News

Plagiarism case continues

In May last year I wrote about a case of plagiarism from my university. The interesting thing about this plagiarism was that it was a teacher who had stolen part of a masters thesis written by two students whom she had supervised.

At the department of business studies two students wrote their masters thesis. Their supervisor then took parts of the text and included it word for word in an article she presented at an international conference. The students were not acknowledged in any way. The head of department defended the supervisorâ??s actions in the student press â?? which is sad, but in a sense an understandable defence. Still sad and it shows a definite lack of backbone. (this blog in May 2006)

The case was sent to the research ethics committee

The majority of the research ethics committee found that while it was wrong that the supervisor did not ask the students, it was too far to say that the supervisor had cheated. This position was motivated that by calling the supervisor actions plagiarism would effectively be damage scientific research. (from earlier post).

Thankfully today the local newspaper writes that the University Dean has sent the errand onwards and upwards to the research ethics group of the National Swedish Research Council. Maybe by going beyond the confines of the own organisation the message can be stated clearly that plagiarism by researchers is as unacceptable as we claim it is when students attempt it.

Today the local paper reports that the VetenskapsrÃ¥det (Swedish Science Council) have reached the unanimous decision that the supervisor’s actions were a clear cut case of plagiarism. The fate of the supervisor will be decided by the university dean after the summer.

Posted on by mklang

Millenium Mouse & Copyright

The attempts Disney goes to maintain copyright over their intellectual property are legendary. Copyright term extention acts have ensured that Mickey Mouse is saved from the public domain and continues to generate income for Disney.

But what would happen if Mickey was shown to be older than we thought? An artefact at Lund Historical Museum dated to 900 A.D. was excavated at a site called Uppåkra in southern Sweden.

Surprise, surprise its Mickey!! This means that Mickey is over 1000 years old – let Mickey enter the public domain – he deserves it…

Don’t be surprised if Disney uses this as an excuse to extend copyright terms to 1000 years!

Although made of bronze, the brooch ornament likely adorned the clothing of an Iron Age woman. Excavations at nearby sites, such as at Järrestad, have yielded other unusual pieces of jewelry, such as a necklace with a pail fob at the end and another necklace strung with 262 pieces of amber. (Discovery Channel)

(via Boing Boing)

Posted on by mklang

University email & student privacy

Some time ago Linköping University proudly announced that they were outsourcing their student email to Google. Basically the students will see the university email address but “under the hood” the system will be run by Google. The BBC reports (11 June) that Trinity College Dublin is doing the same thing.

Google email (gmail) has some privacy issues:

Google automatically scans e-mails to add context-sensitive advertisements to them. Privacy advocates raised concerns that the plan involved scanning their personal, assumed private, e-mails, and that this was a security problem. Allowing e-mail content to be read, even by a computer, raises the risk that the expectation of privacy in e-mail will be reduced. Furthermore, e-mail that non-subscribers’ choose to send to Gmail accounts is scanned by Gmail as well… (wikipedia)

So an uninformed gmail user may be losing some integrity. This is bad but at the same time it can be seen as a question of choice. (Don’t get me started on the problems of uninformed choice). But now the universities are pushing students to become gmail users. In Sweden universities are publicly funded government bodies and therefore they should be more concerned about forcing citizens to become customers of a private corporation.

Generally people are not to aware of the privacy risks which technology may create. Universities should help people to understand society and it is a shame that they are now acting as a sales representative for a company providing them with customers instead of acting as an example and educating citizens about the advantages and disadvantages of technology.

Posted on by mklang

Technology doesn't lie

Via Bruce Schneier I read an article from the BBC about the growth of car cloning in the UK. This is basically when someone mimics the number plate of another car to avoid being fined for speeding or avoiding the congestion charges.

What struck me was the interesting part of the story

Tony Bullock’s car was cloned even though his plates were not physically stolen, and he was threatened with prosecution after “his” car was repeatedly caught speeding in Leicester.

He said: “It was horrendous. You are guilty until you can prove you’re not. It’s the first time that I’ve thought that English law is on its head.”

Here is the problem. Technology does not lie and unfortunately, we tend to believe, that technology is infallible.

The problem is that the technology in question does not take into account that the license plate may be cloned and therefore the socio-technical system (i.e. the stakeholders involved in the system) need to be aware that the technology may create false positives.

Unfortunately in this case an unfair burden of proof is placed on the clone victim to prove that neither she/he nor her/his car were involved in the illegal activities.

Naturally the most powerful actors in this scenario is the legal system which for some reason prefers to believe in the convenient fiction that the technology is correct.

Posted on by mklang

Law is a Luddite Ass

In Oliver Twist, after being told that the law supposes that a wife acts under the husbands direction Mr Bumble, states:

If the law supposes that,â?? said Mr. Bumble,â?¦ â??the law is a assâ??a idiot. If thatâ??s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experienceâ??by experience.â??

I don’t think thats it’s necessary for the law (and its representatives) actually need experience personally that which they are passing judgement upon – but a little experience may be a good thing.

Judge Peter Openshaw is trying a case where alleged Islamic radicals have used a website to post “violent Islamist material” unfortunately Judge Openshaw has had to interrupt the questioning of the witnesses to be taught what websites are. Not good, he should have done his homework in advance.

“The trouble is I don’t understand the language. I don’t really understand what a Web site is,” he told a London court during the trial of three men charged under anti-terrorism laws.

Prosecutor Mark Ellison briefly set aside his questioning to explain the terms “Web site” and “forum.” An exchange followed in which the 59-year-old judge acknowledged: “I haven’t quite grasped the concepts.” (yahoo)

Slightly scary…

Posted on by mklang

What Google wants

To many users Google is understood as a neutral tool. A search engine without bias in any form. While Google has never made any such claim their attitudes and appearance do nothing to dispel this common misconception. It is easy to understand how the idea that technology in itself is neither good nor bad and may be seen as neutral comes about. But such an idea fails to take into account that technology is a man-made phenomenon and as such is the result of countless decisions and perceptions of right and wrong. Therefore while the technological thing may be neutral the choices behind its design, manufacture and use are not.

One of the implementations of Google that may be seen as less than neutral is the harvesting of user searches. Google has a long tradition of recording what people search for. This practice is not without its critics but until now Google has been silent about their purpose for harvesting this data. Last week Googleâ??s Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer posted three reasons why Google captures and retains usersâ?? search queries. The reasons fall into three areas:

  1. Improve our services
  2. Maintain security and prevent fraud and abuse
  3. Comply with legal obligations to retain data

This has not passed uncommented. Micheal Zimmer and Seth Finkelstein are both critical to these explanations in two excellent commentaries they explain why Google’s reasons are mainly unsatisfactory and even misguided.

Posted on by mklang

Army 2.0

You might be excused for getting the impression that the US military is struggling to understand how they should be using Internet technology. On the one hand they recently began an effort to control what their soldiers are posting online (War blogs silenced) and now they have blocked access to sites such as YouTube and Myspace.

The reason for this? Bandwidth.

The US says the use is taking up too much bandwidth and slows down the military’s computer system.

But a US Strategic Command spokesman said a “secondary benefit” was to help operational security.

At the same time the military have realised the potential impact of sites such as YouTube and have started putting material online.

The Pentagon only recently started posting its own videos on YouTube, showing soldiers in action in Iraq in a move designed to reach out to a younger audience and to show the successes of the US military. (More on this over here).

But the best quote in this BBC article is the honest: “The cyberspace battle space was not one that we were particularly operating well in” Lt Col Christopher Garver, US Army.

Yes… we have noticed…

Lex Ferenda has more including the order (AP report | full text of order) and a increased list of blocked sites:

â??To maximize the availability of DoD network resources for official government usage, the Commander, JTF-GNO, with the approval of the Department of Defense, will block worldwide access to the following internet sites beginning on or about 14 May 2007.â??

www.youtube.com
www.1.fm
www.pandora.com
www.photobucket.com
www.myspace.com
www.live365.com
www.hi5.com
www.metacafe.com
www.mtv.com
www.ifilm.com
www.blackplanet.com
www.stupidvideos.com
www.filecabi.com

Posted on by mklang

Secret Numbers

Have you been following the recent blog craze on the topic of Digg and the HD DVD key? Basically the Digg team deleted a story that linked to the decryption key for HD DVDs after receiving a take down demand and all hell broke loose. More stories appeared and were deleted, and users posting the stories were suspended.

Naturally this just made things more exciting and the number now appears on over 50 000 websites, as a set of colors, a poem and at least one t-shirt!

Many of the blogs reporting this news have been in anguish over the fact that numbers should not be copyrightable but this is acutally missing the point. Fred von Lohmann (EFF) clarifies the situation in a neatly written post:

Is the key copyrightable? It doesn’t matter. The AACS-LA takedown letter is not claiming that the key is copyrightable, but rather that it is (or is a component of) a circumvention technology. The DMCA does not require that a circumvention technology be, itself, copyrightable to enjoy protection.

Posted on by mklang

War blogs silenced

Wired News reports that In a directive (dated 19th April) US troops have been ordered not to blog without first clearing each post with a superior officer. There is also a discussion going on at the Wired Blog Danger Room.

Military officials have been wrestling for years with how to handle troops who publish blogs. Officers have weighed the need for wartime discretion against the opportunities for the public to personally connect with some of the most effective advocates for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq — the troops themselves. The secret-keepers have generally won the argument, and the once-permissive atmosphere has slowly grown more tightly regulated. Soldier-bloggers have dropped offline as a result.

The new rules (.pdf) obtained by Wired News require a commander be consulted before every blog update.

It’s hardly a surprising move. It’s doubtful whether blogs were revealing security information (US troops should be better trained in this case) but on several occasions information on blogs and films of YouTube (for example Iraqi kids run for water) have caused embarrassing situations which hardly have improved anyone’s opinions of the war.

Posted on by mklang

Greener Apples

No need to be cynical or pessimistic about the effect of lobby campaigns or the power of collecting people online. Greenpeace launched an environmental campaign against Appleâ??s lack of environmental policy. On 2nd May Steve Jobs published a second public letter (the first was against DRM) listing environmental hazards connected with Apple computers and the steps Apple was taking to remedy the situation.

It is generally not Appleâ??s policy to trumpet our plans for the future; we tend to talk about the things we have just accomplished. Unfortunately this policy has left our customers, shareholders, employees and the industry in the dark about Appleâ??s desires and plans to become greener. Our stakeholders deserve and expect more from us, and theyâ??re right to do so. They want us to be a leader in this area, just as we are in the other areas of our business. So today weâ??re changing our policy.

This is a good first step towards taking Apple to the forefront of environmental concerns as well as its firm position as a design leader. This approach also shows that design and environmentalism are not incompatible.

Greenpeace has responded on their campaign site with the words “We are cheering!”…

It’s not everything we asked for.  Apple has declared a phase out of the worst chemicals in its product range, Brominated Fire Retardants (BFRs) and Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) by 2008. That beats Dell and other computer manufactures’ pledge to phase them out by 2009. Way to go Steve!

It’s nice to know that the machine of my choice has just made a little less guilty.

Posted on by mklang