COMPUTER CAPABILITIES AND ISSUES ASSOCIATED WITH CONNECTIVITY

The five capabilities of computing are, 1. Connectivity. Connectivity refers to the ability to connect computational devices over a network and this makes the transfer of information possible from one device (node) to another. Connectivity is perhaps the latest of the five capabilities of computing that has had the greatest effect on computing in that it has made computing ubiquitous. LANs, WANs, internets, the Internet and Internet2 have been perhaps the greatest invention done by mankind after the wheel in that they have enabled near real -time communication of people and gadgets across the globe and beyond. Events happening on one end of the planet are bro adcast to people in geographically disperse areas of the world; it has enabled the access of resources which can be utilized from across the globe . Collaboration has been enhanced as teams work from geographically disparate areas of the planet on a common problem. The internet has been thought of as the 21 st Century Tower of Babel. 2. Programmability Computation is not useful unless were able to solve problems with it. The concept of programming a computation system to fulfil a certain task has become the foundation of the information age. The product of programming a computation system is a finite set of instructions that abstract a problem solving routine called a program. Repetitive and mundane tasks have been programmed and abstracted for computational devi ces to execute and consequently we have built our society on this capability of computation. Artificial intelligence is one of the more interesting applications of programmability as artificial intelligence in its current state mimics and has capacity to d o tasks as if a human was doing them. This has great benefit in tasks that need human intervention but are too dangerous for human presence like deep sea mining and space travel. 3. Accuracy and Precision The product of the programmability of computing device s is a program, but it would be a shaky foundation to build the information age on a platform of inaccuracy if the same program run in the same way with the same parameters produced different results. Computation is of greatest benefit to humans because we dont question the results from it. 4. Persistence and storage The ability to persist data and programs (instructions) is one of the fundamental capabilities of computational systems . This capability has enabled computing systems to become banks for all type of information. Currently most information of our age has found its way into some form of storage, contacts, emails, documents, movies and music are now persisted on USB drives, computer drives and lately the cloud after all major players in the computing world acquiring/building data centres for their customers to store their material in. 5. Speed of computation Speed of computation is a core capability of computation. This has propelled the information age. The usability of computing devices has been fuelled by the adoption of Graphical User Interfaces. Graphical user interfaces require a lot of computation in order to paint the images we perceive as icons , hardware acceleration has also made it possible for really fast games and video. Computation devices increased computation speeds in accordance to Moores Law. It has been recently discovered that GPUs (Graphic Processing Units) are calculating faster that CPUs consequently general purpose implementations to tap

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into this (GPGPU, nd) will push the matter further, this will push computation further. The most far reaching and society changing capability of computation systems is connectivity, connectivity gives access to information or resources not in your possession. Different technologies have be en built on this capability over and above the traditional client server setup some of the more interesting ones are cloud computing and peer-to-peer networks. They have their own fair share of challenges, unique to these implementations. The following are the different issues and challenges brought about by connectivity. 1. Privacy in computational devices In the olden days when computers were independent standalone devices, the privacy of store information was guaranteed by physical forms of security. In the current setting privacy of information is a big issue not only caused by illegal access to sensitive materials by such methods as eavesdropping and hacking but through legal means instituted by governments. In the US the Patriot act (Bentley, 2008),(Fei et al, 2011) perhaps is a good example for this as it grants the government the right to conduct searches and seizure of assets and thus governments of countries in the EU and Canada have laws that prevent the storage of certain information on servers not i n their borders due to privacy concerns of data stored outside their boundaries. The current scenario of near ubiquitous connectivity, peer -to-peer networking and lack of central points of responsibility for these networks has brought about issues similar to those of cryptography should governments/regulatory authorities have a backdoor into peer -topeer networks (SAVAGE, 2010)? 2. Ownership of networks and content dispersed over networks. As I had mentioned, connectivity in computatio n systems ranges from LANs to Internet level connectivity. It is fairly easy to determine who owns the smaller networks but the matter becomes hazier as we move out, who owns the Internet? Who owns information on the internet? When a story is broken by a n ews channel, is it OK for a search engine to index the information in such a way that the readers can read that news solely from the search engines results? With ownership comes responsibility, if so who owns peer -topeer networks and who is responsible f or the illegalities perpetuated by these networks? 3. Control Who controls connectivity? Should governments be allowed to choose who should connect to the internet, for how long and the content they should be allowed to consume? Networks are mostly used to ge t access to centralized servers, Mail servers and other different kind of services. It is built on the client -server architecture. The control in this traditional setup of who gets connected, for how long and what kind of information is but this is rapidly changing. Peer-to-peer networks have emerged that lack a central point of control. These peer -to-peer networks and applications running on them are used as points of dispersion of illegal, ill intent material. This has been mainly on the area of content sharing but recently a virtual currency system known as Bitcoin has taken off. The Bitcoin virtual currency has been designed to challenge the world of centralised money systems by creating an untraceable, unstoppable, uncontrollable currency system (Greenberg, 2011). 4. Accuracy In the highly connected world we live in it is not quite common that news or articles of doubtable accuracy are copied all over as people try to drive traffic to their site. Possibly the latest case was the rumour that Microsoft was bu ying out Nokia. Stock prices dwindled after various sites reported the rumour ( Vehaskari, 2011) . Who is in charge of the verification of content that appears on a web page or information that is copied around a network? 5. Security Hacking, DOS attacks, man in the middle attacks, phishing e.t.c are all malicious activities that attack the integrity of a network or utilize the network to harm users . The

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issue of security is partly related to privacy in that in order to secure a network how far should you compromise the privacy of the users of the same network in order to create structures to trace details of users who misuse the network ? Most corporate companies have IT policies that control usage of the connectivity resources in their possession. The larger question is what sort of traffic should be allowed in public WI FI. China has been investing in the conversion of the traditional phone booths to WI -FI access points. Will it be ethical for them to act in the same way as companies in controll ing these resources? Peer-to-peer networks represent a relatively new and unique connectivity scenario. This method of connectivity generally uses non standard ports and does not have centralized control and this creates fertile ground for the dispersal o f illegal material and substances (Gawker, 2011). Should governments ban these kinds of applications/protocols (alternative currency systems) that provide channels for law breaking with impunity by facilitating such activities as piracy, child pornography and aiding online drug trade (Gawker, 2011)? Should anonymous networks like Tor be forbidden by organizations as they can be used to aid and abet law breaking ? Reference list Vehaskari, Aira-Katariina (2011), Nokia dips again after heavy fall [ online] available at http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110601/bs_afp/finlandtelecomequipcompanynokiastock (accessed on 06/06/11) Adrian Chen, Gawker (2011), Undergro und Website Lets You Buy Any Drug Imaginable [online] available at http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/silkroad/ (accessed on 06/06/11) GREENBERG, A (2011), 'Crypto Currency', Forbes, 18 7, 8, pp. 40-42, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 6 June 2011. Bentley, L (2008), Regulation Will Increase Complexity in the Cloud [online] available at http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/bentley/regulation -will-increase-complexity-in-thecloud/?cs=15453 (accessed on 07/06/11) SAVAGE, C (2010), U.S. Tries to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet [online] available at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27wiretap.html?_r=1 (accessed on 07/06/11) Fei, H et al (2011), 'A Review on Cloud Computing: Design Challenges in Architecture and Security', Journal of Computing & Information Technology , 19, 1, pp. 25 -55, Computers & Applied Sciences Complete, EBSCO host, viewed 7 June 2011 GPGPU (nd), what is GPGPU? [online] available at http://gpgpu.org/about (accessed on 07/06/11)

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