P A 388K Information Policy @bingut - Tumblr Blog

The Brave New World of IoT

Embedded computer systems typically a microprocessor based system that encapsulates process knowledge. We can sell thousands machine to new customer but this customer wants to take some other metrics of view new packaging machine and take it into the ERP system if we can do that we can sell soldier goes home. We do not have an Internet of Things yet now conversely the Internet of Things pervasive computing technology provides technology in the infrastructure take this data from the machines that were producing and make it available to the enterprise and beyond IT integration and communications becomes a node part the system you do not isolate these devices putting out these so how we going do this. When we won part open source Internet of Things trance messaging transport we need an HTTP, it will need the same thing HTTP is an internet people we need a protocol that we use for the Internet of Things to transport and send back data back and forth second three-party nurses in big bold and IT and develop centric application tooling. We do not really have the same open access to embedded system. We only have it in part, however, it’s not generally available to the development community. The semiconductor industry has exceeded the capabilities of the software in our technology to keep up with its serve warm on public private cloud deployment crucial we cannot deploy into servers and applications. I think it’s just the beginning of the IoT instead of the end.

sarap2015-blog

The Internet of Things

bingut

I am glad you pointed out Accountability. One of my researches is focusing on vision based control. My understanding is that if the self-driving car is close to the navigation directions, then the vision system on the car cannot detect the navigation directions due to physical properties of the cameras. Therefore, I think it’s the technology we used on the self-driving car is not mature enough instead of the software or the mapping system the software is relaying on should be responsible for the accident. I agree with you that this will bring the insurance company to rethink their insurance decisions and remake their insurance policies.

Although IoT has been with us in some form and under different names for many years, the it is suddenly the thing. The ability to connect, communicate with, and remotely manage an incalculable number of networked, automated devices via the Internet is becoming pervasive, from the factory floor to the hospital operating room to the residential basement. The transition from closed networks to enterprise IT networks to the public Internet is accelerating at an alarming pace—and justly raising alarms about security. As we become increasingly reliant on intelligent, interconnected devices in every aspect of our lives, how do we protect potentially billions of them from intrusions and interference that could compromise personal privacy or threaten public safety?

Reflection on The Internet of Things

When the Internet of Things comes to fruition is it going to really reduce complexity, add value and give us more time in our lives? I’ve seen some incredible projects and truly believe the Internet of Things is going to bring all these things for life. Also I’ve seen some incredible medical project, transportation project and secured. Across the industrial sector the Internet of Things technology, the notion is truly helping us but I am going to talking about things here are embedded computers, embedded computers have been around for many years now. As we’ve seen their capacities are expanding into more capabilities, but it is the human mindset that how we apply these the problem inhibiting the expansion internet things.

When we talk to customers about internet things whether it’s devices, whether it’s infrastructure services or complete in the end Internet of Things service delivery. We always get into these what’s right? and the Internet of Things is kind like Jessica Rabbit in Roger Rabbit, is like I am not bad, I am just drawn that way. The internet they could not have taken a worse because it is really not using Internet technology the way that we know it like HTTP in browsers, so once we get the classification right, is the internet things that we’re going to have to give connectivity so we have wireless or Ethernet wired connective, mesh networking and then once we get that we have to figure out which is it? Is it going to be the Intel architectures against the armor protection in what operating system we are going to run and once we get that we can say what development tools are we going to use, i.e., write Java, C or C++ code, and then once we have the hardware in the operating system in the collectivity, what’s going to be our discovery protocol in our data representation protocol? How we’re going to manage millions of things in this new world of the Internet and then finally have billions of devices we are probably going have to connect at the cloud computing and we are going to be creating all this data and there’s new thing there which is call Big Data. I think that could be important but to do that we have to understand Sandra and to understand Linux. Something that looked pretty simple is actually a lot very complex layers of computer technology communications and security in cloud computing and data representation and back in implementations, we’ve really back to get to the point where for the Internet of Things to really take off to scale to the large number of devices by 2020. Something pretty radical is going to happen, the most profound technologies are those that disappeared so for, during the last few years, the researchers were trying to make embedded devices disappear. Where we can do? How we can approach this to where we can enable the Internet of Things actually come to fruition to help personalize? If we look back, we get some emotions here: in first thing we can say is that we can basically split it into two parts. The first few years was embedded IT rules; the second few years was maybe IT had some notions that we should have been looking at when we’re in designing embedded systems.

I would like to ask the following question at the end of this essay: What’s the difference between embedded computer and pervasive computing?

jakethefakesnake-blog

Internet and the Developing World

Very interesting report, for a couple of different reasons - it called forth for action steps governments around the world should take, just like a couple of us are doing in our projects, and it assumed that the reader is already a supporter of the Sustainable Development Goals. That second one is non-trivial, I think. Probably all of us in the class agree with them as worthy goals for 2030, but it’s not too hard to think of a couple of governments that don’t want to support SDG # 5: Gender Equality, at all (Saudi Arabia, for instance). And the priority list seems a little off to me, could definitely be argued over.

I had a couple of real problems with the methodology of the report, especially the ridiculous graph showing the “Business As Usual” path (what does that even mean?) and how it wouldn’t be good enough to achieve the “Sustainable Development Goals” path. That chart was completely meaningless and there was nothing to back it up. I also didn’t like how the report called for action steps without any serious mention of the funding required to achieve them. It’s a major oversimplification of the situation. If governments spend money on the action steps called for by the report, that means that there is less money to spend on other projects. Those opportunity costs need to be taken into account.

The biggest red flag for me was the potential conflict between SDG #s 7, 11, and 13 and the rest. The Information and Communication Technology recommendations put forth by the report would, at least in the short term, drastically increase the carbon emissions and other environmental problems of the nations that adopted them. Sure, the report points out that eventually fast technology sharing leads to increased efficiency in systems. We’re about at that point in Europe and the United States, where appliances and automobiles are getting ever more efficient. But there are problems that we haven’t even come close to solving yet, like what in the world are we going to do with these lithium ion batteries that are too toxic to safely put in landfills and that are quickly becoming one of the most ubiquitous items in our waste stream.

I enjoyed one of the later links, the one to the State Department’s Technology Salon, a lot more. Articles on that page (when I read it) were about African women having access to broadband, and how that can be accomplished. There was also an advertisement for a talk hosted by Wayan Vota on which medium to invest in for sustainable development, mobile phones or cheap laptops. The headline, “Mobile Phones vs. Computers: a False ICT4D Choice?” implies that it doesn’t really matter, but I think that’s a straw man argument. It’s gotta be laptops or desktops all the way, because laptops can be used for creation whereas mobile phones are designed for consumption. I’m not much of a coder, but I know enough that it would be excrutiating to consider designing any piece of software, or even a web page, on a phone. Remember that one of the theses of the ICT report is that greater access to communications technology helps everyone through sharing of ideas. But women in Africa or any other developing region will need to be able to create their own content as well as access others. To say otherwise, I think, is to risk devaluing their own potential contributions and propping up existing thoughts.

Also! A little bit of a tangent here, but I thought you all would enjoy reading this article about social media ranking in China: http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/how-china-wants-to-rate-its-citizens?intcid=mod-yml

Sample quote:

“Alibaba, the world’s biggest online shopping platform, creates an incentive for customers to use its own payment service (also part of Alipay) by raising the Sesame scores of those who do. The company makes no secret of its interest in accessing the payment history of its four hundred million users, to make judgments about their creditworthiness and character. “Someone who plays video games for ten hours a day, for example, would be considered an idle person, and someone who frequently buys diapers would be considered as probably a parent, who on balance is more likely to have a sense of responsibility,” Li Yingyun, Sesame’s technology director, told Caixin, a Chinese magazine. In some ways, Tencent’s credit system goes further, tapping into users’ social networks and mining data about their contacts, for example, in order to determine their social-credit score.”

bingut

ICT provides economic opportunities to both urban and rural populations. One common contribution is that it increases productivity and makes the market work more efficiently, although the magnitude of the impact on economic growth is likely to be different. The fact that virtually all new mobile customers in the coming years will be in developing countries, and more specifically in rural areas, means that the ICT platform is reaching population with low levels of income and literacy. As a result, ICT is becoming the largest distribution platform of providing public and private services to millions of people in rural and poor areas. Market information, financial services, education and health services had largely been unavailable in those areas in the past due to lack of connectivity of any kind. Now the wireless platform is promoting NEW economic and social opportunities at all levels for the poor population. It is very true that ICT is changing the way businesses conduct themselves and high internet speed especially. But this can not be said of the developing countries, I come from a country where internet speed is a big problem, I will like to find out if there is a concrete program by the World Bank to assist developing countries, like China and other countries in similar situation. Furthermore, I would like to ask is the ratio of increase in high speed internet connection and economic growth same for rural and urban economics?

aksullyopinions-blog

I agree with the sentiment that the internet and supporting technologies can play an important role in helping to meet the host of development goals for 2030 or any reasonable date really. But I think there are two main issues with how this will unfold: how the infrastructure is provided to these counties and how it is used. Therefore, the internet/computing technology are not going to magically solve everything.

An improper foundation for these technologies is likely to do more harm than good. So care needs to be taken with how this infrastructure is rolled out. A year and a half ago, a friend of mine briefly became “internet [in]famous” with her blog post “the-problem-with-little-white-girls-and-boys”. In it, she talks about her experience volunteering in 3rd world countries in high school. Looking back on her experience, she felt she caused more harm than good. In particular, her group would work on laying bricks for a building, but they had no construction experience. As a result, the locals would tear down their work every night and re-build it over night with the proper foundation. This would happen every day. Her take away wasn’t that volunteering is bad, but that the system of throwing volunteers at a problem they can’t solve is.

Facebook has been offering to provide the “last mile” infrastructure for “free” – but as we’ve seen in class this is hardly “free” since it was to promote their own company. Which is why I think its important that the one of our readings talked about a need for “local ICTs.” Even if its an international company, they should have ties to the local community. I think its important that if the implementation is going to rely on developing the infrastructure for this technology, then the local citizens need to be prepared to handle the technology. Other countries should not have a dominating say; otherwise, that seems to work against the SDGs. From our previous readings, we know that Africa as a whole is not currently equipped with a strong internet structure. In fact, Africa’s internet is routed through Europe. So if making use of computing technology is going to improve the lives of these countries, there is a lot of work left to be done to provide them with a solid infrastructure that doesn’t leave them unnecessarily dependent on others. However, even the United States has yet to create a perfect internet backbone – there are rural areas in the US where the “internet” is almost a myth and “high speed” internet is just a dream. And where will the funding for this come from? Will you really be able to get time and money from people without the expectation that they will get some benefit of their own?

Then there is how this new infrastructure is used. Our healthcare infrastructure still hasn’t adapted to technology – healthcare.gov was a disaster at the start and electronic medical records aren’t common place. So how do we look to give this technology to other countries when we still have so many flaws in our own adaption of it? Additionally, there are a lot of information policy questions which are unanswered [no matter which country you look at]. Every topic we’ve covered in this class is unsolved – and I don’t see a solution forming in the immediate future. So I can see how computers can help reach development goals, but there are a lot of road blocks in the way.

bingut

I agree that ICTs are powerful to extend economic opportunities to millions of people. But the way they create opportunities and provide services to rural people is different than to urban people. Besides the limitations of existing telecom infrastructure in developing countries, the principal constraints in adopting and using ICT applications, especially for small businesses, include lack of capacity to assess returns and costs of using ICT, and a shortage of and inability to retain ICT-skilled labor. In some countries, business associations assist with needs assessment for businesses to invest in ICT (note that not all of them would benefit from using ICT), advise them on technology choice, and provide common business applications (e.g. Human Resource, accounting) at low cost to small businesses. Some governments offer support of training and skills development. For example, Africa still has the lowest telephone and Internet user penetration (about 25 percent and 5 percent compared to the world average of over 70 percent and 20 percent respectively) and highest costs (e.g. price basket for Internet per month is over $40 compared to the world average of $20). The costs are big bottlenecks for ICT uptake, given the low income levels in the region.

Information and Communications Technologies for the Developing World

Some developing countries have sporadic electricity, records are kept by hand because computers are scarce and unreliable and impractical. But 75 percent of the world cell phones are available and affordable. It’s the use of appropriate available technology that’s the driving force behind United Methodist communications, ICT for D information and communications technology for Development. For instance, if one doctor needs to send an immediate health record to multiple villages or other doctors, he/she can utilize open source software like frontline SMS, which sends group cell phone text without using of the Internet. By using the mass text messaging software, life-saving information can be broadcast to health centers in communities in developing countries. In developing country, the kind of high-tech entertainment oriented technology that drives American and European consumers is simply out of place in the Society’s primitive practices often run head first into 21st century demands. United Methodist communications ICT for teen church initiatives helped to integrate novel solutions with regional realities. There is limited access to power and the Internet, in this complex landscape, traditional computer supplied by well-meaning donors often art practical the rugged conditions make short life for those technologies. United Methodist communications is working with volunteering mission teams as well as local and international partners to build technological capacity that is sustainable and empowering. The communicates in developing countries can close the book on outdated textbooks and use local software in the Internet for 21st century education. The facility can run on solar energy which is equipped with ruggedized ultra-low power equipment and it also employs locally trained management, teacher and technicians. Technology alone is never the answer, it’s confusing breaks down, wears out and provides little human relief. However, by using appropriate technology, people can be empowered by providing proper training and support.

In order to better understand the relationship between information communication technologies and poverty, IDRC decided to support a set of projects that would look at that issue especially from a demand perspective so how were the poor using ICT. Researches have been done for how the poor people were accessing information and communication technologies, and why into and to what extent why they doing that. The researches also reveal how and why the developing-country are using modern communication tools. The research also highlights regional variations and uncovers evidence linking ICTs and poverty alleviation. Information lives of the Poor: Fighting poverty with technology explores the impacts of this unprecedented

For the developing countries, the mobile Internet is taking off and surprisingly it’s not policy or regulation that cost the strength but user-generated content like YouTube and Facebook and other social networking that brings young people present on it and Africa has seen that over the last 5-6 years. It has not been really any increase in the number of internet users due to limitations such as excess electricity at home, cost of a computer or the ability to use and maintain a computer.

Internet access through mobile amongst the developing countries, is not happening to the same extent in South Asia as it is in Africa. In South Asia, there is still some bottlenecks for that and in Africa it is growing which is a good surprise but other issue is around the regulatory environment that tends to spur access or not.

The government, of course, prone wants to tax the providers who are making money, by doing this the government can also make a lot of money. But the researches have shown that if the providers are taxed too much, they will probably reduce the benefit to poor people. Even though there is still the bottleneck to the internet access, there are new questions beyond the access that is related to extend to which ICT leads to new productive users.

panamaluisito-deactivated201605

E = mc^2, where m = idea, c = flow, and E = emergence...

This week’s book, Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread—The Lessons From A New Science by Alex Pentland, was very interesting. I may be way off but, I feel like this book, in a way, took a more focused look at the things that lead to emergence in a system of people (organizations, communities, cities, and nations). More specifically, he honed in on how idea flow or social interaction is the catalyst for innovation and change. Although not directly speaking on emergence, his research did conclude that the cumulative intellect of a group of people in a community, city, organization, ext…had less to do with the individual intellect of its members, and more to do with the way the members of said group interact. This was very resemblant to the concepts in the emergence reading we had several weeks ago.

It is funny because there were several instances where Dr. Pentland would, very eloquently, build up the research he did for many of the conclusions he drew in this book. My expectations were always that his research would result in some astronomically incredible conclusion that I would never have thought of, but it seemed as though much of the conclusions he drew up were common sense. I do not want to diminish his work in any way. I think this book was very revealing and interesting, but a lot of the conclusions drawn were what I expected them to be. For example, one of his major points in the book was that the people with a diverse social group were always the most innovative people. He mentioned that this was due to the fact that people with diverse social groups could look at a problem in a more holistic view and be open to many more ideas. This makes sense to me and would not strike me as a conclusion that shocks me.

That said, what was intriguing was type of person Dr. Pentland chose to contrast against the person with a diverse social network to prove his point: the “expert”. This point hit home for me because I have worked in an organization where new ideas were like the plague and people in said organization would put all their efforts in finding a way to make known solutions to old problems fix new problems. I am blessed to have a very diverse work experience, and as an U.S. Army Officer, I also have to change jobs quite frequently. In my 12 years of service, I have had the honor of holding 7 different positions. My last job was one that brought me to a predominantly civilian organization. What this means is that, unlike my past jobs where personnel come and go frequently, my last job had people working for me that had been there for over 20 years doing the same thing. Kudos to my boss who understood my diverse background and saw putting me in the leadership position he did as an opportunity to bring innovative new ideas to the group and move them forward. That said, that job was easily the most difficult leadership challenge I had faced in my career. I have led a platoon of over 30 men into combat, I have commanded a company of over 200 men in combat, I have been the CIO-J6 of an organization of over 3000 personnel spread out all over the nation of Afghanistan, and none of these jobs were nearly as challenging to me as working to lead this group of nearly 20 civilian personnel and getting them to adopt new ideas. The biggest challenge was getting a group of entrenched personnel, who had done their jobs the same way for decades, to understand that they had to get with the times. As Dr. Pentland showed throughout his research, a group’s ability to produce innovative ideas were based on the cumulative intellect of the group. His research showed that the groups whose leaders were “experts” suffered from the fact that the leader is good at what he is good at and wants to fit solutions to what he/she knows. In my case, although I was assigned the leader of the group, the true leaders were the personnel who had been there for several years and had the influence over their peers. Every collaborative effort I made to have the group begin looking to new innovative ways to achieve our goals, were railroaded by the naysayers who did not want to learn new ways of doing things. I wish I could say that I found a way to motivate these naysayers to get on board, but I actually ended up having to remove them from our group. It was not until this happened that our organization began to flourish. Without the constant contradiction to what needed to be done, people in the group were open to the innovative ideas brought up in our collaborative sessions. This compounded by the tangible, positive results our organization was producing due to the adoption of several of these innovative ideas, help foster a cultural change in our organization. As a Soldier, it was hard for me to have to let go my team mates instead of making the effort to bring them into the fold, but I realized that with the time I had, something had to give.

I’m going a bit long here, but the point of my story was to show how Dr. Pentland’s concept of a having a diverse social network leads to great idea flow, and to show an example of how experts that tend to live in their comfort zones can suppress innovation. Great read!

bingut

I agree with you that in the book the author honed in on how idea flow or social interaction is the catalyst for innovation and change. Think of how many organizations there are that would like to influence our thoughts. They could do it without announcing themselves, but instead work through agents with nice personalities who could maintain engaging web personas. These "leaders" need not reveal that they are working to change our thought to align with some agenda or other. Imagine large numbers of paid shills, working hours every day, using these techniques to sway public opinion without ever showing their true colors.

I’m delight that you pointed out that having a diverse social network leads to great idea flow, and to show an example of how experts that tend to live in their comfort zones can suppress innovation. It's time for a new social revolution!

I support Social Physics as a new science. Yes, you are right. All the observations and relationships between cause and effect are all familiar to us as common sense but this new science seeks to bring mathematical precision to the most imprecise of all things, human behavior. We need new social experiments which offer incentives in a subconscious and spiritual level rather than just on a monetary one. I have written a book which focuses on reorganizing our social relations and eliminating top down pressures to create a more just and socially mobile society.

tbhartnett50

Weekly Blog 10: Social Physics & Switch

Having perused Social Physics by Alex Pentland, I can’t help but think of Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. The Heath brothers wrote about five years prior to the publication of their book, but I think many of their recommendations in terms of business and social strategies for change make a lot of sense in terms of Peatland’s work. The Heaths recommend three things for producing change: ‘motivate the elephant’, ‘direct the rider’, and ‘clear the path’. ‘Motivating the elephant’ more or less involves waking the latent potential in everyone for change. ‘Directing the rider’ means generally to encourage the natural restraining tendencies to productively focus on the change hand rather than remaining in fear. ‘Clearing the path’ means removing obstacles that restrict the change process.

To me, Social Physics aligns nicely with these premises. Through the combination of effective social norms and incentives, we can ‘motivate the elephant’ to engage in new forms of engagement and information generation / sharing. We can ‘direct the rider’ to break out of his or her echo chamber or isolation to be more receptive to new information from networks of contrarians who might have strategies that run against the grain of common sense but have significant consensus for being reasonable solutions. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, involves ‘clearing the pathways’ and providing new avenues for sharing that information and creating those same social incentives.

In the context of Pendland’s argument for social physics as a new sort of math that will enable us to develop more valuable social structures, I think this is truly where the rubber meets the road for information policy. Breaking down the obstacles to information sharing apparatus and designing more efficient, value creating enterprises is where information policy can have its best effect. Information policy, at best, should be an enabling capacity, and it can do this best through modes that remove obstacles and incentivizes strong social network performance.

Without getting too specific, but rather focusing on principles, I think we ought to look at information policy as a means rather than an end unto itself. When viewed from this perspective, the question becomes not “How can we make everyone’s data secure?” but rather, “How does this policy facilitate the secure transfer and storage of information so that we ultimately create a better society?” I think this is one of the best values in Pendland’s work, helping us to ask the right questions that identify the purpose of any information policy. If policies regarding the pitfalls and opportunities of data sharing techniques don’t somehow focus on the larger questions of bringing value to our social exchanges, we have constructed them too narrowly, and at best this represents a missed opportunity.

bingut

I am delight that you agree with the argument for social physics as a new sort of math that will enable us to develop more valuable social structures. I am also happy that you think break down the obstacles to information sharing apparatus and design more efficient, value creating enterprises is where information policy can have its best effect. However, at the meantime, I think we need social physics. In the area of psychology, in the management things, we are back in the days of alchemy, we know something about it from having learned a lot of stuff, but there really aren’t any bones there. That, however is the biggest thing that’s happened in the last several years. For the first time, we have big data. The big data is most about human behavior. Where do the people go? What do they do? What do the buy? As a consequence, we can make these observatories of the humans. And we can really for the first time understand in a quantitative, predictive way, i.e., we can write down equations to predict what people will do. That’s the huge change. That’s the focus of the conversation. It’s about the fact that we can now understand customers and employees, how we organize in a quantitative and predictive way.

Reflection on "Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread"

The book of "Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread" by one of the world's leading data scientists Sandy Pentland gives a landmark tour of the new science of idea flow, offering revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influence. Through years of groundbreaking experiments, Sandy has distilled remarkable discoveries significant enough to become the bedrock of a whole new scientific field: social physics. “Humans have more in common with bees than we like to admit: We're social creatures first and foremost. Our most important habits of action—and most basic notions of common sense—are wired into us through our coordination in social groups. Social physics is about idea flow, the way human social networks spread ideas and transform those ideas into behaviors.” - from Penguin Press.

The author thinks the biggest problem in the world is not the global warming, it’s not war. Really what it is is how can we organize among ourselves to make good decisions and carry them out. We can cure global warming later if we could all just decide what to do and get about doing it. And the impossibility of that makes us not even consider that as an option. What the author thinks is that we don’t know how to manage ourselves, we do not know how to integrate our idea, our opinions, our views to make decisions and carry them through. If we knew how to do that, we could transform things in ways that are really hard to imagine. To do that through, we need to understand a lot more about ourselves and about our species and about how we work together. We need social physics. In the area of psychology, in the management things, we are back in the days of alchemy, we know something about it from having learned a lot of stuff, but there really aren’t any bones there. That, however is the biggest thing that’s happened in the last several years. For the first time, we have big data. The big data is most about human behavior. Where do the people go? What do they do? What do the buy? As a consequence, we can make these observatories of the humans. And we can really for the first time understand in a quantitative, predictive way, i.e., we can write down equations to predict what people will do. That’s the huge change. That’s the focus of the conversation. It’s about the fact that We can now understand customers and employees, how we organize in a quantitative and predictive way.

The impossibility of getting everybody to work together looks like a Utopia, which we do not even think about it. However, there is hope because in the last decade for the first time ever almost all humanity is connected by cell phones, computers and other networks that means for the first time ever humanity has voice and we have social networks to connect each other to share data. Unfortunately, those social networks seem to be more the cause of panics and crashes, then the source of wisdom to really get them to make us smarter. Solving this big problem, we have to figure out how we work, how we share ideas as human so that we can work with our humanity not against it. So for the last two centuries, as thought by Adam Smith, we’ve thought of ourselves as individuals competing, we write our government that way, run companies that way. We also know that we are much more than that. We are social beings; we are interacting with each other. And one of the main things is we do learn from each other that’s the original social network and which we have leverage if we are going to make ourselves smarter. It’s been difficult because the science is really tough. But the big brings revolution. Social scientist finally gives us the data from social networks, cell phones, credit cards that we need to be able to understand human behavior. And as a consequence, we can write down equations that talk about ideas from person to person through social networks. The science is emerging. It’s the pattern of the idea flow that makes these teams smarter, so when there are lots of ideas coming, then everybody is equally engaged, the collective intelligence will grow up. For the team, we can improve the engagement, you can improve the productivity of the group, but a group like that just has engaged is very static not very creative. Creativity comes from the ideas outside workgroup which is exploration. Exploration feeds in new ideas into this idea machine which figures out new ways to do things. Idea flow determines productivity, innovation.

If we ask the question how can social networks make a smarter? How can we come together as a species make better decisions? We find our current social networks have the problem of echo chambers and these echo chambers destroyed the wisdom of the crowd. Therefore, we are left with face to face connections. One of the things we can do is to apply our face to face skills into digital social networks. And in the longer term what we should do is building social networks that have echo cancellation to protect us from the badness.

hunterk1516

Where Do We Go From Here?

In The Global War for Internet Governance, Laura DeNardis outlines many of the complex policy issues that surround charting a path forward for the Internet. These questions involve a diverse set of actors and require us to think not only about how the actions that we take will affect technologically developed nations but also those parts of the world with less mature network infrastructure. Perhaps because I come from a computer science background, I appreciated the fact that the author delved into the technical details of these issues in a substantial manner, and I believe the author did a good job of overviewing in a balanced manner various policies that could be implemented.

I enjoyed reading early in the book about “critical Internet resources” and how they are managed and distributed. Having taken a couple of networking classes in the past, I was already familiar with some of the basics of how DNS resolution is performed and how IP addresses function, but some of the technical detail was new to me, especially those details that occurred at a more macro level. For instance, Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) were an unfamiliar concept to me (even though they probably shouldn’t have been, given their importance). I also appreciated the discussion of how ICANN, top-level domain operators, and other actors cooperate to provide a functional Internet, and more specifically, it was interesting to hear about the particular ways in which the United States (through the Department of Commerce) has held on to its historical governance role by use of the intermediary of ICANN. I had read of the current tension in which other nations are pressuring for less U.S. influence over the Internet, but I never fully understood what this entailed. At this point, I’m not exactly sure where I fall on the question of whether the United States should abandon its privileged role in Internet governance. It makes a lot of sense that a truly global phenomenon should be managed by such an organization as the United Nations, but on the other hand, it doesn’t appear to me that the Internet has been hindered by this loose American oversight. Consequently, I’m not sure if I see a burning need to destabilize the status quo; however, I recognize that if I were a citizen of a different nation I might see things differently.

As the book described how standards and protocols for the Internet have come to be, it highlighted the fact that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which are crucial for the ongoing success of the Internet and the web, respectively, operate in a very “bottom-up” manner in which openness and voluntary contribution by members are key. This is still somewhat remarkable to me that such a distributed process can have such successful results, and it’s this sort of result that makes me very hesitant to bring governmental (or UN) influence into considerations of Internet architecture. For instance, one topic that the author addresses is how peering and transit agreements come into being between various network providers. DeNardis makes the case that the well-established networks operated by Tier 1 providers have little to no reason to interconnect with newer, smaller networks on the basis of settlement-free peering agreements despite the fact that interconnecting might be the most sensible action from an overall technical perspective. While I understand that governments need to perform some oversight and regulation of a utility-like structure such as the Internet, I think that in a case such as this I would be more inclined to let the free market decide the result rather than having a government issue some mandate for peering.

Toward the end of the book, the author focused on the ways in which Internet governance can be made a tool for questionable purposes. One specific technique that she mentioned was deep packet inspection (DPI) and how it may be used to control the type of content that passes through a network, such as is the goal when a government is wanting to censor its citizens. Given the discussion in last week’s book regarding the potentiality of installing a real-time, wide-reaching DPI system across the the Internet backbone in the U.S., this mention by the author certainly provides a moment for pause and reflection about the potential implications of that action. While I still feel that the idea of DPI for cyber-defense makes a lot of sense, I believe this section in The Global War for Internet Governance should remind us that we would need to be extremely cautious if such a system were to be implemented. An abundance of transparency, checks, balances, and accountability would be absolutely essential. The potential for “mission creep” would be very real, and personally, I’m not even quite sure where exactly I would draw the line of acceptable vs. unacceptable use of such a system. I don’t want Big Brother, but I do want adequate protection from cybercrime and cyberwarfare. Striking that proper balance would be a difficult challenge, just as is the case for many of the issues lying in the realm of Internet governance.

bingut

I agree with you that many of the complex policy issues that surround charting a path forward for the Internet and these questions involve a diverse set of actors and require us to think not only about how the actions that we take will affect technologically developed nations but also those parts of the world with less mature network infrastructure. The same as you, I also like the fact that the author delved into the technical details of these issues in a substantial manner.

I agree with your idea that it makes a lot of sense that a truly global phenomenon should be managed by such an organization as the United Nations. I strongly believe that more people means more power. There are more experts in the field of global phenomenon and they can do a great help for the organizations like United Nations to make decisions which are more helpful than individual person or country. Therefore, I think that governments need to perform some oversight and regulation of a utility-like structure such as the Internet. However, in a case of not globally issues I would be more inclined to let the free market decide the result rather than having a government issue some mandate for peering.

markmgray-blog

Global Domination of Internet Policy

I found The Global War for Internet Governance to be very informative as to how the internet works and the different protocols that make it interoperable. The book also mentions how the internet was originally not interoperable, and consisted primarily or proprietary network protocols that required companies to purchase specific products to ensure interop within their network. This gave rise to the need to have a standard TCP/IP protocol that would allow all devices to communicate with one another. I mentioned in my previous week that currently we are on the IPv4 standard and this supports a 32 bit address space. The book mentions, like I did, that the rate at which the internet is expanding we will inevitably exhaust the 4 billion IP addresses we currently have. They also mention the slow adoption of IPv6 that was supposed to be completed several years back. With this foundation the book was able to go into more depth about the privacy and governing issues that the internet has spawned.

Being international it is hard to say who should ‘control’ the internet. One could argue that the US should have this power due to its creation and vast explosion of use there. Would that then mean that other governments would be subject to the US policies about how the internet should operate? This is not the case though, countries maintain their own connections to the internet and maintain the availability within their own nation-states. This creates the issues as to when are governments able to cut off their citizens’ communication with the rest of the internet? Should governments be allowed to have such control? The book gives examples of San Francisco’s BART blocking protestors cell service to avoid a riot. This gave rise to more outrage over the blocking of communication by a regulator. I personally believe that the internet and the interop that we receive through it are good things and that allowing companies the ability to block these communications is wrong. However, expanding it to the government is a little more complicated. I find myself torn between agreeing with it in the event of a national crisis, and being against it due to the possibility of privacy concerns.

It appeared to me as though each government had its own policies in place for the internet and that they self regulate themselves. In class many of us have advocated for a detailed information policy that would intern affect the internet as well and when we hear of cases like Egypt’s internet blackout we are outraged that that is even a possibility. Should we be careful in forcing our western views on foreign countries? Should the US and its private non-profit internet managing companies be able to create policies that all internet users should follow? I don’t believe these are easy questions to answer and I don’t have a definitive answer myself. I am eager to hear other views on the matter as I believe there will be a vast array of differences.

bingut

I also found the book titled The Global War for Internet Governance by Laura DeNardis is informative. I agree with you that the internet and the interop that we receive through it are good things and that allowing companies the ability to block these communications is wrong. As I mentioned in my post from last week that when Facebook opened its application programming interface made available to other services and application builders to communicate with it. There was a spike in innovation, four thousand applications were created by non-Facebook entrepreneurs within few months. The decision made by Facebook to more interoperable lead to innovation.

I also agree with you that expanding it to the government is a little more complicated. I think the government should have the power to control it in the event of a national crisis since there are more experts who work on these issues for government. However, I think the government should not dismiss our privacy. Lacking of privacy and the massive surveillance state make us actually less safe. I think the bottom line is to ensure privacy while protecting personal or corporate data, maybe start seeing more and more online privacy tools is a good choice for us.

Reflection on The Global War for Internet Governance

The rapid growth of the internet and the risks and rewards this brings are mainly issues of cyber security in internet governance. The management of critical internet resources which usually is a term to describe domain names, e.g. CNN.COM or Google.COM and this has to be globally unique. Also the internet addresses which are binary numbers of series of 0 and 1 which is necessary in order to send or receive information on the internet. This address is not physical but virtually exists on our computer and it is logical and nature. It’s a technical area but the global struggle over who controls internet names and numbers has actually been a very long standing issue power struggles have reflected tensions over new global institutions and their role. The key feature is that the department of commerce in the United States has retained a historic relationship with this function through having a contract with a function within this organization, and having the authority to update some of the technical functions that are involved in translating the names that we understand when we type in Utexas.edu and the numbers that a computer understands when its routing information around the world.

ICAN is a private non-profit organization which has oversight names and numbers, so it controls the distribution of these numbers. Who is responsible for cyber security governance is an area that is both public and private. The private sector really does handle a lot of security but there are also private public institutions like computer emergency response teams. The internet is not a cloud, because it has a physical architecture, transmission facilities and switches which has equipment that has houses buildings with a cool machine and raised flooring and air conditioning and the people. The internet is made up of interconnected networks, it’s not one network, it’s a series of networks that make agreements to connect and to conjoined either bilaterally with each other or a shared internet exchange points.

The relationship of the internet infrastructure and intellectual property rights enforcement. Traditional online enforcement by protecting copyright, by going after a person or by going after the content itself sometimes does not work in the digital environment. So there has been a movement to have the internet service providers have something called three strikes approaches that can cut off access.

I like the three common themes the author provided in the book:

First, arrangements of technical architecture are also arrangements of power in modern society.

Second, internet governance infrastructure, the technologies, the architecture, the infrastructure is increasing becoming a proxy for broader political struggles and for control of content. Nation, States, around the world, this is a global issue which has lost control over content. Repressive governments want to suppress the media, they want to sensor information, they have to turn out to technical infrastructure to do that. Media companies have lost control at the monetization of their own content to a certain extent because of the privacy so they are turning to infrastructure to do that.

Third, the privatization of governance. We have the technology that transcend border and private companies that manage a lot of aspects of these technology but that’s not all. It’s not only private governments perform anti-trust. Most of the functions the internet governance is the purview of the private industry, so private company is managing the mapping names and numbers, they make up the majority of the internet’s backbone, they set standards for the internet and they are carrying out these core functions not only in these functions but also as actors that are forced to respond to political events on global stage.

There are numbers of open problems to watch in the near future, but the true is that right now, the internet is governed and this government has been in a constant state of flux for decades. It’s a very powerful area of the authority because we have the technical mediation of the public sphere, so democracy takes place online and we have the privatization of the conditions of civil liberties within that public sphere. The government is not fixed any more than architecture is fixed. It’s constantly changing. The stability of the internet should rank among other collective action problems that involve the world like environmental protection, human rights and basic infrastructural systems, water and energy.

markmgray-blog

Cyber War and the “Internet of Weapons”

Actual website: http://map.norsecorp.com/

I am proposing that we rename the “Internet of Everything” to the “Internet of Weapons.” After reading Cyber War by Clarke and Knake I can see this high level of interop resulting in various new vectors of attack. To backup my claim I want to cover some history of TCP/IP, specifically IPv4 our current routing system. IPv4 uses a 32-bit addressing schema to generate IP address for routing traffic all over the world. A 32-bit address space gives us 2^32 IP addresses to utilize. This means there are exactly 4,294,967,296 addresses to be used world wide. That sounds like an extremely large number. However, currently there 7.125 billion people on earth, close to doubling the number of IP addresses. Today there are 2 billion smartphones in circulation, and each of these has the ability to tie up 1 address. That is already half of the address space. You may be thinking, “so what, how does this turn connected homes into weapons?” In short, it doesn’t! The premise here is that creating an interconnected home will undoubtedly (at our current pace) exhaust our remaining address space. Ok, so we are going to run out of addresses for all of our devices what is the solution?

IPv6 is the latest version of the internet protocol (IP) and with it a whole new playground for cyber warfare. IPv6 supports a 128-bit addressing space (2^128 addresses) which is more than enough to support the internet’s infrastructure for the foreseeable future. Why do I state that it will open up new attack vectors in the word? Simply because it is new (in practice) and has not undergone the rigorous exploit attempts that have been performed on IPv4 since its beginning. IPv4 has been subject to many different exploits including the Ping of Death, DDOS, and system specific packet exploits. The ability to perform each of these attacks has been documented and in many cases there are firewalls in place to prevent them from happening again. In the “Ping of Death” attack a packet exceeding the 64 kilobytes of allowed data is sent to the destination server and causes the system to crash due to an overflow exception. This has subsequently been fixed in all known operating systems that were affected. This attack was crafted to target the Internet Protocol being used by the destination host. Thus moving to an entirely new system that has not been tested throughly will allow for these types of exploits to arise again. New systems come with new exploits and what these are we’ll just have to wait and see. It is not a far cry to imagine these exploits giving control of your connected house to a malicious user and thus causing the “Internet of Weapons.”

I want to comment specifically on one part of the book, that is when the author describes his vision of what a cyber attack would look like on a national scale. He describes trains running into each other, and power grids shutting down. These are not unlikely given an on-site hacker or intruder, but many of these systems are not connected directly to the internet. This is a common misconception and any company that has security as a relative thought creates separate networks within their company that many times do not talk. I worked for BP in their Digital Security and Counter Threat Unit over the summer and learned that all of their critical systems are behind strict security and do not have access to the internet. These systems require on-site users to operate, enable, and disable them. There are other ways that these can be infected, such as exploits in the applications, operating system vulnerabilities, and even unintentional installation of malware. It is not as simple as a hacker in Russia pressing a few keys in a terminal and disabling the entire Eastern seaboard. I can however see the Internet of Things giving hackers a way to simulate a power grid failure without actually disrupting power by taking control of home systems and rendering them inoperable on a large scale.

bingut

I am glad you proposed the current Internet Protocol issues. I think the main issues of current IPv4 protocol are Rapid depletion of the address space, which has led to the use of Network Address Translators (NATs) that map multiple private addresses to a single public IP address; Lack of hierarchy support; Complex network configuration; Lack of built-in authentication and confidentiality; A new protocol suite must satisfy some basic requirements, i.e., Large-scale routing and addressing with low overhead; Auto-configuration for various connecting situations; Built-in authentication and confidentiality. The Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is a new suite of standard protocols for the network layer of the Internet. It is designed to solve many of the problems of the current version of the Internet Protocol suite (known as IPv4) with regard to address depletion, security, auto-configuration, extensibility, and so on. IPv6 expands the capabilities of the Internet to enable new kinds of applications, including peer-to-peer and mobile applications. I am delight you proposed that it is a common misconception and any company that has security as a relative thought creates separate networks within their company that many times do not talk. I agree with you that in industrial all of their critical systems are behind strict security and do not have access to the internet. On-site users are required to to accomplish the operations.

infopolicyanw-blog

Cyber Security and Cyber War

.Are we already at Cyber War? What would be an act of Cyber War? If it’s attempting to attack our government’s infrastructure, then that’s happening continuously every second. China alone is found attacking our systems consistently, and it dramatically increases during test periods for students. Are students being assigned real world applications for their computer expertise? Are their attempts a threat to our national security and should the US take action? Cyber War, in my opinion, is often a misnomer in its daily use, and acts of war by other countries are often hard to distinguish from non-state entities. Politicians will use “Cyber War” and “Cyber-Pearl Harbor” as an attempt to stir up the masses in realizing that our cyber security is extremely important.

What would be the impact of a successful cyber attack? The US government’s infrastructure is in no way modular. Vital systems are integrated with other vital systems and pieces that don’t need network access are completely accessible from online. To move away would be to migrate a huge legacy system and it would take years to do so. They don’t even need to attack our defense system. They can just mess up a city’s infrastructure - ruin the stoplight algorithm and there would be devastation on the streets. John Oliver talks about the security around our own nuclear warheads - which is shockingly thin.

I think there are interesting situations where we are attacked by a foreign entity and data is compromised. The Sony hack in 2014 was traced back to North Korea where tons of employee information, emails, salaries, etc was released. Social security numbers were amongst the 100TB stolen. North Korea also threatened action if the movie The Interview, a mockery of North Korea, was released.

What did we do? We debated not releasing the movie, letting NK control our actions. But really, what action can we take? Data was compromised, but no one was, debatably, physically harmed. Was it an act of war? I think the issue is that there are gray lines everywhere on what constitutes an act of “Cyber War”, how to react, and against whom?

bingut

In the book the authors covered the entire state of cyber security issues from car theft by network interference to Cyberwar. After reading it, I have gotten a deeper understanding of how to secure my network. The book tells me what has been happening in the entire world of Cyberspace that can affect me directly. I am delight you said that vital systems are integrated with other vital systems and pieces that don’t need network access are completely accessible from online. The issues of cybersecurity are no longer just for the technology crowd in our digital age, they matter to us all. I think the issue of network security has become global in scope and there are no political boundaries in Cyberspace. Nothing can separate us personally from being raided by a thief whether he be an individual using an electronic jamer to keep our car unlocked or an employee of the Chinese government using commercial routers to collect personal data against us. The misuse and abuse of Cyberspace is predicated on the natural openness of the design of the Ethernet. Education about the current situation is our primary defense against those who would use this valuable tool against us.

Reflection on "Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard A. Clarke"

Richard A. Clarke discussed the likelihood of a cyber-attack, and what can be done to prevent it in his book titled "Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It".

Richard claimed that predictions are hard. But he was interested in cyber security and cyber war. Richard was confident that hundreds of millions of billions of dollars will be stolen by cybercriminals who will not be got caught. He was also confident that cyber espionage that theft of intellectual property research development even transactional information will result in the loss to companies again of billions of dollars. As nation state, especially China steal information from American and European companies and give it to Chinese companies, in short, the Americans and Europeans pay for the R&D and China get it for free. It’s hard to compete without going on but that will go on in the near future as it’s been going on.

For the cyber-war, the author gave an example of secretary defense Leon Panetta who said that we are at a pre 9/11 moment and when it comes to the cyber-war, there are people with capabilities were planning to use them to against American. Leon was referring to Iran. Iran had just engaged in the tag on the Saudi oil company Aramco wiping clean 30,000 computers. It is the largest wipe attack so far has been seen. The Iranians had been behind an attack on a series of US banks, flood attacks ten times larger than anything they’ve never been seen before that not US banks offline one day after another, one bank after another. If the United States and Israel bomb Iran next year to stop the Iranian nuclear program, then the author would believe that Iran will retaliate not just in the Arabian Gulf but also the United States. The cyber-war knocking out banking perhaps, knocking out electricity perhaps, causing havoc and getting away with it because we cannot defend successfully today against that kind of attack.

The author thinks there are four distinct phenomenon and people can remember them easily by using the word CHEW. Cyber-crime which is very successful and is though the theft of money and happens all the time. Cyber-hacktivism which is anonymous WikiLeaks other groups that steal information in order to publish it for political reasons. Cyber-espionage which is the most serious thing today, it is the theft of a lot of money by the information, particularly information from private companies and from universities’ research and product information. Cyber-war which people really have not seen very much of it yet. The author thinks the definition of war is disruption destruction or damage, not just turning out the lights but destroying the generator so it cannot come back. For example, destroying the transformer so it cannot come back.

Nowadays, everything we do is connected to the network. The machines talking to machines and machines controlling machines and people have not secured them.The author thinks Cyber-war will probably be part of a larger connected war and cyber-war will only happen when the nation is going to go to war anywhere. Richard thinks that United States is very good at cyber-offense based on the cases demonstrated. However, United State is bad at cyber-defense because it took thousands amount of money to defend as it does to attack.

markmgray-blog

Interop: Benefits and Tradeoffs

(Internet of Things related image)

Interop is an interesting concept and this book touches in many key benefits and concerns. It was very interesting to see how something that appeared so technological as having deep roots in history all the way back to the transcontinental railroad. The idea of making large scale projects work collaboratively based on a standard rather than uniformity describes many of the non-technical systems we have today. However, with the fast emergence of technology we have thrown many of those interconnectable systems out the window for many systems. Maybe we did this out of necessity to keep up with the changing trends of technology and the vast number of companies that are attempting to compete rather than collaborate in many sectors. As he points out the benefits of Interop are huge, but they don’t come without some downsides. These downsides come in the form of privacy and security. Creating all data to be interoperable would allow for large companies to compile vast amounts of information on market trends and users and create more in-depth profiles about people and eventually predict their behavior based on their past. 10 years ago I would have scoffed at this idea but seeing the ever increasing amount of storage and data retention of companies it is already happening and the more accessible the data, the more detailed the profile can become. He advocates that smart interop strategies by technology companies and users could mitigate this risk. From a software development point of view you never put the trust in the user. You have to design a system assuming the user will not utilize it correctly and that it needs to be robust enough to protect itself and the user (or their information) from harm. However, he does push for urgent action to creating interop policy and I do agree that the sooner we can get a solid foundation in place the better. We have gone over in class several different companies that use our data for a multiple of different ventures without our know, including monetizing it!

(You can track your dog in the Internet of Things!)

The argument for this type of interop of data is the ability it will create to answer the hard questions we face today such as climate change and the smart grid. These questions need a lot of information from many different sources to be answered. One would need to know the greenhouse emissions from all the automobiles on the road (possible with today’s interconnected cars), the contributions from power plants, and oil refineries. Some of this data is already available but may not be in a standardized form that makes for ease of use. The implementation of policies could require that data be organized in a standardized fashion and used for a common good. Greenhouse emissions don’t sound too invasive to my privacy, but the second push is for a “smart grid” system. One that can increase or lower the power funneled to a location based on the necessary amount of energy needed. How do they get to the point where they know the power I am going to need at any given time? Simple, by collection past data on my energy usage and predicting my schedule. With the Internet of Things on the rise many of the products I could use in my home will be able to track their energy usage, and potentially send that information back to the cloud. Now they potentially know what products I use in my home and at what time they are on or off. If this information was to be used against me someone could determine the most likely time for me to not be home, and the length of time I am typically away.

I will close by saying that I am not against interop, but like many of us in the class, I am skeptical of putting my information in other people’s hands without the proper assurances through security and policy that it will be safe and not used against me. We discussed health insurance companies potentially gathering Fitbit data and using that to raise rates or deny insurance to individuals. With a sound policy and accountability I believe that interop between all data would help us solve the hard questions that the author poses it could.

bingut

I am glad that you agree with the importance of interoperability in modern society. I believe Interoperability is a critical aspect of any successful system, and now is more important than ever. Interoperability offers a number of solutions to global challenges, but in order to get the most out of interoperability while minimizing its risks, we will need to fundamentally revisit our understanding of how it works, and how it can allow for improvements in each of its constituent parts. I think that more interoperability creates certain vulnerabilities arguably. Suppose that we have more connection points, more people organizations and so forth tap into naturally into a date the flowing can misuse these highly interoperable networks if we with only half a connection between here and there, you with half a lower risk, accumulated risk than when you have so many different points of connection.

I am delight that you realized the downsides of interoperability which illustrate themselves in the form of privacy and security. A little information can be a dangerous thing and a lot of information possibly more! I agree your opinion that Creating all data to be interoperable would allow for large companies to compile vast amounts of information on market trends and users and create more in-depth profiles about people and eventually predict their behavior based on their past.

infopolicyanw-blog

Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems

Standardization is extremely important. When companies, entities, etc. can agree on a standard, the system itself expands as its network isn’t bound by a conflict amongst pieces. However, as the book mentions, connectivity can be overwhelming. A lot of data flows through these systems and introduces vulnerabilities.

In other situations, having better connectivity can be efficient and useful. For example, I was able to go to the Consumer Electronic Show in January 2015 and saw huge systems, touting the Internet of Everything idea. Qualcomm, Intel, LG, and GE were all advertising their newest tech that involved connecting to your phone, your other appliances, etc. Lowe’s had a huge display which was literally a house built inside the convention hall. They had a system that interconnected almost everything in the home. It was overwhelming, a bit reminiscent of Skynet, but still the innovation was exciting. However, Lowe’s does not work with Qualcomm’s, Intel’s does not work with LG, and so on. Therefore, while their own proprietary systems have a large amount of connectivity and interoperability amongst themselves, they do not have it amongst the different companies. It makes it a huge risk, therefore, to adopt one company’s system when it may go out of business or doesn’t get updated if a competitor is doing better in the market. However, if users were able to connect the different company’s pieces, it wouldn’t be such a risk.

I find the case studies to be quite interesting. They touch on various innovations that we take for granted and how standardization affected its development and adoption. How many amazing ideas were crafted and were subsequently dropped because they didn’t tap into the benefits of interoperability? Then again, how many products felt forced into a standard to be adopted by consumers?

bingut

I agree with you that Standardization is extremely important. In fact, Standardization is a phenomenon that has become the fundamental form of coordination and control on the global market. There is a need for coordination, cooperation, and organization on a global scale. Many factors indicate that the need for standardization increases with globalization. If many organizations follow the same standards, their interaction can be facilitated. The work of other organizations becomes easier to predict; products and production processes become compatible with each other; the communication needed for coordination becomes easier and more efficient. Standards often offer order and simplicity in an otherwise chaotic world.

However, I think there is no clear and obvious answer to the question of whether standardization has positive or negative consequences for our working conditions. Due to our different perspectives, there may exists different and often contradictory results regarding the consequences of standardization on our working conditions. The impact of standardization on working conditions depends on many variables and factors, and may differ considerably from organization to organization. For example, we want all the cell phone manufacturing companies provide the same (standardized) cell phone charger such that we can charge our cell phone anywhere without bringing the specific cell phone charger. However, if we apply the same theory into our research, then there would not be any progress in science.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

P A 388K Information Policy