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Economic structure; transparent customers Following the dynamics of informatised economies, the consumption habits and lifestyles if customers are of great interest. New technologies make it possible to store and combine collected data of an enormous amount of people. User profiling helps companies understand what potential customers might want. Often enough, such data collecting takes place without the customer's knowledge and amounts to spying. "Much of the information collection that occurs on the Internet is invisible to the consumer, which raises serious questions of fairness and informed consent." (David Sobel, Electronic Privacy Information Center) |
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A Tool for Privacy The algorithm being the code leads to encryption. When Alan Turing worked on his Turing Machine, he planned a machine where the instruction-code was part of its working, where the binary code was a fixed logic in dispute, in other words the machine turning into its own algorithm, which means nothing else than dialectic. And exactly here the theoretical work on cryptography touches - as a consequence of the actor always having been part of the technical arrangements - an issue of modern democracy, the question about the private and the public: the terms are changing, do not fit to their original meanings anymore. One might say the Internet is something private. One might state the contrary. Both sentences are wrong. It is neither of them. Maybe we do not all feel it yet, but humans are going through a stage of blurred words, where classic definitions get lost, just like the codes/algorithms of behavior. The meta-narratives break down, not leaving anything but puzzle pieces. We can never be private on the Internet. Nor could we be in public if we were "out there" in virtual reality. Cryptography, the study pretending to work for privacy, cannot provide us with absolute privacy either, as the danger of losing it through a decryption attack hinders its prospering. At the latest with the quantum computers coming into existence the patterns of the encoded picture will not be visible anymore. At the same time the social relations, its exact and excluding meanings must blur. Democracy needs something to rely on, something to refer to, just like the private and the public. Still, our need for privacy on the one hand and curiosity on the other hand create the longing for cryptography of information as well as its decoding. "Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world." (Cypherpunk's Manifesto) |
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Copyright Management and Control Systems: Post-Infringement Steganography Applied to electronic files, steganography refers to the process of hiding information in files that can not be easily detected by users. Steganography can be used by intellectual property owners in a variety of ways. One is to insert into the file a "digital watermark" which can be used to prove that an infringing file was the creation of the copyright holder and not the pirate. Other possibilities are to encode a unique serial number into each authorized copy or file, enabling the owner to trace infringing copies to a particular source, or to store Agents Agents are programs that can implement specified commands automatically. Copyright owners can use agents to search the public spaces of the Internet to find infringing copies. Although the technology is not yet very well developed full-text search engines allow similar uses. Copyright Litigation While not every infringement will be the subject of litigation, the threat of litigation helps keep large pirate operations in check. It helps copyright owners obtain relief for specific acts of infringement and publicly warns others of the dangers of infringement. |
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Legal Protection: WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) Presumably the major player in the field of international Information on WIPO administered agreements in the field of industrial property (Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (1883), Madrid Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Marks (1891) etc.) can be found on: Information on treaties concerning copyright and neighboring rights (Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886) etc.) is published on: The most recent multilateral agreement on copyright is the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty. Among other things it provides that computer programs are protected as literary works and also introduces the protection of databases, which "... by reason of the selection or arrangement of their content constitute intellectual creations." Furthermore the |
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Linking and Framing: Cases Mormon Church v. Sandra and Jerald Tanner In a ruling of December 1999, a federal judge in Utah temporarily barred two critics of the Mormon Church from posting on their website the Internet addresses of other sites featuring pirated copies of a Mormon text. The Judge said that it was likely that Sandra and Jerald Tanner had engaged in contributory copyright infringement when they posted the addresses of three Web sites that they knew, or should have known, contained the copies. Kaplan, Carl S.: Universal Studios v. Movie-List The website Movie-List, which features links to online, externally hosted movie trailers has been asked to completely refrain from linking to any of Universal Studio's servers containing the trailers as this would infringe copyright. Cisneros, Oscar S.: Universal: Don't Link to Us. In: More cases concerned with the issue of linking, Ross, Alexandra: Copyright Law and the Internet: |
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Basics: Acquisition of Copyright The laws of almost all countries provide that protection is independent of any formalities. Copyright protection then starts as soon as the work is created. |
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Biometrics applications: privacy issues All biometric technologies capture biometric data from individuals. Once these date have been captured by a system, they can, in principle, be forwarded to other locations and put to many different uses which are capable of compromising on an individuals privacy. Technically it is easy to match biometric data with other personal data stored in government or corporate files, and to come a step closer to the counter-utopia of the transparent citizen and customer whose data body is under outside control. While biometric technologies are often portrayed as protectors of personal data and safeguards against identity theft, they can thus contribute to an advance in "Big Brother" technology. The combination of personalised data files with biometric data would amount to an enormous control potential. While nobody in government and industry would admit to such intentions, leading data systems companies such as EDS (Electronic Data Systems; Biometric technologies have the function of identification. Historically, identification has been a prerequisite for the exercise of power and serves as a protection only to those who are in no conflict with this power. If the digitalisation of the body by biometric technologies becomes as widespread as its proponents hope, a new electronic feudal system could be emerging, in which people are reduced to subjects dispossessed of their to their bodies, even if these, unlike in the previous one, are data bodies. Unlike the gatekeepers of medieval towns, wear no uniforms by they might be identified; biometric technologies are pure masks. |
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Sergei Eisenstein Though Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) made only seven films in his entire career, he was the USSR's most important movie-conductor in the 1920s and 1930s. His typical style, putting mountains of metaphors and symbols into his films, is called the "intellectual montage" and was not always understood or even liked by the audience. Still, he succeeded in mixing ideological and abstract ideas with real stories. His most famous work was The Battleship Potemkin (1923). |
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Mass production The term mass production refers to the application of the principles of specialization, |
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to decipher/decode to put the ciphers/codes back into the plaintext |
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1896 1896 The Daily Mail was published in Great Britain. It was the first newspaper for the masses. With the emerging of newspapers the manner how politics was perceived by the public changed completely. It became more difficult to keep secrets, while at the same time there was suddenly a new and nearly perfect tool for manipulation. |
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John von Neumann b. December 3, 1903, Budapest, Hungary d. February 8, 1957, Washington, D.C., U.S. Mathematician who made important contributions in quantum physics, logic, meteorology, and computer science. His theory of games had a significant influence upon economics. In computer theory, von Neumann did much of the pioneering work in logical design, in the problem of obtaining reliable answers from a machine with unreliable components, the function of "memory," machine imitation of "randomness," and the problem of constructing automata that can reproduce their own kind. |
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blowfish encryption algorithm Blowfish is a symmetric key block cipher that can vary its length. The idea behind is a simple design to make the system faster than others. |
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Kosov@ The "word" Kosov@ is a compromise between the Serb name KosovO and the Albanian KosovA. It is mostly used by international people who want to demonstrate a certain consciousness about the conflict including some sort of neutrality, believing that neither the one side nor the other (and maybe not even For more explanations (in German) see: |
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UNIVAC Built by Remington Rand in 1951 the UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer) was one of the first commercially available computers to take advantage of the development of the |
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Alan Turing b. June 23, 1912, London, England d. June 7, 1954, Wilmslow, Cheshire English mathematician and logician who pioneered in the field of computer theory and who contributed important logical analyses of computer processes. Many mathematicians in the first decades of the 20th century had attempted to eliminate all possible error from mathematics by establishing a formal, or purely algorithmic, procedure for establishing truth. The mathematician Kurt Gödel threw up an obstacle to this effort with his incompleteness theorem. Turing was motivated by Gödel's work to seek an algorithmic method of determining whether any given propositions were undecidable, with the ultimate goal of eliminating them from mathematics. Instead, he proved in his seminal paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem [Decision Problem]" (1936) that there cannot exist any such universal method of determination and, hence, that mathematics will always contain undecidable propositions. During World War II he served with the Government Code and Cypher School, at Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, where he played a significant role in breaking the codes of the German " |
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Edward Herman Edward S. Herman is Professor Emeritus in Finance, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Author of several books like The Myth of the Liberal Media: An Edward Herman Reader or Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (he wrote that book - and others - together with |
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General Electric GE is a major American corporation and one of the largest and most diversified corporations in the world. Its products include electrical and electronic equipment, plastics, aircraft engines, medical imaging equipment, and financial services. The company was incorporated in 1892, and in 1986 GE purchased the RCA Corporation including the RCA-owned television network, the National Broadcasting Company, Inc. In 1987, however, GE sold RCA's consumer electronics division to Thomson SA, a state-owned French firm, and purchased Thomson's medical technology division. In 1989 GE agreed to combine its European business interests in appliances, medical systems, electrical distribution, and power systems with the unrelated British corporation General Electric Company. Headquarters are in Fairfield, Conn., U.S. |
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