Good work Elise and Edith! I don’t know who’s who. Your picture on the home page is so intentionally mysterious. 

Apparently, I’m not that smart as I figured out the catch on the “How smart you are” page, but I hardly identified the subject of the wiki page. 

Well, I don’t have any comment on the layout. Wikidot is not quite detailed oriented. No user friendly and poor graphics. Anyway, I like that you choose a clean layout. I’ll go through the pages and point out some strong and weak points. I’m a usually too critic, so I’ll try to keep a balance. Nothing personal. Well, the menu is well organized, easy to read and identify the sections of the wiki. I have to admit that the last one (How smart…) stands out, so I went there in the first place. I use to select texts as I’m reading, so good for me. 

Next, I tried to see what is all about, to get a thread… so I went to the History page. Not what I expected to be, but at least I have a clear picture of your working process. That is quite important in collecting information and designing a wiki. I also found there the purpose of your work, finally! “Our goal was to look for Russia inside different news that we can get our hands on. “Interesting idea, but not very attractive to me. We don’t have much Russian news in Romania and I think this is a reaction of their influence during the communist time. I don’t remember myself looking for any Russian news at all. Anyway, I could bet that there are tones of information about an influential country as Russia. 

In the Sources page I like the way you categorized the feeds. All media sources cite the press agencies, so you choose the major ones. 

In the Articles, you also did a smart filtering, choosing the most important news regarding Russia’s internal matters, economical, as well as external politics, especially with the countries from the former Soviet block. Again, very well listed, presenting the source, the link and a teaser. 

The next logical step after collecting and categorizing the information is to analyze the data. The next one is to present some conclusions, but you choose to mix these two, and it’s ok, as long your analyses and conclusions are overlapping. 

The last logical page is a sort of “field work” a sort of real life feed back. If all you have done before can be considered as “the theoretical part” the next one is the application. The idea with the interviews brings a personal opinion on the Russian situation. You choose an empirical approach and it’s ok as an exercise. 

The last too pages, Ideas and How smart you are don’t belong here, but I understand the limitations. They describe the working process again, a sort of internal pages. 

In conclusion, you did a very organized job, not very interesting as subject, but the workflow and the way you presented it was clean and easy to digest.

“In 2001, American professor, lawyer and thinker Lawrence Lessig proposed a new initiative called Creative Commons. Initially created as a tool for a legal case involving copyright, the organisation quickly caught wind and in December 2002, the first set of licenses was completed. CC can be seen as a “middle-of-the-road” between the traditional inflexible copyright and Stallman’s radical “intellectual property is unethical” view – the copyright uses the formula “Copyright: All rights reserved”, Stallman in turn expressed his contempt towards the former by a hackerly pun “Copyleft: All rights reversed”; Lessig’s CC uses the phrase “some rights reserved” and tries to fit into the existing model of intellectual property, while introduced most of Stallman’s ideas.” 

Recently a Romanian example came up as a First music contest under the CC license. A famous pop band from Romania, Hi-Q, supported a contest by offering music, voice samples with one of their unreleased songs. Almost 100 remixed versions signed up, and finally they selected the winner, a great chance for Dasteff, a Dj  fighting for years to emerge in a crowd market. The Hi-Q band consider themselves as the promotors of the online music in Romania, and the CC licensing helps their initiative in a challenging Internet environment. They will promote the final remix officially under a CC license. Here you can listen the best remix from the contest. 

“The race between software companies and crackers was always a draw, no copy prevention scheme held for long.” Is this enforcement useful, in which cases exceptions should be made? The answer depends on which side you stand. The course cited Romania as one of the top countries regarding piracy. I still remember the years after the Revolution in 89, when our country was flooded with music, movies and later computer programs. I know people who made a fortune by selling these products. It was like a black hole for the authors, one of the most important being Microsoft. I think we compensate with the huge number of programmers working for Bill Gates. So I call it a draw! 

It took several years until we had an ambiguous copyright law. The things didn’t change much, except you cannot sell the copies on the street, but the underground activity is as free as a bird. Once in a while a read the news about some guy being caught copying in his apartment. Some moral people have different opinions as well. Regarding the computer programs some say that they are open to pay for them as long these programs will be profitable. Others, are trying to buy them online but, some companies (Adobe) don’t allow you to do this just because you have a “romanian IP address”. That means they don’t care so much about the piracy. Microsoft itself has recently admitted that “piracy is not the worst problem – as long as they pirate our software”.

Starting with Mr. Soros’s Open Access initiative, an entire culture developed, following the same path. A good example are the scholarly journals that are available to the reader “without financial or other barrier other than access to the internet itself.” Some are subsidized, and some require payment on behalf of the author. Basically these initiative release the financial pressure from the students and facilitate a free access to scientific information, studies. On the other hand, it is still a subject of dispute especially regarding the publishers and their benefits out of this. A directory on OA Journals was established. This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. They aim to cover all subjects and languages. I don’t know what’s the real situation in our Universities, but as we don’t invest much in research, not many studies are published. 

There is still a current practice in some Universities that the course support or other studies are published and sold to students, sometimes as the only source. No way of Open Access. One of the reasons is the self supporting of publishing of these studies. For a balanced situation, the benefits should cover the both sides, a free access to the information on one side and a financed study on the other side. Otherwise the already mentioned “Digital Divide” is getting deeper. Open Access for Africa is another wider initiative to “open” the dark continent and close the digital gap. Unfortunately, the “business” interests are still a strong opponent.

The GNU Project was launched in 1984 to develop a complete Unix-like operating system which is free software. GNU’s kernel isn’t finished, so GNU is used with the kernel Linux. The combination of GNU and Linux is the GNU/Linux operating system, now used by millions. The GNU General Public License was developed by Richard Stallman and his colleagues in 1989 and refined in its second version two years later, it forms the mainstay of free software, being used at approximately 70% of all free software projects. I’ll try to briefly analyze its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. 

The main idea behind the free culture was summarized in a joke on intellectual property: “copyright, all rights reserved became copyleft, all rights reversed”. In other words, the GPL rules are the opposites of copyright. What was forbidden, now it’s free, and more, can be adapted and even sold. But you cannot turn a GPL-ed software into a proprietary product. It looks like a very strong and flexible license. You can copy it, modify it, distribute it and access the source code.

A GPL-ed software will always be improved by a large community of programmers. This is a strong point, but in the same time becomes an ever changing software that needs a constant update (this is usual even in the copyrighted ones) A GPL is always sending a message of instability and a lack of warranty, at least a the first sight. Many people and companies tend to go with “serious softwares”. The truth is that a GPL benefits from a lot more attention and also encourage competition and ultimately, lower prices for a better result from the developers. It also offers the opportunity to compete with the big ones. The successful Open Office and Ubuntu are just some examples. You can also develop your business using free resources and your know how, so you can make profit. I don’t distinguish any immediate threats, but I see the future belonging to the open source and the freedom of information.

When we talk about copyright we should go back in the Ancient Rome. It seems that this copying matter was controlled somehow - authors were able to sell their works to booksellers who then obtained full control of the creation. I don’t believe this was such a big problem considering that they were copying everything by hand. Later, in middle age, the issue persisted. The “copied” writings were well protected not because of the economical reasons but because the decisions what to copy were prescribed by superiors. Some of the disputes ended even in battles (the Celtic church vs. Saint Finnian’s dispute over a psalter, around 560) Later, Johann Gutenberg, the inventor of the movable type revolutionized the entire system. The copying was radically easier which determined the property to be transferred from the author to the publisher. The situation remained unchanged until today. The history goes on and the things get more complicated. From a measure to regulate printing, it became a measure of regulating copying. The author rights became a priority in legislation. There are also the economical interests related to the the publishing houses. The principle once established by laws, it was soon applied to other forms of expression besides written articles. Photography, later movies were included as well. It covers any intellectual product with “the only purpose” to protect the authors. 

More than 20 years ago, as a country in the communist block any information belonged to the state. I remember that the dictators “contributed” or “supported” almost to all of the available books. They took advantage of the authors, scientists by putting their signature on the works. While the western societies and the US were regulating copyright through a system that works until now, in the communist side of the world, the effect was similar, not by freedom of expression, but by the impossibility to benefit from your works. Why to copyright a book that was censored anyway or stolen? 

“The creativity is the art of copying” someone said. Is this under the laws of copyright or the plagiarism? Is there any creativity without the information collected (copied) from all around us? There are still many debates on the freedom of information and if we should protect it somehow or not? Is this protection encouraging creativity in all areas or not? There is no copyright on any language of course, but yet, some companies registered some words or phrases as their own through trademarks or slogans. “The alternative to intellectual property is straightforward: intellectual products should not be owned. That means not owned by individuals, corporations, governments, or the community as common property. It means that ideas are available to be used by anyone who wants to.” That sounds almost impossible. Imagine the big companies, governments and especially mass-media giving away their rights and monopoly. 

Another good idea is that the intellectuals are consumers as well as producers of intellectual work. They pay a lot for other works but instead ask for the royalties of their own work. If you cut both you’re even… somehow. On the other hand, it is a nonsense to stand against intellectual property without coming to a solution to reward or to support the creatives. Not all works, academic and scientific research are sponsored by the government. An entire system must be set up in order to reorganize this, a new strategy for change. Here are some suggested steps: 

• Change thinking. “Once intellectual property is undermined in the minds of many citizens, it will become far easier to topple its institutional supports.” 
• Expose the costs. “Once the figures are available and understood, this will aid in reducing the legitimacy of the world intellectual property system.” 
• Reproduce protected works (piracy). This seems to be a wrong strategy against intellectual property. By encouraging it, the copiers appear to accept the legitimacy of the system. 
• Openly refuse to cooperate with intellectual property. This is a better alternative to illicit copying. It is not illegal, but much more effective. 
• Promote non-owned information instead. The freewares are so popular because they belong to everyone. “A suitable alternative to copyright is shareright. A piece of freeware might be accompanied by the notice, “You may reproduce this material if your recipients may also reproduce it.” This encourages copiers but refuses any of them copyright.” The concept of “copyleft” came out as the opposite of copyright. Copyrights take away freedoms; copyleft preserves them. The Free Software Foundation who came up with this idea said: “The simplest way to make a program free is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted. But this permits proprietary modified versions, which deny others the freedom to redistribute and modify; such versions undermine the goal of giving freedom to all users. To prevent this, `copyleft’ uses copyright in a novel manner. Typically copyrights take away freedoms; copyleft preserves them. It is a legal instrument that requires those who pass on a program to include the rights to use, modify, and redistribute the code; the code and the freedoms become legally inseparable.” 
• Develop principles to deal with credit for intellectual work. “No one has totally original ideas: ideas are always built on the earlier contributions of others.” The less there is to gain from credit for ideas, the more likely people are to share ideas rather than worry about who deserves credit for them. 

Well, the intellectual property belongs to the past or not? Is the future open source? These questions will remain for a while…

Here is a case considered to be the largest identity theft in American history. In 2005, a British immigrant who worked on a help-desk for a New York software firm has been jailed for 14 years. Philip Cummings, 35, who now lives in Cartersville, Georgia, apologised to the court for downloading passwords and credit information and selling them for $30 (£16) each to a ring of Nigerian immigrants who used them to cheat about 30,000 people out of an estimated $50 million-$100 million. The federal district court in New York received statements from around 300 victims who had seen their bank accounts emptied and fake loans taken out by the Bronx-based gang.

“I’m very, very sorry for my conduct in this case,” Cummings said at the sentencing hearing on Tuesday. “I normally don’t get into this kind of trouble.” 

Cummings, who emigrated to America when he was 15, originally faced up to 50 years in prison but agreed to a plea bargain last year on fraud and conspiracy charges.

Claiming he needs a heart transplant, he appealed for leniency. But the judge said the crime was too serious and ordered him to report to jail on March 9. Although a British citizen, he did not seek consular assistance.

District Court Judge George Daniels said the case emphasised how easy it was to wreak havoc on people’s financial and personal lives, and called the personal suffering of the victims “almost unimaginable”.

In 1999 and 2000, Cummings provided technical support on the help desk of Teledata Communications, a Long Island company that provides the software needed to run creditchecks at America’s “big three”credit-history bureaux: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.

His job allowed him access to passwords and codes that enabled him to download individualcredit reports.

Cummings regularly met a friend called Linus Baptiste at Baptiste’s home in the New York suburbs. There they would use one of Baptiste’s five computers to download credit reports.

Baptiste, who has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing, sold the credit reports to a ring of about 20 street criminals, composed mainly of Nigerian immigrants, who used the information to loot the bank accounts and credit cards of unsuspecting victims.

Entering his guilty plea in September, Cummings admitted that he recorded the information on to a laptop computer that he gave to Baptiste.

“I left the computer with him and when I asked what he was doing, he said he wasn’t doing it any more,” he told the judge. “I didn’t know the magnitude.”

The first target was Ford Motor Credit Corp’s branch in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which began receiving complaints from customers. Armed with confidential information from the credit reports, the gang had been able to drain bank accounts, open lines of credit and change customers’ addresses to receive duplicate credit cards.

The ring moved on to other companies across the country. An investigation was started when a clerk at a Washington Mutual Bank in Florida noticed that the branch had been billed for 1,100 credit reports it did not order.

Barbara Cusumano, the former head of an airline anti-fraud unit, told the court she “went crazy”writing to everybody after discovering that $1,500 had been illegally charged to her credit card by someone in Florida. Florida police told her they would not investigate because her loss was less than $5,000.

Her case was investigated only when authorities realised it was part of the larger scheme. “One of the messages this sends is that if you stay under the threshold, you can do what you want,”she said. 

Here are some practical steps to do to prevent the social engineering: 

• Be suspicious of unsolicited phone calls, visits, or email messages from individuals asking about internal information. If an unknown individual claims to be from a legitimate organization, try to verify his or her identity directly with the company. 
• Do not provide personal information or information about your organization, including its structure or networks, unless you are certain of a person’s authority to have the information. 
• Do not reveal personal or financial information in email, and do not respond to email solicitations for this information. This includes following links sent in email. 
• Don’t send sensitive information over the Internet before checking a web site’s security. 
• Pay attention to the URL of a web site. Malicious web sites may look identical to a legitimate site, but the URL may use a variation in spelling or a different domain (e.g., .com vs. .net). 
• If you are unsure whether an email request is legitimate, try to verify it by contacting the company directly. Do not use contact information provided on a web site connected to the request; instead, check previous statements for contact information. 
• Install and maintain anti-virus software, firewalls, and email filters to reduce some of this traffic. 

The recent Beijing Olympics remembered me of the chinese hacktivists. They call themselves patriots willing to put all efforts to fight for their country in an eventual cyberwar. Their favorite opponent is of course, The United States. The “strange” situations around the Olympics seems to be controlled by the Chinese government, which of course deny it, equipped with an entire army of IT experts, hackers or so called “useful idiots” for the communist regime in Beijing. I don’t know where the truth is, I know that the Americans are aware of the vulnerabilities of the Internet systems and the eventuality of a cyber war. The consequences of such a war has a lot to do with the real life, including economy frauds, banks, power systems, military… 

A recent case of hacking a diplomate laptop drew the press attention. U.S. authorities are investigating whether Chinese officials secretly copied the contents of a government laptop during a visit to China by Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez.

“We have rules in place, we have procedures people go through before they travel so there is a very significant process in place. Tech is obviously moving very quickly and we have to move very quickly with it”Modern copying equipment can duplicate a laptop’s storage drive in just minutes. Prior computer intrusions at the Commerce Department – as well as the Pentagon and the State Department – have also been blamed on China. Computer experts say it’s an escalating problem.SOTJames Lewis “For the past few years, really for the past decade, at least two foreign governments have been making massive efforts to penetrate US computer networks and they’ve been successful”It’s not clear what material was on the laptop, but experts say it’s unlikely a U-S government official would carry classified data on a laptop to China.The current investigation comes at a sensitive time.The U-S and China face looming trade issues, and China is under intense scrutiny ahead of the summer olympics. (The Associated Press.)

How can a minority group can make use of Internet to reduce alienation and prejudice? This is a hard question for our country. Every time I read about Estonia I’m amazed how well they started in terms of digital world and I also realize how far behind we are. Digital world has given lots of new tools for minority groups. Citizen participation and direct democracy are perhaps the most powerful weapons to promote greater inclusion of all citizens. 

I don’t see any big changes in our system. we have free access to the information, we have the know how, we have resources, but it seems we don’t have any political will. We’re very very slowly embedding the Internet applications in the social life. There are also some educational problems. I cannot imagine our old people paying their electricity bills on-line. Not because they don’t have the possibility to do it, but because they just don’t know how. We can extend this issue to other minorities, like gipsies. Their lack of education makes it even more difficult. They belong to a different world and definitely not to the digital one. We’re still having big problems to include the “different people” in our real world, don’t mention the digital one…

What can we do? We don’t have so many choices but to invest in education and in creating opportunities for inclusion of all. We didn’t have cell phones 20 years ago, but now everybody’s using them, including the minorities (and I refer here to the general term) That means the time is important in all this process too. I really believe in the coexisting of these two “worlds” They complement each other and make the life more comfortable. Not everybody’s tasting it, but that’s life! We’ll never have the great experiences our parents had years ago. The future? Different people living together in this digital world, taking advantage of it, like they do in the real life.