After reading the articles for this week I began to realize how easy it is to hack into someone else’s account. I guess all you need is the last four digits of a credit card and the associated email account along with random other accounts of the same account. The fact that people tend to link all accounts and reuse passwords make it even easier to hack accounts. The reasons stated before are just things that users themselves do to make hacking accounts easier. When paired with the incompetency of Apple and Amazon’s security flaws today’s hackers are hacking more accounts simply because it is easy.

At least now I know to not link all of my accounts together. I also know to use multiple passwords and to store backups of all information. Personally, I don’t have much that I am worried about losing but if my personal information and identity were to be stolen I would not be happy. The articles have given me a new look into identity theft and the need to protect yourself online.

I decided to do this website because I thought it would have full news broadcasts and that would be pretty interesting. Once I started searching random topics on this site I realized that there was nothing longer than around thirty seconds. It also didn’t seem to be very organized. As far as usefulness I found it to be a huge disappointment. As far as ethically sound it seems to me to pass the requirements that we have learned about in class. There doesn’t seem to be any motives for monetary gain on the part of the creators of the website which seems like the most relevant topic on copyright infringement and fair use practice. I don’t see how anyone could really go through the effort to bring a lawsuit against this either. There is no malicious intent, no monetary gain and I suppose they could claim this is educational.

After reading the material and watching the video’s for this week, I’ve come to realize that it’s all about the money. When we look at sampling music we see that everything made now is pretty much a sample of something from a much earlier time. I felt like the only people who honestly cared about their stuff being sampled were the record companies that wanted to fatten their own pockets. With all the artists in “Copyright Criminals” it seemed that even when the artists themselves didn’t like that things were sampled they felt that there was nothing wrong with it as long as they got some sort of recognition. I feel that this is the right stance to take. Instead of prohibiting the use of samples, the artists using the samples should simply acknowledge the artist who’s music they are using. I don’t understand why they do not just make a website with credits of who they have sampled and just update it as others want credit. I also don’t understand how you can copyright and claim that something altered significantly is your work to begin with. I can see how the “amen break” is recognizable but a simple note or chord that is sampled cannot be claimed as one individual’s property.

The readings for this week covered a bunch of things about infringement of copyrights and “fair use”. It seems to me that as long as you are not trying to profit from your use of property, then you should be fine as long as you give credit and are willing to take it down if asked. The biggest surprise to me is how long things are copyrighted for. Seventy years after the author dies. That is ridiculous.

After reading through the articles written by Morris I realized that he had a whole lot of time to do this research. Not only does he have a lot of time but the funds and passion to investigate the pictures as well. I personally wasn’t a fan of the articles but can see the process of how hard it can be to correctly dissect the pictures we are presented.

The first thing that I thought when I first saw the pictures was does it really matter if the photograph was staged or not?

ERROL MORRIS: a fake photograph is a photograph that’s been posed.

The entire point of a picture is to present viewers with an idea or emotion and whether the photo is staged, edited or photoshopped the importance is not what we see but how we feel about it. If Fenton had moved the balls into the road it was to present to us what he wanted us to see and that’s the only thing that matters.

In the case of “Photography as a weapon” we see how captions and photoshopping changes how we see images. Once again, we are presented “fake” pictures. Once again, it doesn’t matter how legitimate the pictures are. The point of the picture of the missiles was intended to present the idea that Iran has missiles. The fact that one misfired is irrelevant, simply because the threat is there in our minds that Iran has missiles that may or may not reach us.

1. To find an Oped on a labor dispute involving teachers before 1970 I first visited Wikipedia to clarify what an Oped was. After that I visited Proquest’s historical newspaper section. I searched the words labor dispute education and limited my results by document type to Letter to the Editor. The following is the article I found.

http://search.proquest.com.mutex.gmu.edu/docview/148000790/1391CE241793EF722FD/6?accountid=14541

2. The first documented use of solar power that I found was also found on Proquest. I started off on Wikipedia just to look for key dates and names. Once at Proquest I looked for “solar power” and searched through the articles by date. The first 4 articles were of no relevance so I settled on this article.

http://search.proquest.com.mutex.gmu.edu/docview/144876686/1391CE6EEC93987AE8B/1?accountid=14541

3. For the California State Ballot initiatives and voting data I found that googling California Ballot Initiatives Database gave me the best results. This paired with ballotpedia.org seems to give me the most accurate results for ballt initiatives and how the votes were recorded. These are the links for both sites.

http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/1900_ballot_measures

http://library.uchastings.edu/library/guides/california-research/ca-ballot-pamphlets.html

I had no idea how much time, money and effort it took to digitize history. After reading this chapter of the book I have come to realize that there is no way I ever want to take part in the processes of digitization. The chapter was broken down into eight chapters:

1. Introduction
2. Why Digitize the Past? Costs and Benefits
3. Digitizing Text: What Do You Want to Provide?
4. To Mark Up, Or Not To Mark Up
5. How to Make Text Digital: Scanning, OCR, and Typing
6. Digital Images
7. Audio and Moving Images
8. Who Does the Digitizing? Should You Do It Yourself?

Each chapter covered the various aspects of digitizing documents and the processes that go into turning analog items into digital ones. Chapter 5 through 7 in particular are the most technically informative chapters. These chapters explain the different formats that are in use currently and the pro’s and con’s of the programs in place along with the equipment that is necessary to accomplish digitization of analog items. The final chapter explains the reasons for outsourcing the task of digitizing compared to doing it in house. I know that if this task is placed on me after reading this chapter I will try to outsource it unless of course I can’t afford it which is one of the arguments for doing it yourself if it is a small project.

This is what happens when I do homework

That’s all I’m going to say for now. Good luck everyone

To be perfectly honest I read this article through not knowing what the author was talking about and what the point of it was exactly. The article contained a lot of technical terms which I had no previous knowledge about and I felt like I was drowning in the material.

After I completed the article I went through and skimmed through some of my classmates posts to try to get some insight into the text and was surprised that the point of the article was that it was the vision of today’s world that the author believed he would see. He describes the “memex” which is today’s computer. There are striking differences mainly in size and structure but the similarities in today’s laptops are also described. Bush predicted that we would have a device ran by buttons and levers that would project images on screens for the viewer. He also describes how data is stored and linked together by the user which is similar to the way our laptops operate today.

I found it difficult to process his vision and couldn’t see it personally until after reading other blogs so I am amazed that someone could have anticipated the future of technology fifty years before it becomes a reality.