1.   Identify and describe 5 specific capabilities of computing (e.g., speed, permanence/storage) made possible or enhanced by computing technology.

2.   Select one of the capabilities you identified and discuss its relationship to the following issues raised by the application of the technology:

• Privacy
• Ownership
• Control
• Accuracy
• Security 3. Describe the areas of potential IT policy decisions that may be triggered by your selected capability.
  

1.) Capabilities of computing

I chose the following capabilities: connectivity, multimedia handling, accuracy, fast mathematical calculations, repetitive operations.

Connectivity: it is the first in my list and it’s the most important capability of the computers for me. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to learn here for example. My whole life is built on computing and nowadays mostly around Internet, so it’s an important feature for me. Connectivit means that you are able to communicate with virtually any connected computer user in the whole world. It’s unbeleivable how much nations can be found here or in internet based games for example.
Multimedia handling: This is the ability of recording and playing voice and video content on the computers.
Accuracy: computer operations are accurate. The result will always be the same, doesn’t matters how many times we make it repeated or which computer we use.
Fast mathematical calculations: it’s one of the most important capabilities of computing. It makes us able to search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, drive airplanes, forecast weather, etc.
Repetitive operations: a computer will never be tired. It can repeat the same operation again and again with the same result.

2.) Issues raised by connectivity
I obviously choose connectivity from my list to discuss. I do it, because it’s very close to me, and because it raises all the mentioned issues. In most cases, I’ll refer this capability as Internet, because currently this is the most used way of connecting computers.

Privacy
On the internet, this is surely an issue. Timothy J. Walton (2000) wrote in the first sentence of his article: “The right to privacy in Internet activity is a serious issue facing society.”. There are many problems mentioned by the author, like unsolicited e-mail, usage of cookies, building of huge company databases about the customers’ behaviour, selling customers’ data.

Ownership
It’s a huge problem nowadays. First of all, the ownership of the information. Internet is huge and mostly anonymous. Nowadays it’s moving towards a more and more open information publishing. Free websites, blogs, community networks make it very hard to take care of the ownership of the information. Another problem, which is closely related to this one is the Intellectual Property Rights. Who can prove, who is the owher of an article or a novel for example? How can it be assured, that no body will state, that it’s his/her work?

Control
Issue of control is raised by connectity daily. First you can think of control of the computer itself. Nowadays there are many ways hackers can use to take control of the connected computer you use. There are troyans, backdoor opening viruses, password crackers, network sniffers. This is a very important issue nowadays. Another issue is that influencing masses through information flow is much easyer than it ever was. In Hungary the biges “mediahack” was when a clever journalist made fool of the whole Hungarian press. According to Sz. I. M. (2007), Gábor Varga found out an imaginary story about the Madzsari tribe in Africa. Madzsari sounds very similar to Magyar, which is the Hungarian word for Hungarian. The story was simple and wrote that an imaginary Swiss institute, African Research Institute was the source of the information. It wrote, that www.ar-institute.ch is the homepage of the institute. The author intentionally hide some traps in the article, for exapmle, there were no such institute, and even the homepage didn’t exist. For the first time, the whole Hungarian press, including the bigest newspapers wrote about it as a fact and the bigest television stations presented it as a huge sensation and as a proof of Hungarian greatness. Nobody checked the source and nobody tried to open the website. The first one who tried to check it was SZ.I.M, the journalist of my favourite Hungarian portal.

Accuracy
Connectivity helps us to gather more accurate information quickly. You can ask anybody in no time or check an information website in minutes, so connectivity helps us to imporove accuracy of information. Although there are a lot of difficulties because there are numerous information sources and you cannot always tell which one is reliable.  Robert Harris (2007) writes about very good methods of evaluating information found on the internet. He says that information needs to be avaluated carefully because unlike traditional information sources, internet articles usually published without a preliminary approval process.

Security
Security is a complex idea. Because, what is security? Security is basically the ability to keep privacy, ownership and control. A house is secure, when nobody can enter it without the owner’s will. A computer is secure if nobody can enter it without the owner’s will. Nowadays it’s not an easy thing to keep your computer secure.

Mixed issues

All the mentioned issues are connected to each other. Let’s look at just one exapmle. According to Randy James (2009) Internet censorship in China not only makes it impossible to reach specific websites, but when you try to view some information, you have to provide your personal details. They restrict access to pornography websites and many political topics. I’m sure, that this “total” control helps to improve the security level of Chineese internet, but affects privacy, accuracy and control, too. We say, it’s bad. But what we do with company firewalls and proxes? Limit the access to information. And in modern companies access to internet is not an anonymous activity any more. And what did USA  – and many other countries – try in the schools? A proxy like control system to limit the access to specific information.

3.) IT policy decisions triggered by connectivity
Connectivity triggers numerous policy decisions. Maybe the most common is that almost all companies access internet through a proxy servers. Many companies limit the access to websites and internet services with a well defined internet policy. Some companies even limit the access to the internet with policy decisions. Policies can be written ones or software / hardware forced ones.
The National B2B Centre (n.d.) developed a very detailed guide about making internet policies. They write that making clearly stated internet usage policies to help the employees to follow it and the company to defend itself when an employee makes unacceptable things using the company’s resources on the internet.

Reference list:

Randy James (2009) A Brief History of: Chinese Internet Censorship [Online] Available from: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1885961,00.html (Accessed: 10. February 2010)

SZ.I.M (2007) Magyar törzset fedeztek fel Kongóban? [Online] Available from: http://index.hu/tudomany/tortenelem/magykonfg367/ (Accessed: 09. February 2010)

The National B2B Centre (n.d.) Introduce an internet and email policy [Online] Available from: http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/layer?topicId=1074402338 (Accessed: 10. February 2010)
Timothy J. Walton (2000) Internet Privacy Law [Online] Available from: http://www.netatty.com/privacy/privacy.html (Accessed 09. February 2010)

Most IT experts in the world would be suprised on my statement: the small sized floppy disk was invented by a Hungarian, Marcell Jánosi. Before him, the connonly used disk was the 8 inch sized, very flexible IBM invented floppy disk. This disk was big, vulnerable to physical damage and was difficult to transport. According to computernostalgia.net, the original concept of the 3^1/4 inch floppy disk was developed by Marcell Janosi in 1973, two years before IBM invented the 5 ^½ floppy disk (http://www.computernostalgia.net/articles/HistoryoftheFloppyDisk.htm, 2009). Intrestingly this was the year, when Ernő Rubik invented the world famous Rubik Cube. Unfortunately for political reasons the Hungarian state didn’t renew the patent on this invention, and that made the Japaneese manufacturers able to produce a floppy disk. They started to make a product which was, let’s say, very similar to the original version, which was introduced to them personally by Mr. Janosi in Hugary. A photo of the original disk and the drive can be seen here: http://index.hu/cikkepek/0702/tech/azelso/.gdata/a6_03.jpg Even Jack Tremiel, the CEO of the Commodore factory travelled to Hungary on his private jet to buy this product according to an interview with Mr. Janosi, published on Index.hu portal (http://index.hu/tech/hardver/jm0206/, 2007). As you can see, this disk became widely used on the world with minor changes before the mass production. It’s a thing we can be proud of, but Marcell Jánosi never earned a cent for it, because of the Communist state’s regulations.

There were several great Hungarian inventors in the past, including the first flat screen TV in 1936, by Kálmán Tihanyi (http://www.pcma-tv99.org/sales-history-of-lcd-tvs, 2007), but since my task is to write about data storage, I mention a very intresting new development. Since I’m in contact with an employee of  Holografika, which is an invertor and producer of 3d holographic displays, I decided to write about the holografic data storage. Amongst other researchers, the Hungarians also working on this topics. Although we already use some topics based on very similar technology, like Blue-Ray disks, for example, there is a very intresting development made by Hungarians. On Budapest University of Technology and Economics researchers  made a working holographic storage device. In an abstract, published on SPIE Digital Library tey wrote: “A raw density as high as 2.77 bit/µm2 has been achieved without multiplexing in a compact, portable read/write sytem at 532 nm allowing more than 1000 readout without data loss.” (http://spiedl.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=PSISDG004991000001000034000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes, 2003) I can see this affort as a promising one, since it uses the currently known fastest substance to store, read, write data. It uses all the real world dimensions, three and the fourth dimension, time to store data. In my oppinion, this is the future of data storage. Mike Houghton on enterpriseitplanet.com also thinks so: “The future of data storage will almost certainly lie in the technology of holographic storage for the enterprise market. With a predicted shelf life of up to 100 years or more, which means we can expect at least 50 years and disk-sized storage capacities of over 300 gigabytes per disk, the equivalent of 462 CDs, it’s a safe bet that this is where we’re going with our storage solution.” (http://www.enterpriseitplanet.com/storage/features/article.php/3530796 , 2005). Since science always succeeded to develop new and new technologies in the past, it seems obvious to me, that this is not the end of the evolution of the data sorage technology. But what will we see next, who will make the next step? I only know, who made the first. He was Denes Gabor, a Nobel prize winner Hungarian scientist, who invented holography itself (http://www.answers.com/topic/dennis-gabor, n.d).

Reference list:

• Answers.com (n.d) Scientist:  Dennis Gabor [Online]. Available from: http://www.answers.com/topic/dennis-gabor (Accessed: 05. October 2009)
• Computernostalgia.net (2009) History of the Floppy Disk [Online]. Available from: http://www.computernostalgia.net/articles/HistoryoftheFloppyDisk.htm (Accessed: 05. October 2009)
• Index.hu (2009) The first floppy drive [Online]. Available from: http://index.hu/cikkepek/0702/tech/azelso/.gdata/a6_03.jpg (Accessed: 05. October 2009)
• Index.hu (2007) Jánosi Marcell, a bűvös flopi atyja [Online]. Available from: http://index.hu/tech/hardver/jm0206/ (Accessed: 05. October 2009)
• Mike Houghton (2005) Holographic Backup: The Future of Enterprise Data Storage [Online] Enterpriseitplanet.com. Available from: http://www.enterpriseitplanet.com/storage/features/article.php/3530796 (Accessed: 05. October 2009)
• SPIE Digital Library (2009) Polarization holographic data storage using azobenzene polyster as storage material [Online]. Available from: http://spiedl.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=PSISDG004991000001000034000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes,%202003 tvs (Accessed: 05. October 2009)
• TV At It’s Finest (2007) Sales History Of LCD Tvs [Online]. Available from: http://www.pcma-tv99.org/sales-history-of-lcd-tvs (Accessed: 05. October 2009)