03/21/13

In the reading for class a major topic was the privacy of a persons account on Facebook. At first I thought that the paper was mostly gonna talk about how people post private information and that some friend who they do not want to see it, end up seeing it. The paper was partly about that then it started to talk about how people try to make Facebook much more private so that no who they deem unwanted will not see their post.  First was the simple ways by clearing your friends list to people who you do not want seeing your post or things you are tagged in. When I first thought about this I though, "Well of course you should do those things." Then the article went into how people bypass simple things like that because of how much Facebook changed their Privacy settings. I became extremely worried at this point because I thought that my Facebook settings were set to the default. (Thankfully they were not.) I did not realize how many people could see a person's Facebook profile without even being friends with them. The amount of access one had to see other peoples's information was scary. The paper started talking about how this has caused people to violate Facebook's Terms of use guidelines. By changing their name to either being shorter or just using an initial, to even forging a fake last name. After reading that statement  I came to realize that legally speaking I had a few friends who were breaking those guidelines. To be honest I started to consider doing so to help keep my information private. What amazed me the most was the reasoning that Facebook changed their default privacy settings. They did so for advertisements that way they can make money. If it wasn't enough that the article scared me in class Dr. Edwards showed us a graph about how much Facebook's privacy settings changed over the years. The worse fact about the low default privacy settings was that it is almost strange for a person to not have a Facebook. Some employers may think that because a person does not have a Facebook, he or she may be an antisocial shut in. So not only does one basically need a Facebook one has to make sure that he or she keeps track of who has access to the information they post. I find that the fact that Facebook went from privacy being a huge deal to allowing more and more people see the information quite appalling. 

Gold Farming

I started playing WoW at roughly the age of 14. So I have seen the advertisements for gold in the game for real money. I remember asking my parents at one point if I could purchase the gold, but both looked at me and said no. My mom said no because my dad did. However, my dads reasoning were much more sound because he had known one of his friends who purchased gold that way for a game called Everquest. My dad told me about how the business worked to a certain extent and then told me how his friends account was later hacked and used for gold farming. This caused me to drop the topic and later I stopped playing WoW to make time for football. Though after entering college some friends started playing WoW again which caused me to join. Then the same topic of buying gold came up between us. I told then what my dad had told me. They laughed and explained how much gold farming has changed and after their explanation I decided to look into the topic myself. When the topic came up in class I felt that I was fairly knowledgeable since the research I did was only a few years old. The concept still intrigued me because I know some friends who have purchased gold with real life money. After the reading of InfoDev, I became even more interested and did some research again. I ended up finding out about bitcoins and how they are used over the internet. A interesting story that I found is that a man in Canada is selling his house which would not seem strange. The interesting part is that the man is accepting an equal value of bitcoins instead of money. This just blew my mind that a person is willing to accept digital money in exchange for a HOUSE! With the way digital money is evolving I wonder if we as people will eventually turn to a pure digital currency economy. Though I hope that we do not because at our current state I feel that hackers would be able to easily manipulate the economy by creating false numbers for how much they have.

Lessig 03/04/2013

In chapter seven Lessig talks about how Jon Else tried to get permission to use a four second click of the Simpsons in the corner of a scene. He goes on to explain that Else just wanted to make sure that he was in the ok to use the click so he first called the creator. Then the Creator said yes, but best to talk to Gracie Films to be extra safe. Then Else called Gracie Films who said he could use the clip, but needed to talk to the parent company Fox to completely make sure. Once Else made the call Fox said no and that it would cost around $10,000 to use the 4-5 second click that was in the corner. After reading about this I was astonished because it seemed so outrageous that a 4-5 second clip that is only visible in the corner of a scene  would come with such a price tag. Else also thought that Fox was being unreasonable and did some law research to see if he fully understood all the details. Later he found out that he may have been able to use the clip and lable it under fair use. However, he was then told that Fox would fight it and that it would eventually come down to who has more money and a bigger legal department. I knew that some places can charge vast amounts of money to use something that is copyrighted. I never truly thought that people would be so unreasonable. Due to all my current works being for school and not for profit or commercial use that everything I make falls under the fair use law. However, I did not think that it would be so hard a tiny bit of something that was copyrighted in my work. This reading brought a new light to me about how terrible copyright can be. Lessig even states that "This practice shows just how far the law has come from its
eighteenth-century roots. The law was born as a shield to protect publishers’ profits against the unfair competition of a pirate. It has matured into a sword that interferes with any use, transformative or not." I fully agree with what he states because copyright has gone from a shield to a sword. It will be very interesting once I enter the real world and need to make sure I am not violating any copyright laws.