Wasteful Patents

The problem of excessive patent protection is at present best illustrated by the software industry. Some patent protection provides an inventor with more insulation from competition than he needed to have. For example, Apple's design patent, titled, "Display screen or portion thereof with animated graphical user interface" gives Apple the exclusive rights to the page turn in an e-reader application. This, along with several other patents that Apple has acquired in the last few years, doesn't seem like a truly unique idea. Such patents only encourage patent trolls that seek excessively broad patents to pursue either a large tech company for a substantial payment or choose thousands of small tech companies as their prey, seeking smaller “license” payments. In any case, this kind of patents in software industry seem to hamper rather than encourage innovation. 

Digitizing Family History

Family history and genealogy records had been difficult to search, share, and verify before the advent of online family history tools. Recent burst of family history in information technology has made data-mining of genealogy easy and efficient. Many people have increased their efforts to build up their family tree with use of technology, especially the World Wide Web. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has inspired people to get involved in this divine purpose. Learning about our ancestors can bring perspective and understanding to our own life. FamilySearch.com is a website publicly available to enhance this divine cause. There are more resources added everyday in the internet to help build family trees and learn about our personal history. All of us should utilize these resources to explore our genealogy.

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Time to revisit Facebook Privacy Settings

Facebook has now unveiled its Graph Search tool, which turns the personal information people have shared on facebook into a powerful searchable database. "With Graph Search, you can look up anything shared with you on Facebook, and others can find stuff you've shared with them, including content set to Public. That means different people see different results," Facebook said on the page. With this new powerful search, your friends and employers can discover things you thought were private. That's why this is a very good time to review your privacy settings and go through your data on Facebook to make sure you're not sharing anything publicly that you wish you weren't. Facebook has done a good job of explaining what their privacy and security settings are when you are looking at it, but you still have to go through it. At the very least, you may want to go through photos that you are tagged in and untag the ones you don't like or think are inappropriate.

The discovery of 75 cent Hacker

Cliff Stoll, in "The Cuckoo's Egg",  begins an investigation that ends up changing the intelligence community. His extensive testing and experiments reveals not only an unauthorized access, but also the flaws of computer security. He studies methods, data paths, and the signals through an electronic maze that eventually leads him to the "Hunter". Stoll's diligence and thoroughness in his work is mesmerizing. I enjoyed the part where he accounts for six-second-time delay between data transmission and reception, and the way he finds the three missing seconds.

I think this book talks about very important issues on computer security. The author has successfully warned us on rapid development of computer softwares and their vulnerabilities. We need to test security issues on any software before we embrace it. This will help reduce the chances of inconsistencies and likelihood of software hacking. Hacking, and especially internet security is a major issue these days. This reading makes us aware of some potential problems that are related to internet security.

In the end, the author gives some of the best arguments as to why unauthorized access to computers is a serious crime. As a scientist, he understands how all benefit from the free flow of information and mutual trust.

Women in Computer Science

Designing, implementing, debugging, and optimizing are what computer scientists do. It requires a lot of patience and determination to remain focused on projects when they keep you in your workstation for a number of hours. It is very difficult to handle this pressure, especially for women, who generally need a social life. I don't mean that women lack focus, but they generally like social interactions also. Another important thing which has kept women away from computer science is computer games. Game makers have focussed on targeting their games towards men. Despite attempts of some companies to create computer games for women, they have never been hugely successful at attracting women in computer  games. This notion has created male dominance in computer science. But these notions about computer science have to change to attract more women towards this major.

Microsoft pushing too hard

There are multiple reasons why Microsoft failed in its recent release of Surface Computers. The so called "new class of PC" was probably a hype because Microsoft made too many compromises to get it to the market soon. The new Surface Tablet is thicker & heavier than the previous one and provides only about 4 hours of battery life. In some ways Microsoft was trying to get ahead of the technology today but got too ahead of itself in the process. The competition in the technology sphere is understandably unnerving, which forced Microsoft to act fast and ambitiously. The initial release of Surface has been a failure but it is just a glimpse of what the future is going to look like. It is just a matter of time before we have the feature rich, bug free Surface tablets on our laps.

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