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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17th century Cardinal Richelieu invents an encryption-tool called grille, a card with holes for writing messages on paper into the holes of those cards. Afterwards he removes the cards and fills in the blanks, so the message looks like an ordinary letter. The recipient needs to own the same card
- Bishop John Wilkins invents a cryptologic system looking like music notes. In a book he describes several forms of steganographic systems like secrets inks, but also the string cipher. He mentions the so-called Pig Latin, a spoken way of encryption that was already used by the ancient Indians
- the English scientist, magician and astrologer
1605/1623 Sir Francis Bacon (= Francis Tudor = William Shakespeare?) writes several works containing ideas about cryptography. One of his most important advises is to use ciphers in such a way that no-one gets suspicious that the text could be enciphered. For this the steganogram was the best method, very often used in poems. The attempt to decipher Shakespeare's sonnets (in the 20th century) lead to the idea that his works had been written by Francis Bacon originally.
1671 Leibniz invents a calculating machine that uses the binary scale which we still use today, more advanced of course, called the ASCII code
18th century this is the time of the Black Chambers of espionage in Europe, Vienna having one of the most effective ones, called the "Geheime Kabinettskanzlei", headed by Baron Ignaz von Koch. Its task is to read through international diplomatic mail, copy letters and return them to the post-office the same morning. Supposedly about 100 letters are dealt with each day.
1790's Thomas Jefferson and Robert Patterson invent a wheel cipher
1799 the Rosetta Stone is found and makes it possible to decipher the Egyptian Hieroglyphs
1832 or 1838 Sam Morse develops the Morse Code, which actually is no code but an enciphered alphabet of short and long sounds. The first Morse code-message is sent by telegraph in 1844.
1834 the
1844 the invention of the telegraph changes cryptography very much, as codes are absolutely necessary by then
1854 the Playfair cipher is invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone
1859 for the first time a tomographic cipher gets described
1861 Friedrich W. Kasiski does a cryptoanalysis of the Vigenère ciphers, which had been supposed to be uncrackable for ages
1891 Major Etienne Bazeries creates a new version of the wheel cipher, which is rejected by the French Army
1895 the invention of the radio changes cryptography-tasks again and makes them even more important
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Besides oral conversations and written language many other ways of information-transport are known: like the bush telegraph, drums, smoke signals etc. Those methods are not cryptography, still they need en- and decoding, which means that the history of language, the history of communication and the history of cryptography are closely connected to each other
The timeline gives an insight into the endless fight between enciphering and deciphering. The reasons for them can be found in public and private issues at the same time, though mostly connected to military maneuvers and/or political tasks.
One of the most important researchers on Cryptography through the centuries is
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In the phrase "the rise of the citizen as a consumer", to be found on the
When the citizen becomes a consumer, the state must become a business. In the data body business, the key word behind this new identity of government is "outsourcing". Functions, that are not considered core functions of government activity are put into the hands of private contractors.
There have long been instances where privately owned data companies, e.g. credit card companies, are allowed access to public records, e.g. public registries or electoral rolls. For example, in a normal credit card transaction, credit card companies have had access to public records in order to verify identity of a customer. For example, in the UK citizen's personal data stored on the Electoral Roll have been used for commercial purposes for a long time. The new British Data Protection Act now allows people to "opt out" of this kind of commercialisation - a legislation that has prompted protests on the part of the data industry:
While this may serve as an example of an increased public awareness of privacy issues, the trend towards outsourcing seems to lead to a complete breakdown of the barriers between commercial and public use of personal data. This trend can be summarised by the term "outsourcing" of government functions.
Governments increasingly outsource work that is not considered core function of government, e.g. cooking meals in hospitals or mowing lawns in public parks. Such peripheral activities marked a first step of outsourcing. In a further step, governmental functions were divided between executive and judgemental functions, and executive functions increasingly entrusted to private agencies. For these agencies to be able to carry out the work assigned to them, the need data. Data that one was stored in public places, and whose handling was therefore subject to democratic accountability. Outsourcing has produced gains in efficiency, and a decrease of accountability. Outsourced data are less secure, what use they are put to is difficult to control.
The world's largest data corporation,
Technically the linking of different systems is already possible. It would also create more efficiency, which means generate more income. The question, then, whether democracy concerns will prevent it from happening is one that is capable of creating
But what the EDS example shows is something that applies everywhere, and that is that the data industry is whether by intention or whether by default, a project with profound political implications. The current that drives the global economy deeper and deeper into becoming a global data body economy may be too strong to be stopped by conventional means.
However, the convergence of political and economic data bodies also has technological roots. The problem is that politically motivated surveillance and economically motivated data collection are located in the same area of information and communication technologies. For example, monitoring internet use requires more or less the same technical equipment whether done for political or economic purposes. Data mining and data warehousing techniques are almost the same. Creating transparency of citizens and customers is therefore a common objective of intelligence services and the data body industry. Given that data are exchanged in electronic networks, a compatibility among the various systems is essential. This is another factor that encourages "leaks" between state-run intelligence networks and the private data body business. And finally, given the secretive nature of state intelligence and commercial data capturing , there is little transparency. Both structures occupy an opaque zone.
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New opportunities for online advertisers arise with the possibility of one-to-one Web applications. Software agents for example promise to "register, recognize and manage end-user profiles; create personalized communities on-line; deliver personalized content to end-users and serve highly targeted advertisements". The probably ultimate tool for advertisers. Although not yet widely used, companies like
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The
Yet copyright laws also provide that the rights of copyright owners are subject to the doctrine of "
- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes (usually certain types of educational copying are allowed)
- the nature of the copyrighted work (mostly originals made for commercial reasons are less protected than their purely artistic counterparts)
- the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work (as a general rule copying may be permitted if it is unlikely to cause economic harm to the original author)
Examples of activities that may be excused as fair use include: providing a quotation in a book review; distributing copies of a section of an article in class for educational purposes; and imitating a work for the purpose of parody or social commentary.
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Copyright law is a branch of
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The glamour of the data body economy clouds economic practices which are much less than glamorous. Through the seizure of the data body, practices that in the real political arena were common in the feudal age and in the early industrial age are being reconstructed. The data body economy digitally reconstructs exploitative practices such as slavery and wage labour. However, culturally the data body is still a very new phenomenon: mostly, people think if it does not hurt, it cannot be my body. Exploitation of data bodies is painless and fast. Nevertheless, this can be expected to change once the awareness of the political nature of the data body becomes more widespread. As more and more people routinely move in digitised environments, it is to be expected that more critical questions will be asked and claims to autonomy, at present restricted to some artistic and civil society groups trying to get heard amidst the deafening noise of the commercial ICT propaganda, will be articulated on a more general level.
The more problematic aspect of this development may be something else: the practices of the data body economy, themselves a reconstruction of old techniques of seizure, have begun to re-colonise real political space. Simon Davis, Director of the London-based privacy campaigners
The constant adaptation process required from the modern individual has anonymised and structuralized punishment, which now appears in the guise of error messages and the privatisation of risk.
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Certain elements of two or more photographs can be put together, mixed, and the outcome is a new picture. Like this, people can appear in the same picture, even "sit at the same table" though they have never met in reality.
Founded in 1982 and headquartered in Palo Alto, USA, Sun Microsystems manufactures computer workstations,
For more detailed information see the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
Amazon.Com was one of the first online bookstores. With thousands of books, CDs and videos ordered via the Internet every year, Amazon.Com probably is the most successful Internet bookstore.
Authors of copyrighted works (besides
In November 1997, after the assassination of (above all Swiss) tourists in Egypt, the Swiss newspaper Blick showed a picture of the place where the attack had happened, with a tremendous pool of blood, to emphasize the cruelty of the Muslim terrorists. In other newspapers the same picture could be seen - with a pool of water, like in the original. Of course the manipulated coloured version of the Blick fit better into the mind of the shocked Swiss population. The question about death penalty arose quickly ....
Black propaganda does not tell its source. The recipient cannot find out the correct source. Rather would it be possible to get a wrong idea about the sender. It is very helpful for separating two allies.
Founded in 1992, the Internet Society is an umbrella organization of several mostly self-organized organizations dedicated to address the social, political, and technical issues, which arise as a result of the evolution and the growth of the Net. Its most important subsidiary organizations are the
Its members comprise companies, government agencies, foundations, corporations and individuals. The Internet Society is governed by elected trustees.
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was the head of the NSdAP, the National Socialist Workers' Party. Originally coming from Austria, he started his political career in Germany. As the Reichskanzler of Germany he provoked World War II. His hatred against all non-Aryans and people thinking in a different way killed millions of human beings. Disinformation about his personality and an unbelievable machinery of propaganda made an entire people close its eyes to the most cruel crimes on human kind.
Virtual Private Networks provide secured connections to a corporate site over a public network as the Internet. Data transmitted through secure connections are encrypted and therefore have to be encrypted before they can be read.
These networks are called virtual because connections are provided only when you connect to a corporate site; they do not rely on dedicated lines and support mobile use.
Robot relates to any automatically operated machine that replaces human effort, though it may not resemble human beings in appearance or perform functions in a humanlike manner. The term is derived from the Czech word robota, meaning "forced labor." Modern use of the term stems from the play R.U.R., written in 1920 by the Czech author Karel Capek, which depicts society as having become dependent on mechanical workers called robots that are capable of doing any kind of mental or physical work. Modern robot devices descend through two distinct lines of development--the early
The bandwidth of a transmitted communications signal is a measure of the range of frequencies the signal occupies. The term is also used in reference to the frequency-response characteristics of a communications receiving system. All transmitted signals, whether analog or digital, have a certain bandwidth. The same is true of receiving systems.
Generally speaking, bandwidth is directly proportional to the amount of data transmitted or received per unit time. In a qualitative sense, bandwidth is proportional to the complexity of the data for a given level of system performance. For example, it takes more bandwidth to download a photograph in one second than it takes to download a page of text in one second. Large sound files, computer programs, and animated videos require still more bandwidth for acceptable system performance. Virtual reality (VR) and full-length three-dimensional audio/visual presentations require the most bandwidth of all.
In digital systems, bandwidth is data speed in bits per second (bps).
Source: Whatis.com
ARPAnet was the small network of individual computers connected by leased lines that marked the beginning of today's global data networks. Being an experimental network mainly serving the purpose to test the feasibility of
In 1969 ARPANET went online and links the first two computers, one of them located at the University of California, Los Angeles, the other at the Stanford Research Institute.
But ARPAnet has not become widely accepted before it was demonstrated in action to a public of computer experts at the First International Conference on Computers and Communication in Washington, D. C. in 1972.
Before it was decommissioned in 1990,
In the USA commercial users already outnumbered military and academic users in 1994.
Despite the rapid growth of the Net, most computers linked to it are still located in the United States.
A server is program, not a computer, as it sometimes said, dedicated to store files, manage printers and network traffic, or process database queries.
Web sites, the nodes of the
Saddam Hussein joined the revolutionary Baath party when he was a university student. In 1958 he had the head of Iraq, Abdul-Karim Qassim, killed. Since 1979 he has been President of Iraq. Under his reign Iraq fought a decade-long war with Iran. Because of his steady enmity with extreme Islamic leaders the West supported him first of all, until his army invaded Kuwait in August 1990, an incident that the USA led to the Gulf War. Since then many rumors about a coup d'état have been launched, but Saddam Hussein is still in unrestricted power.
A gateway is a computer supplying point-to-multipoint connections between computer networks.
Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) was a Roman Statesman who came to power through a military career and by buying of votes. His army won the civil war, run over Spain, Sicily and Egypt, where he made Cleopatra a Queen. For reaching even more power he increased the number of senators. But he also organized social measures to improve the people's food-situation. In February 44 BC he did not accept the kingship offered by Marc Anthony, which made him even more popular. One month later he was murdered during a senate sitting.