Final Exam Exercise Questions

List and describe the five moral dimensions of the Information Age that are
involved in political, social, and ethical issues. (Ch4)

Answer: The five moral dimensions are:

1. Information rights and obligations. What rights do individuals and organizations have with respect to
information pertaining to them?
2. Property rights. How can intellectual property rights be protected when it is so easy to copy digital
materials?
3. Accountability and control. Who will be held accountable and liable for the harm done to individual
and collective information and property rights?
4. System quality. What standards of data and system quality should we demand to protect individual
rights and the safety of society?
5. Quality of life. What values should be preserved? What institutions must we protect? What cultural
values can be harmed?

Discuss at least three key technology trends that raise ethical issues. Give
an example of an ethical or moral impact connected to each one. (Ch4)

Answer: Key technology trends include the following:

1. Computer power doubling every 18 months: ethical impact—because more organizations depend on
computer systems for critical operations, these systems are vulnerable to computer crime and computer
abuse;
2. Data storage costs are rapidly declining: ethical impact—it is easy to maintain detailed databases on
individuals—who has access to and control of these databases?;
3. Data analysis advances: ethical impact—vast databases full of individual information may be used to
develop detailed profiles of individual behavior; and
4. Networking advances and the Internet: ethical impact—it is easy to copy data from one location to
another. Who owns data? How can ownership be protected?

Ethical analysis: A five-step process

When confronted with a situation that seems to present ethical issues, how should you analyze it?
1.Identify and describe clearly the facts

2.Define the conflict or dilemma and identify the higher-order values involved

3.Identify the stakeholders

4.Identify the options that you can reasonably take

5.Identify the potential consequences of your options

 Six Ethical Principles

•Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you

•Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative: If an action is not right for everyone to take, it is not right
for anyone

•Descartes' rule of change: If an action cannot be taken repeatedly, it is not right to take at all

•Utilitarian Principle: Take the action that achieves the higher or greater value

•Risk Aversion Principle: Take the action that produces the least harm or least potential cost

•Ethical “no free lunch” rule: Assume that virtually all tangible and intangible objects are owned by
someone unless there is a specific declaration otherwiseEx. copyrights, patents, and trademarks

Internet Challenges To Privacy

Cookies: Tiny files downloaded by Web site to visitor’s hard drive

Identify visitor’s browser and track visits to site

Web bugs: Tiny graphics embedded in e-mail messages and Web pages
Spyware: Software downloaded onto a user’s computer—usually without knowledge—that tracks Web
behavior and reports that behavior to a third-party server

Two Models of Providing Privacy

•Opt-out model: allow sites to collect personal information unless a person refuses to take action
•Opt-in model: prohibition of data collection without the consent of a person.

Technical Solutions
•Encryptinge-mails
•Makinge-mail or surfing activities appear anonymous
•Preventing client computers from accepting cookies
•Detecting and eliminating spyware
•P3P

Explain and give examples to the terms mashup and widget. (Ch5)

Mashups: Combinations of two or more online applications, such as combiningmapping software.

(Google Maps) with local real estate

Widgets: small programs that can be added to Web pages or placed on the desktop to add additional
functionality(weather reports)
 IT Infrastructure has 7 main components

•Computer hardware platforms : Dell,IBM,SUN,HP,APPLE,LINUX

•Operating system platforms: MICROSOFT,UNIX,LINUX,MAC OS

•Enterprise software applications: SAP,ORACLE,MICROSOFT

•Data management and storage: IBM,ORACLE,SQL SERVER,MYSQL

•Networking/telecommunications platforms: MICROSOFT SERVER,LINUX,CISCO,NORTEL

•Internet platforms: APACHE,JAVA,UNIX

•Consulting system integration services: IBM,EDS

Contemporary Software Platform Trends

•Linux and open-source software

Open-source software: Produced by community of programmers
Linux: Open-source Opearating System
•Java
Object-oriented programming language (Sun Microsystems)
Operating system, processor-independent (Java Virtual Machine)
•Ajax
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML

Competitive forces model for IT infrastructure investment

1.Market demand for firm’s services

2.Firm’s business strategy
3.Firm’s IT strategy, infrastructure, and cost
4.Information technology assessment
5.Competitor firm services
6.Competitor firm IT infrastructure investments
 What is Green Computing

Green computing is the environmentally responsible and eco-friendly use of computers and their
resources. In broader terms, it is also defined as the study of designing, engineering, manufacturing,
using and disposing of computing devices in a way that reduces their environmental impact.

Examples: Participating in electronic recycling programs Disadvantages: High start-up cost

Deploying virtual Technologies Still in experimental stages
Limiting printing and recycling paper

Advantages: Environmental sustainability - Save more Money per year

Energy efficiency – Green computing will actually translate into much lower carbon-dioxide emission.

GRID COMPUTING: Grid computing connect geographically remote computers into a single network
to combine processing power and create virtual supercomputer.

CLOUD COMPUTING: Cloud computing is a general term of anything that involves delivering
hostel services over the internet.

ADVANTAGES:Cost saving – Security – Quality control

DISADVANTAGES: Security in the cloud – Inflexibility – Technical Issues – Lack of support

UTILITY COMPUTING: Utility computing is a model in which computing resources are provided
to the customer based on specific demand.

RESPONSIBILITY: Accepting the potential cost, duties and obligations for decision you make.

ACCOUNTABILITY: Mechanism for identify who is responsible.

LIABLITY: Permit individual to recover damages.

 Disaster recovery and backup systems Give each of them 3 real-life
examples.

Disaster recovery is one of the things that is easy to explain abstractly and difficult to understand at the
real-world level of practice. We will focus particularly on situations involving the restoration of data
availability

Example 1: A DDoS attack

The DDoS attack focuses on crushing your network with illegitimate requests to prevent legitimate
data. As a result, your business can no longer connect to databases that access it over the network.

However, you can make backup data available by bringing new servers online to accommodate this by
simply keeping the backup data servers ready to go into production mode for immediate notification.

A more efficient approach would be to keep the backup data server images at hand, then gather new
virtual servers in the cloud based on those images when you need them.

Example 2: Data center destruction

a disaster that destroys part or all of the data center or all servers and disks in it. Such a situation is
possible, though rare. The best way to prepare your business for disaster recovery is to ensure that you
have external copies of your data.

Example 3: Data sabotage

A data disaster that can cause your business to fall is when someone intentionally sabotages data.
The critical step in preparing for such a disaster is to have backup copies that go back enough to allow
you to recover your data using a version that you know is safe.
CHAPTER4- CASE1: BIG DATA GETS PERSONAL: BEHAVIORAL TARGETING

Why is behavioral tracking such an important ethical dilemma today?

Identify the stakeholders and interest groups in favor of and opposed to
behavioral tracking.

The technology advancement can be double-edged sword. It brings benefits and opportunities to some of
the users but it also bringing troubles to some of the users. The web has created new opportunities and
challenges regarding privacy issues.

Stakeholders in favor of behavioral tracking include:

- Advertisers and marketers
- Individual Web Sites and companies whose business is identifying and tracking the internet users and
preferences in order to provide higher quality service, e.g. Google, Facebook and so on.
- Law enforcement agencies

Stakeholders opposed to behavioral tracking include:

- Privacy groups who is trying to enforce expectations of not having unwarranted intrusions into
personal lives
- Users who valued privacy

2.How do businesses benefit from behavioral tracking? Do people benefit?

Explain your answer.

Business benefits:

After the presence of behavioral monitoring, companies can predict what customers want and what they
are looking for, so that they can advertise on the web page that the customer always visits. This helps to
make advertising more effective and increase the company's profits.

Benefits to people:

Behavioral monitoring not only benefits the business, but also benefits people. For examples, you have
researched a phone on the Internet and its features. So, when it catches up with our web surfing history,
there will be many pop-up ads about the phone we're looking for.

3. What would happen if there were no behavioral tracking on the Internet?

- The private information will be missing such as the contents of shopping carts, location information or
login information.
-Website do not protect your information on internet.
-The scammer and spammer will be increases because no protection.
-Anonymous people or fake account will be free.
 CHAPTER4- CASE2: MONITORING IN THE WORKPLACE

How does information technology affect socioeconomic disparities? Explain

your answer.

Now users have adapted to information technology and have learned to use the new technology to spend
more time on these media devices. Based on research, poor families spend less time with their children
than families with more use of computers, phones and television to use media.

Why is access to technology insufficient to eliminate the digital divide?

Because those who are not in good shape spend less time using these technologies, which ultimately
leads to a digital division between the rich and the poor.

How serious a problem is the “ new” digital divide? Explain your answer.

Because now parents are spending more time to control the use of technology and at the same time
increasing the health concerns associated with the excessive use of technology. With the use of Internet
smartphones and other modern technologies, the increasing emphasis on visual processing rather than
critical thinking and information retention affects our cognitive patterns

Why is the digital divide problem an ethical dilemma?

Digital division is considered to be necessary in modern life. Therefore, there is no

unethical dilemma if users use it negatively, and if they use it positively, there will
be no unethical dilemma.
 CHAPTER5- CASE1: IS IT TIME FOR CLOUD COMPUTING?

What business benefits do cloud computing services provide? What

problems do they solve?

It’s benefits are:

- It can store large amounts of data and information
- It helps us build a large database
- It can help us to quickly find the desired information
This improves the work efficiency

What are the disadvantages of cloud computing?

- Possible downtime without - Internet connection
- Security in the Cloud - Inflexibility
- Technical Issues - Lack of support

How do the concepts of capacity planning, scalability, and TCO apply to this
case? Apply these concepts both to Amazon and to subscribers of its
services.

- Amazon must plan its future needs to be capable of providing suffienct computing power for both AWS
and Amazon retail services.

- Scability relates to both Amazon and AWS subscribers. Amazon must be able to provide its customer
with services that are scable, as it claims to do on its website.

- Amazon must provide hardware capacity planning and scability, bear the total TCO of its services
while also need to maintain the profitability of the company.

What kinds of businesses are most likely to benefit from using cloud
computing? Why?

Cloud computing has begun to take off in the business World. Zynga is a good example of a company
using cloud computing to improve its business in a new way.
More cost-effective - Application
Data lost prevention - Callaborative business.