Month: March 2018

There are many conflicting views on net neutrality that are being given when disputing this topic. There are two main analogies that are given when presenting their point on the matter. Those in favor of net neutrality usually give the following analogy. Taking away net neutrality means that companies with more resources will have access to a “faster lane”, giving them an unreasonable advantage over small companies that can’t afford the faster lane. Those against net neutrality will give you the following analogy instead. Having net neutrality is equivalent to having a truck pay the same as a motorcycle at a toll road even though trucks most definitely contribute to more tear and wear to the road than the motorcycle.

These two views are what contribute mostly to the discussion and they stem from a different understanding on the issue. From reading all the articles, it seems like there’s a problem of oversimplification or simply a problem of people not correctly defining the issue. Here I will try to express both possible interpretations.

The first interpretation is that given by those who defend net neutrality. This interpretation is that companies will provide limited access to resources to small companies. So, if people can access Netflix, a company with enough resources to pay the premium service, at up to 1000 KB/s, a small content provider with less resources may only be accessed to up to 100 KB/s for example. This means that small companies have a very slim chance of competing against larger companies.  In other words, this interpretation means that ISP’s limit download speeds of consumers.

The other interpretation is that companies will have to pay money based on their upload speed. In other words, if Netflix can pay for a total upload speed of 100 TB/s, since they have a large number of users, this would get distributed over a large number of people. Lets say they have 1 million users. Then each user would get on average a download speed of 100 KB/s. Then, lets say a smaller company has a base of 10,000 users. To match Netflix’s users’ download speed they would only need to purchase a service with 1 MB/s upload speed, which should be considerably cheaper. With this interpretation, removing Net Neutrality would actually give smaller companies an advantage of cheaper internet access while they build their user base.

This distinction hasn’t been made clear by those discussing net neutrality online, but it’s a significant one. They each have very different effects on the market. My position on the issue will depend on how this is addressed. Ultimately, the goal should be to protect consumers and provide them access to a fair internet, which on this day and age has become a basic right which the government has a duty to protect.

One third issue is the possibility that ISP’s, many of which are also content providers, will be given preferential access to their resources. This is a very delicate topic with no clear solution. Here, however, anti-trust laws should come into effect. To protect fair competition among competitions, antitrust laws prohibit big companies with various services to give themselves an unfair advantage on the market. If it the case that content providers are giving themselves an unfair advantage, it is the case that legislation exists to protect other companies and consumers. This kind of laws are addressed on a case by case basis and while they don’t provide the strict regulation that previous Net Neutrality laws held, they give a window through which the problem may be addressed should it ever arise.

Corporate personhood is the belief that corporations have some rights similar to those granted to humans. This, on the surface, seems like a matter of fairness towards companies. It allows companies the right to freedom of speech, protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, and protection against excessive fines among others. These rules seem necessary in order to ensure protection of corporations.

However, there is a point at which a line has to be drawn. One of the biggest controversies regarding this is the idea that corporation can have a religion and they may make decisions based on a religion. This gives theoretically an open door for companies to break the law. They just have to claim that it was done on the basis of religion.  At the same time, how can a corporation have a religion when a corporation is a conglomerate of individuals that may or may not share that religion? Who decides this religion? Is it the founder of the company, the board of directors, the CEO, or is it a voting process?

Furthermore, if a company can have a religion, they can certainly have a political party. This allows companies, which have an incredible amount of resources, to invest their money on funding for their political parties. Individuals can hardly compete with the power these companies have, making politics a competition of which companies invested the most money. This became a problem with the removal of a law that previously capped the amount of money corporations could invest for campaigning of a candidate.

Finally, another problem is that corporations, unlike humans, can’t go to jail. They can be fined and eventually forced to disappear, but this sort of arrangement gives too much power to corporations. There have been cases where companies prefer to pay for fines because violating the laws gives them more money than the fines they have to pay. Ultimately, this gives them a way to freely keep breaking the law.

At a deeper level, is the matter of ethical responsibility. There have been many cases where companies engaged in immoral acts. How should they be accountable for that? One relevant example is that of IBM. During WWII, machines built by IBM played a vital role in organizing the various stages of the holocaust process. Finding millions of people belonging to a religion or a race, extracting all of their property, transporting them to concentration camps, and scheduling their distribution to be used for experiments, labor, or death was a massive undertaking that would simply not be possible with a pen and paper. This was possible thanks to the large number of tabulating machines that IBM sold and serviced for the Nazi government.

Certainly, individuals who colluded with the Nazi government were held responsible for their actions, but IBM certainly didn’t. Perhaps the problem was that back then no one questioned the claim that the German branch of the company was taken over by the Nazis. The problem now, however, is that unlike individuals, corporations are everchanging bodies of people. It doesn’t make sense to punish them now when essentially all their work-force has been replaced. Most certainly everyone who works for IBM now had nothing to do with the support of the holocaust carried out by the company many decades prior.

Certainly, IBM helping the Nazi government carry out their genocide was an act punishable by law, but it is no longer correct to punish them. What this shows is that ultimately corporations are unlike humans. Thus, the law should not treat them as such. A new set of laws that applies only to corporations should be created. This should be a set of laws the holds corporations accountable in their own realm. This should be with the purpose of preventing immoral actions while protecting people that may not be involved in the actions of the corporation.

The judging for morality for corporations won’t be too different from the way we judge humans. If a corporation does anything that would be immoral for a human to do, it is immortal for them too. The only different lies in how the cases are handled.

The cloud is essentially when a third party essentially either holds files for you, perfors computations in your behalf, or some combination of both. This may involve allowing you to use an app over the web, or even hosting a whole operating system for you. The meme that says “There is no cloud. It’s just someone else’s computer” has some truth to it, but it can be a bit misleading. It’s not that you’re connecting to some remote computer and everything is there. You’re connecting to a network, and at any time you may be connected to a server at a whole different location. Of course, cloud services try to make it so that you connect to what’s closest to you for performance purposes, but the fact remains that you never really know where you’re really connecting to in the cloud network.

I have never used a cloud directly for developing purposes, but I have used it to some extent. Particularly, at Notre Dame all CSE students have used AFS to host our files. We can then access our files through any computer connected to the AFS network. Not only that, but we can connect our laptops to AFS at any time. That allows us to have great flexibility when working on our programming assignments. We can work on our laptop on the go through SSH, or we can work on the machines at Cushing Hall to have better performance when running more resource intensive applications (maybe a small videogame you may be working on).

On a real working environment I can see this being carried further by adding even more flexibility for your job duties. You can work from anywhere on the world (especially useful if you travel a lot). Furthermore, all you need is a good internet connectivity and a device that can handle opening a browser, which isn’t asking for a lot. The applications and operations are run completely on the cloud.

As a consumer, I also get many the benefits from the cloud. I often use my Google Drive to share big files with other people. It also allows me to have a place to store my pictures and other files I would like to keep accessing in the future. It also facilitates the sharing of my files across my different devices. More indirectly, having the cloud has allowed many new companies to emerge. Netflix has become part of many people’s lives. Netflix makes use of a third-party cloud service to manage its operations.

Overall I believe the cloud is a great technological advancement. I can’t say the cloud is completely safe, but its much easier to believe that they will do a good job than making sure a local sys admin is doing a good job. I believe evidence supports this too. Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer of Imperva, shared with the BBC that “Most of the major data breaches that have taken place over the last five years, from Sony to Ashley Madison, TalkTalk to Target, have been from internal, not cloud-based, databases.”

Furthermore, some of those breaches that happened through the cloud where because of the mistakes of the consumer. Iam Massingham explains that for the cloud services providers “Customers can choose to control their own encryption keys if they wish…as well as set the rules for who can and can’t access the data or applications”. In other words, the cloud will be as safe as the consumer wishes it to be. That seemed to be the case with the NGS breach of files. The files were left on an open cloud with no password or encryption to protect it. There was no fault for the cloud host in this incident. It was the neglect of the Booz Allen contractor handling the files.

My conclusion is that while the cloud is not fault proof, it is a worth investment and one that will increase overall productivity and security.