Kids

It feels like they have an excruciating need to know our whereabouts at all times, or to have an up-to-date background check on any new friendship we encounter. These are all simple parental instincts.

Furthermore, video games, movies, and music records all share one thing in common: they have ratings. These ratings allow parents to choose whether or not the media is appropriate for their child to watch. 

Even pay-per-view television has parental control, allowing the setup of a secure pin code.

But what about when it comes to downloading or watching movies online? What about the billions of applications that we have available nowadays for our smartphones?

The majority of mobile apps do not provide any privacy information, which makes it hard for mothers and fathers to decide which apps are safe to let their kids use. Nevertheless, some mobile companies do provide warnings and notifications when a user tries to download applications with a certain kind of content.

I read this article about kids and parents downloading apps and the problems it brings along!

What do you think about it???

Copyright

Many times the questions about copyright and ownership arise. Especially in the case of open source software it might become a problem to identify the real owner of a specific piece of work.

 I tried to figure out how the legal aspect in an open source project is laid out since this seems to make the situation of protecting intellectual property a fair amount harder. In one of my courses at university we have been working with OpenStack a cloud based computing program. It is an open source project with 1197 participants (at least 250 of them code contributors) from 92 companies and more participation announced all of the time.  Now, with some many people working on one and the same thing who owns the copyright and who gets a license?

According to an article I read the rights are distributed as follows: “OpenStack has the attributes that make open source developers happy: copyrights are kept by the contributors, the project is under the Apache Software License (ASL) 2.0, and the project is governed by a board with eight out of twelve elected seats.”

Apparently OpenStack is one of the projects that works just fine the way it is run despite the fear of corporate-led projects. One example would be Sun Microsystems's acquisition by Oracle and the ongoing problems that have ensued for some of the open source projects that Sun once led (OpenOffice.org, Hudson, MySQL, and Java).

An interview with Jonathan Bryce, founder of The Rackspace Cloud and member of the OpenStack Project Policy Board (PPB) also revealed some insight into the copyright policies and the success of OpenStack.

"We don't own the copyright," Bryce explained, "[contributors] decide who owns the code." With all contributions licensed under ASL 2.0, there's not a huge potential for Rackspace to hijack the OpenStack project.

So far no copyright issues have arisen in the OpenStack environment but as we could see on other projects the open source factor can bring nasty lawsuits and big trouble. 

FIRST blog

I came across this article yesterday regarding privacy violation and since we talked about privacy and data protection in a recent lecture, I thought this might be a good first topic to blog about.

Hipster and Path are the two Apple apps that by “mistake” uploaded a user’s address book information with all their contacts without any explicit permission. Of course, both of the companies apologized publicly for the inconvenience caused. But I wonder if this is enough. Considering that they violated so many people’s privacy, how can it be so easy to undo this kind of action? I mean, is it good enough to have a decent PR agent that will publish an official apology in the newspaper and on a blog to make things right again? Hipster apparently hosted a summit to discuss best practices and privacy standards as a way to straighten out their error. Also it was promised that all the uploaded private data was deleted immediately as they came to be aware of the problem.

It seems like in most cases the only compensation user’s get is a simple apology but should we really let them get away so easily? There is a bunch of privacy laws that “supposedly” protect a consumer but are they used effectively?

I believe that almost non of the users that experienced the privacy invasion by either of the two software applications actually raise their voice to complain about it in a legal form.

This brings me to the point that WE users need to care more about our own privacy in order to make companies/organizations be more careful when it comes down to protecting it. 

If anyone is interested in the article itself, here is the link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16962129