Computer Crimes Across Borders

Today, at the request of Dutch authorities, Armenian police arrested the suspected creator of the Bredolab botnet. The botnet consists of over 200,000 infected computers located around the world. Since the hacker is Armenian, should he be tried in an Armenian court, or extradited to Holland or some other country with affected computer owners? I don't think there's a clear answer to that question, and I think that's a big problem. The World Wide Web has eliminated all borders in the digital world, antiquating our current legal systems with boundaries and jurisdictions. Until we establish a world-wide network law, and an agency with authority to enforce it, uncooperative legal systems will continue to hinder finding and prosecuting internet criminals.

Genealogy Online

The internet streamlines every aspect of family history work, from research to ordinances. Having an online database of genealogical data eliminates countless hours of tedious work that, if required, would cripple the ability of members world-wide to perform proxy ordinances. If every name submitted to the temple was sent to Salt Lake, then checked by hand against Church records for duplicates, temple work would crawl. Instead, we can enter new information into the Church's database from anywhere in the world, the data is checked automatically for any possible errors or conflicts, and then we can print of an ordinance sheet that we can take to the temple. What a miracle, and what a blessing!

Networks: fragile to ubiquitous. Users: stupid as ever.

In The Cuckoo's Egg, Cliff Stoll describes the Arpanet as a collection of fragile relationships built on trust. As the Arpanet has long since been superseded by the Internet, the fragile trust that networks were once built upon has been superseded by the need for information. No modern university could justify lacking internet access on grounds that a hacker might infiltrate their systems, and most homes and businesses find that the benefits of the internet well outweigh any risk of intrusion. However, the digital community has had a cultural revolution since Cliff tracked the KGB informant crawling his network. In the days of Cliff's hacker major security holes went unpatched for years, but now operating system and user software vendors distribute patches via the internet within days or even hours of discovering a vulnerability. Most vendors even bundle tools that automatically find, download and install updates for their products to simplify the process for users.
Although the issues of networks and trust have evolved since the days of The Cuckoo's Egg, issues of poor administration and careless users have not. Software, no matter how secure, can't protect a user who's stupid enough to download and execute an email attachment from a stranger. Security measures in an operating system are worthless if the systems manager does not understand how to use them. People still pick common words as their passwords despite decades of knowledge of the dictionary attack. Others use a pet's name, their birthdates, or other information available to anyone who reads their Facebook profiles. Software has yet to completely protect against user stupidity, and I doubt it ever will. Additional security measures will never make up for users' ignorance, so when will internet safety make its way into the education system? When elementary school children are trained to recognize suspicious emails, websites and files, those children will become the first generation of responsible computer users.

Women in Computer Science

Although many people believe that the relatively small number of women in Computer Science poses a big problem, I disagree. I believe the real problem is the large number of men in our discipline who make no contribution. Of the aspiring CS majors that I know, many—if not most—believe that CS means programming. That is not true. Computer Science is the theory of computing and the study of solving problems programatically. Based on that definition, most CS majors hate Computer Science; they just enjoy programming. If those men all moved to a more suitable major then we would not have many computer scientists at all, male or female.

The Church, Technology... no Unicode?

The Church has struggled with internationalization of its software since we started using computers. A 1984 Ensign article reports how technology was accelerating work for many departments of the church (especially for temple ordinances), but notes that the technology was not yet adapted for temples in the Orient. We still have this problem today. The Church has been very slow to adopt the Unicode standard, which is now almost two decades old. The Mission Office System still uses European character encoding, making MOS nearly unusable for missions in Asia. Even the new FamilySearch has only recently added support for Chinese names, as per the Church's own temple submission standards. Late may be better than never, but as for supporting Church software outside the Americas and Europe, the Church needs to step its efforts.

Vulgarization of the Nerds

In contrast to Cringely's depiction of Sillicon Valley in Triumph of the Nerds, Daniel Lyons claims that emerging companies in the valley have lost the vision of their precursors. If the bright and brilliant of the rising generation focus on making quick cash—through the likes of FarmVille—society as a whole will suffer the lost potential of stagnant technology. But we can't hold them to blame for a lack of higher ambition. The real problem is their customers, who lack desire to do anything more meaningful than play mindless flash games. People need to stop spending money on these virtual sinkholes so that Silicon Valley can return its attention to the meaningful problems that are waiting to be solved.

Is Amazon Green?

A recent study suggests that online shopping leads to increased carbon emissions. The average online shopper might think that avoiding a drive to the store would be more environmentally friendly, but he overlooks something: shipping burns fuel too. According to the article, a consumer must order at least 25 items at once before the carbon footprint is smaller than that of traditional shopping. I have never ordered more than 10 items at once. Since amazon.com began offering free 2-day shipping to students I rarely order more than one item at a time. This reminds me of an older article, reporting that carbon emissions from a Google search are equivalent to boiling a kettle of water. If we aren’t the ones behind the wheel of the truck, or paying the electric bill, we tend to overlook of the environmental impact of these day-to-day activities. Next time you order a book online, order with a friend. Check your query for typos before you press the search button. Bookmark your class websites rather than Googling them daily. It’s scary how wasteful we can be, but amazing how much improvement just a little change can bring.