Cyberbullying

          Cyberbullying is the act of harassing people over the internet using e-mails and chat rooms. It is a terrible thing to do because you get stalked by people that are just there to constantly harass you. You can try your best to block the bullies, but most of the time they find another way to message you more hatred and it never ends. In one case of cyberbullying, it got so bad that a girl commited suicide over it.

          In the article Girl’s Suicide Points to Rise in Apps Used by Cyberbullies, it states: “Inside her phone’s virtual world, she had changed her user name on Kik Messenger, a cellphone application, to “That Dead Girl” and delivered a message to two friends, saying goodbye forever. Then she climbed a platform at an abandoned cement plant near her home in the Central Florida city of Lakeland and leaped to the ground, the Polk County sheriff said.”

Legal and Ethical issues

I do not think that all information should be free. I think that journal articles and tv shows should be free because not all tv shows require you to buy them. Many journal articles are free to read also but some websites will require you to buy them even though you can usually find a specific article for free. I do not think that movies and music should be free because it costs money to produce them and you cannot view them for free in today’s world.

I think copyrights are a good thing because people cannot steal ideas and creations from you and call it their own. Open-access information can be claimed by anyone and they can say it is their own but it really is not. In the article A Data Crusader, a Defendant and Now, a Cause, it states: “The United States government has a very different view of Mr. Swartz. In 2011, he was arrested and accused of using M.I.T.’s computers to gain illegal access to millions of scholarly papers kept by Jstor, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals.” I think that it was wrong to use someone else’s computers to gain access to private data. No one should be hacking into databases to get information out of them.

Privacy and Security

The Internet is not private in my opinion. There are malware (Malicious software) all over many websites and you will not know if it gets in. In the article “Why Spyware Poses Multiple Threats to Security,” by Thompson, R., it states: “Spyware can “Phone home” information about an individual, their computer, and their surfing habits to a third party to use to spam a computer user or push pop-up ads to their screen;” Someone’s computer cam get compromised just through one piece of Spyware and that is no good. Thankfully there are anti-malware and other programs out there to combat these threats.

Also, the FBI and internet service providers can monitor anyone’s usage of the internet.  In the article “U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program”, it states: “Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”” That scares me because the NSA can take any information it wants from almost any website that has multimedia on it such as Facebook and Skype. All these things make me feel that anything that I type can be seen by anyone.