using voting machines it is vital that every vote gets counted accurately. There have been problems in the past with using paper cards for voting. One such incident occured in Florida where they had"dangling" chad situation won't happen but other technological problems can occur.
As information is widely spread in nowadays, the most useful data is scattered and hidden. The reasons for that are the distribution of information among many companies, the useful outputs(of benefit to all parties) from information that can be computed, the online collaborative computing which has large potential benefits and the reluctance to reveal information. For example, proprietary information can help people to compete, and the revealing corporate strategy and performance can lead to a failure. So people begin to figure out a secure way for a single person to deal with information that can be used by several people who don't know each other's information. Secure Multiparty Computation is protocols for computing with data without learning it, and the final answer are the same as if the information had been fully shared. But actually they just know themselves' calculation method and the input. This method has lots of advantages such preserving confidentiality, using even with trusted counterparts and legality.
When I refer to voting, I think it is one the simplest things. I have some non-politic votes in the past. For instance, every year there is a election of class monitor and vice class monitor. First those participates are announced at the beginning of the voting, then every one takes out a piece of paper to write the person who can surely afford the responsibility of a monitor. Finally, the result will be counted, and the voting ends. However, as far as I am concerned, when it comes to a politic voting, it becomes much more formal. Rules are needed to make sure the voting conducts all people's will. There are several complications should be considered: anonymity, validity of voter, limits on choices, privacy and verification. However, voting is not always best to some extent because voting can never be one hundred percent in out real life. There are points that are hold by different kinds of people come from different places. This makes me think about the politic voting in China. Due to the large amount of people. When choosing a president or modifing law, they can't listening to more than 1.3 billion people at a time, which is not conductable. There are representers to represent each district across China. The final voters who decide the modification of law and some important elections are called National People's representers. There are also conferences in districts and it refers to district People's representers. I have no ideas about whether this kind of voting is fair or not, but I am sure that voting can hard'y be perfect. For example, there are some conditions for voting progress that are still problems today: accurate, secure, reliable, easy to conduct audits and recounts, easy to understand and accessible.
In conclusion, the voting is now taking more and more factors into consideration. It will be more reliable and securer. The information assurance will still be a topic, and we have long to go.


What of possible solutions ot this voting issue? While software will always have its flaws, having a more controlled and closed development environment would increase the likeliness of accuracy in voting results. Voting machines based on Windows XP and accessible with a universal key isn't exactly the most precise voting operation. Closed platforms, while stifling innovation, allow for a more controlled approach to the content and access of various parts of the system and therefore a guaranteed (or mostly at least) user experience/ consistency.

The Internet

The Internet was originally the U.S. government's ARPANET. It was originally designed to be a redundant communication network in case of a nuclear attack. But ARPANET became public in the mid 90’s and became the Internet. The Internet went from the U.S. government to being used by colleges and universities to becoming public. It’s hard to believe how the Internet has become an everyday power in our lives today. What was it like before there was the Internet? Well, everyone got the news through newspapers, coupons were cut out of the Sunday newspaper, and dating was on the phone.

The Internet has evolved to become a part of our everyday life. It’s kind of hard to think of life without the Internet. How would our team communicate and create a blog if it weren’t for the Internet. The Internet is now a large network consisting of many networks of computers worldwide. Who would have thought all of this would be possible back in the early 90’s? Probably not a lot of people would have thought the Internet would get as big as it is today.

The Internet is definitely a great invention. Today most people can’t live without the Internet. In the past year, we probably have been online almost every day. We study, we shop, we work, and we do online gaming on the Internet. We may even contact friends and families on the Internet. It reminds one of us of about 10 years ago. The Internet is still not popular in China. However, families in China have access to the Internet and it is used to browse some news. It’s amazing but I didn’t realize that in ten years it has completely changed my life. At that time, the only reason I loved the Internet was because I could find some funny games on it. As time passed, I became more familiar with the function of the Internet. I learned to use QQ (social networking software which is very popular in China), I play WOW and also use the Internet to study and shop. After I came to the U.S., I found that the Internet has been used much more broad than China. Some University in China does not even provide Internet access for students. There is a big difference between China and the U.S. In short, the changes in this decade really surprised me.

The Internet has brought us great convenience. However, there are still some points we should concern. At first, all of us want the speed to be faster and faster. It means the computer should get more larger packages during the same time. Moreover, more ities are required by the users. Internet should be more usable, reliable, flexible, secure and mobile. In my opinion, it is the way that the Internet goes. When I was in elementary school, few of students had a computer at home. Even some students had a computer at home, few of them use Internet because of the low speed and high cost. My father bought a computer when I was in Grade 3 in elementary. Though we could get to the Internet but it’s dial-up. You couldn’t see the full web page until over 1 minutes after you open the web page. Nevertheless, we thought it was very interesting to get online and chat with people even thousands of miles away. Things have changed now. We can buy things online, which means the Internet becomes more secure and usable. We use different devices to get to the Internet and do different things, which means the Internet becomes more mobile and flexible to use. Finally, most of us use the Internet everyday to send e-mails, do homework, video-chat with families, which means the Internet becomes more reliable, just like a friend and a perfect assistant. After consider these changes I’ve been through, I have fully confidence in the Internet developing in the future. It will be more reliable and flexible, and it should be.

Cyber Security

Cyber security refers to the hardware, software and data protection. As I know, there are four types of security attacks: interruption, interception, modification and forgery. Interruption: attacks the availability of the system, it destroys the system and data to make the network stop working. Interception: attacks the confidentiality of the system, non-authorized users access the system through some means. Modification: attacks the integrity of the system, non-authorized users can not only access but also modify the data in system. Forgery: attack the integrity of system, non-authorized users can use the fake data to change data from system.
The book covered wireless security with reference to WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) and WPA. It states that WEP was first used in 1999 and by 2001 it was found to have security flaws. Then WPA came out, but because hardware hadn’t been updated yet with WPA security most networks were using WEP, which was insecure and caused major security issues. Nowadays, WEP is still unsecure. It can be hacked in about three minutes. WPA is also unsecure as there are instructions all over the Internet as to what hardware to purchase and what software to download in order to hack WPA but it is still more secure than WEP. So, what is the most secure now? The answer is WPA2. As with all types of encryption and security people are going to try to hack whatever level that is used. WPA2 is the best option in a wireless network as it is more secure than WEP and WPA and less likely to be attacked.

First I will talk about the threat landscape change through years. At first, threats were visible to any one and it was noisy , indiscriminate , disruptive , impact readily visible and it had a small range of threats . However , things have been changed with the pace of the outside network world. Threats are silent and unnoticed , highly targeted and regionalized. Data is stolen and brands are impact unclear . Remediation is more complex and that may need to investigate data leak. There is overwhelming amount of nameless threats and variants. There are several trends which are concerned on the top :Insider threats, industrialized hacking, advanced persistent threats, protecting virtualized environments, enabling the consumerization of IT, leveraging cloud technology, regulatory compliance, ROSI and ROI balance. For example , advanced persistent threat means to access and steal information to achieve competitive advantage on an ongoing and undetected basis . The targets are government , commercial and private sector entities. However, it is still hard to do threats on the network because of the inforensics. It conducts a repeatable and verifiable examination of “the computer”using practices and procedures that are already established . Besides , it can successfully communicate results of the examination to the “trier of fact”,maturing from “black art” to “science”. However, people have different opinions on cyberspace such as “different” from the real world . Because boundaries are invisible , jurisdictions are difficult to ascertain and all crimes can have a cyber dimension . Finally, with the technology continuing to rapidly develop , new technologies will emerge all the time .

Social Networking and Privacy, or lack thereof.

To delve into the discussion about social networking and then gain an understand of both why privacy is so important and why privacy matters to everyone, we need to establish a background for both the definition of a social network and the history of online social networks.
What is a social networking.
Social Networking includes hardware, software, services and applications. It was evolved from the e-mail. Social network site are “web-based” services that allow individuals to…

1: Contact friends and learn about their latest.

2: Record life through photos, and shows this to your friends.

3: Share photos, music and movies with your friends.

4: You can control privacy by yourself.

5: Find old friends, make new friends.

Besides that, social networking is also used for business and education purpose.

History of social networking

SixDegree.com was launched in 1997 as the first social network site and it allowed users to create profiles , create and surf the friends lists . But somehow it failed to sustain its business and closed in 2000 because at that time most people did not have extended networks of friends on line and there were nothing interesting to do after accepting friends’ requests and most people were not fond of meeting strangers .

Friendster was launched in 2002 to help friends-of-friends meet . When its popularity surged , it encountered technical and some serious social difficulties . For example , rapid growth of users was hard to handle and the servers and databases were ill-equipped ; A collapse in social contexts which means users had to face their bosses and former classmates alongside their close friends; a lot of activities were restricted .

From 2003 , many new SNSs were launched . Because most of them were socially organized and took the form of profile-centric sites , some sites which focus on specific audience are beginning to emerge out of the market . Sites were divided into professional ,”Passion-centric” and ”Media-sharing”.LinkedIn , Visible Path , Xing were professional sites.
Dogster , Care2 , Couchsurfing, MyChurch and so on were “Passion-centric” sites which helped people connect based on shared interests . Finally , Flickr , Last.FM , YouTube were “Media-sharing” sites .

My Space was launched in August 2003 when eUniverse employees decided to mimic popular social networking features of Friendster . The number of current users are over 130 million . It ranks 12 in Alexa Traffic and 5 in US traffic .

Facebook is the second most-trafficked PHP site in the world , and one of the largest MySQL installations anywhere which runs thousands of databases . “Thefacebook” were launched in February 4,2004 by Zuckerberg and at thefacebook.com. Then Facebook expanded to Stanford, Yale and Columbia in March 2004 . Facebook also launched a high school version in September 2005 and now it has over 350 million active users .

Twitter began in a “daylong brainstorming session” that was held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo in order to break out of a creative slump .Full-scale version of Twitter was launched in July 2006 .

Whats the big deal about social networks and privacy? There are massive potential dangers in posting to a social network online. People never really realize that what they put out there on the Internet can be permanent and for everyone to see. Employers are perusing the social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter to see what current employees are saying, if anything, about their jobs and bosses. Employers also check to see if potential employees belong to a social network and if so, what kind of posts do they have and photos as well.

It also turns out that two-thirds of divorce attorneys are looking online at posts and photos that have been submitted as well. These items can be used in a court of law against someone trying to gain custody of their children or other things.

What is out there stays out there. The Library of Congress archives tweets from twitter. So, the government has a copy of all tweets that are on twitter.

When posting on a Social Network be mindful that others are looking and reading what you say or do or even what people are posting on your page or wall.

It’s not about a popularity contest either to see who has the most friends or the most photos on the net. These things could cause problems with potential employers and schools.

If you accidentally posted something on Facebook that really shouldn't be there you can delete that post. Just go to your wall on Facebook and look for the posting and go to it. Once there on the right there will be an X. Click on this X to remove the posting and then confirm removal. You can also remove other posts by other people on your wall and if necessary mark them as Spam.

It is also a good idea to check the privacy settings in Facebook or any social networking site but especially Facebook. One of the things to be mindful about in Facebook is that applications that your “friends” use can also access your information. So, there is a check-box to disable this feature. It would be nice if Facebook set the privacy settings to the strictest possibility and then allow the user to customize. However, this is not a possibility at this time so it is best to check your privacy settings and adjust accordingly.

The main idea is to be mindful of what is posted on social networks and that there could be potential negative side effects of what is out there. It is a good idea to keep your walls ‘G’ rated and delete potentially negative information. It is also a good idea to never post when you are upset. People often write or say things that they really don’t mean when they are upset. If you really need to write something. Write it on a piece of paper and throw it away when you are done. It’s then over and done with and not publicly available.

Having stated what a social network is, the history of social networking, and the hazards associated with social networking itself, the question now turns to how can we improve online privacy. One idea is to turn the complex list of individual privacy settings into a simpler meter type system (Figure 1 on the right) that Internet Explorer uses to determine the security level(or amount of effort for a hacker...) for securing the browser. There are 4 tiers; high, medium, low, and off.
A similar system for privacy settings on Facebook instead of Recommended and Custom would allow people to quickly and easily configure their privacy to a higher than default settings, without forcing the user to sit down and go through a large list as they currently do (Figure 1 on the left). One of the biggest hurdles to privacy seems to be a combination of Facebook making vague privacy options thus to maximize its advertising profits, and the user being either unwilling or unable to take the time to customize their privacy settings to protect themselves. While this solution may lead to less data for Facebook to monetize, it would help users keep their private lives private, and therefore is an essential step in the evolution of online privacy. Its either that or there will be a rude awakening amongst Internet users when they find out that the services they use are provided by companies that are out there to make money, and that their profiles, pictures, and content is the cash cow and enabler for them to do so.