Corinne's IST 110H Blog

Me and my two best friends in the whole world in Italy.

Team Multivac decided to do Celebrity Jeopardy as our video project and I personally loved the idea, being a huge fan of the Saturday Night Live skit myself. I was not entirely sure that we were going to be able to make the content fit the humor aspect of the show and have it still be somewhat informative but I was surprised once we started brainstorming questions how wrong I was. Our questions managed to be funny, informative, and stay true to the characters. It was nice that the humor of our group members was able to shine through. There were a few times when a few of us may have been worried about the appropriateness of our video but I think in the end our video is one of the most G-rated on all of youtube.com.

The filming of the video wasn't too painful at all. I think that we were so organized with the script since we had met a few other times prior to the actual filming that we didn't have to stress over minor details while in the process. Each member of the team did their part by pulling together their costumes and any props that might be needed and this too was nice in that it helped keep the day moving.

I wasn't sure with the way we filmed the video how it was going to turn out once Garrett edited it but then again I had no idea that Garrett was so skillful at editing. I was amazed while watching the video that at points where I remember us cutting and changing around that it appeared that we filmed in one continuous perfect take.

I am very pleased with how this project turned out and happy that we could be humorous while still managing to fulfill project requirements and being somewhat informative.

Here is our video in case you haven't had a chance to see it :)

I came across an article that was published in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Ten Things Your IT Department Won't Tell You". http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118539543272477927.html?mod=todays_us_nonsub_journalreports
In this article, there are several ways to bypass certain regulations that businesses put on their employees, either to protect their systems, or in a futile attempt to keep employees on task during work hours. I know that for me, I could have used these tips in high school when I couldn’t visit youtube http://youtube.com/even something as simple as my email account.http://www.msn.com However, I realize that when my school put up these restrictions, they were not necessarily to block the tourettes guy videohttp://youtube.com/watch?v=myB_8UPTGBQ or some of the other hilarious videos that youtube possesses. They were most likely trying to block websites that can damage their systems by acquiring spyware and other such detrimental things that are often leaked onto your computer when you visit less than reputable sites. Some of the things that are taught to you by this article are how to send files larger than allowed by your network, how to use software that your company disallows, how to search work documents from home, and “How to Look Like You’re Working”. While some of these things may seem harmless, most of them leave users more susceptible to hackers.

While none of the information in this article is “top secret” it leaves one to wonder what else will be released to the public over the next few years.

There is not much about Second Life that I understand. I don’t know why people would spend so much of their recreational time fiddling with it or why it is important to construct the perfect avatar or even why some insist that it is in no way a game. However, there is one aspect of Second Life that I understand and even have a respect for, and that is businesses using the site for practical uses. IBM uses the site in many different ways. One way that it uses it is to give more information about the company to consumers, potential employees, and even other businesses. IBM also uses SL as a way to hold meetings with its employees, which I thought to be slightly dysfunctional until our class help a similar meeting. I thought that if the members of the meeting had things like their jobs on the line they would be less inclined to take off all of their clothes and drop down on their colleagues at inappropriate times. I think that without this little defect our class meeting could have been fairly effective.

The things that IBM has on their island, well the one that I explored, as IBM has many, are conference rooms, theaters, and even media centers. As a person who is still inept at SL workings I found the island fairly easy to navigate and it helped that there were people to ask if I wanted to find something interesting to look at.

“The Sales Center Reception area of the business center is staffed 24 hours per day, 5 days per week, with global access from Los Angeles to Paris to Sydney.” –cnet.com IBM makes it very clear that they are user friendly and I liked this quote that I found on cnet.com and I did not find anything like this on the Sun Microsystems site which is the next one that I explored.

I think I would recommend this space to a friend if I thought that they had a particular interest in the business. It was well organized and there are a lot of websites online that reference this particular presence on SL so it was easy for me to find outside information.

The other island that I decided to visit was one from Sun Microsystems. I thought I would go back and explore more with this company because I did this particular one when examining the blogging policies and I wanted to make a link of sorts. The Second Life space for Sun Microsystems did not seem to be as developed as that of IBM. I also found that there weren’t many people to ask questions so I had a hard time navigating the island and I had a hard time finding things that would be of particular interest to me and that would prove interesting to mention in my blog entry. Also there were several islands of Sun Microsystems but many of them would not let me go there. There was only one that I found that would allow me access in the first place and once I got there I was disappointed with the lack of interaction that I experienced when exploring IBM.

Many teachers on the high school and middle school level and most college/university professors strongly discourage the use of Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org as a primary source for research papers and other such projects. However, a new extreme as arisen in a New Jersey school district. They have gone as far as to ban Wikipedia from their network. Their reasoning behind this? Students will be too "tempted" to use Wikipedia and its untrustworthy information. I agree with one critic, Denise Walker, in that this is sad. I agree that sometimes the information found on Wikipedia is not up to the standards of a primary source but most of the time it can give you a good place to start if you have no idea what you are talking about. Walker mentions that it is a shame that this school district simply banned the site instead of making it into a learning experience. Instead of telling them not to use the site, why not tell them to contribute to the site and add the information that they find from their primary sources to the information already on Wikipedia, or why not take the opportunity to have a discussion about the importance of integrity in media. I would never use Wikipedia as a primary source but before I start a paper or a project with a completely new subject matter I almost always start with a wiki. I gather information and use it to search other key terms associated with my main focus in order to write and inclusive paper. I think that banning Wikipedia would be tragic.

The article I based this blog posting off of can be found at the following URL:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071127-banning-wikipedia-at-school-good-idea-or-missed-opportunity.html

In a recent survey taken by Sophos, businesses were asked to account for their biggest concerns in regards to security and risk as far as the technologies of their companies were concerned. The main consensus of these surveys was that a large majority of businesses still believe their employees to be the main risk to exposing the company to IT threats.
Paul Ducklin, Sophos’ head of security stated that the conclusion that can be drawn from this is that administration has yet to take desktop security seriously within lower level of company workings. Ducklin also stated that most of the attention in these companies is focused on “the outside” rather than “the inside”, but most physical accidents with laptops and other such devices are unavoidable and more time should be devoted to things that can be easily prevented, like IT threats.
A separate survey conducted by the Department of Trade and Industry went one further to pinpoint the errors that compiled the human risk in companies. In this instance 1,800 people were given passwords to remember and over one third of these participants wrote down their password or storing it on their computers.
It goes without saying that this is a huge risk to be taking in today’s IT world, which is saturated with hackers and potential identity thieves. Companies seem to be realizing the risks that human ignorance can bring upon a business yet these surveys have been run annually and the numbers have yet to drop in favor of more intelligent IT practices. How long will it take for these companies to realize that they need to educate from the bottoms of the corporate ladder upwards? I would like to say that the lesson has been learned but outside of the realm of information technology there are still many who are unaware of the risks they are posing to their own systems.

These are the articles where I read about this:
http://www.news.com/Survey-Office-workers-still-the-greatest-security-threat/2100-7355_3-6213227.html?tag=item

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/06/18/dti_it_security_research