AUTHOR
John Weckert

ABSTRACT

Recently legislation was introduced into the Australian parliament to regulate the Internet. This created something of a furore from within the computer industry where arguments against the legislation ranged from those based on technical difficulties to those based on moral considerations, particularly of freedom of speech and freedom to access information. This paper will be concerned with the moral aspects of Internet regulation, and will be based on the speech act theory of John Austin. It will compare the Internet with other media, particularly print, television, and telephones. It will examine arguments both for and against Internet regulation, and argue that such regulation is not all bad, and in fact exists to a considerable extent already in a way which meets little resistance.

AUTHOR
Julian Webb, Lesley Rackley and John Betts

ABSTRACT

The tertiary-level students currently studying computing and information technology, or who are about to commence their studies, form the bedrock on which the future success or otherwise of information technology in society will, to a large extent, depend. It is therefore incumbent upon educational organisations to provide courses which give students the skills required to play their part in the responsible development of IT. The past twenty years have seen a radical change both in the tools provided for software developers and in the skills required by developers using those tools. However, there would appear to have been far less change in the typical structure of computing and IT tertiary courses during the same period. A major areas of statis appearing to need discussion is the prior experience of IT by students enrolling on higher education courses.

In this paper we argue that change is long overdue; that a major reassessment of the skills taught to computing and IT students is needed and that great care is needed to avoid gravely disadvantaging the very students the educational system should be assisting.

In the past a major component of a typical computing degree would be the acquisition of basic skills (e.g. the use of word processors, database packages etc.). Now, as a result of the widespread use of computers at home and in schools, students enrolling for higher education are already familiar with many of these skills. As a result, these students often find that their initial experience of tertiary study is the demotivating revisiting of topics with which they are already familiar. This leads to a number of questions. Should higher education institutions expect that new students are familiar with some set of ‘basic IT skills’, in the same way that they are expected to be able to read and write? If this were the case, considerable resources currently devoted by such organisations to elementary IT education might be redirected to more appropriate areas.

On the other hand, one possible problem with this approach is in the support of the mature student. Currently, the tertiary teaching of computing and IT starts from a very basic level and thus encourages mature students to further their education. What effect would making assumptions about prior IT experience have on these students, who are thought of by academics as being important factors in the success of a course? Might an underclass be created of those for whom such basic experience was unavailable? What sort of ‘top-up’ provision might be appropriate to these students and who should provide (and hence pay for) it?

This paper discusses each of these questions in some detail. Our conclusions are that: major changes in computing and IT teaching are required; further studies are needed to assess the core skills which today’s students are developing prior to entering tertiary education; the teaching of programming needs to be reviewed so as to provide more appropriate tools for the average student’s future career; the resources released from out-moded subject areas should specifically be channelled into other, more appropriate, staff and student development areas.

AUTHOR
Andrew Ward and Brian Prosser

ABSTRACT

In the twentieth century, the principal delivery system for post-secondary education was interpersonal in nature. Students would attend classes in which the professor, or someone designated by the professor, would provide instruction in the relevant discipline. This meant, amongst other things, that it was not uncommon for students to develop interpersonal relations with one another, and to feel that, in enrolling in and attending classes, they had become members of a community of learners. One need only look at the “student unions”, clubs, societies, lectures, and other organizations and events to see this characterization of post-secondary education confirmed.

In the last decade of the twentieth century the situation has begin to change. With the advent of computers networked through Internet Service Providers, and the downward spiral for the cost of such computers, the traditional topography of the University has begun to change. Where before there was a central location to which students were required to travel in order to receive instruction, this is no longer the case. Students can now take classes over the Internet without ever leaving the confines of their homes. More than this, students, using “laptop computers” and the ubiquitous Internet Service Providers, can now literally travel anywhere and still have access to instruction. Similarly, students no longer need physically attend public lectures and symposia in order to receive the benefits provided by both. With suitable foresight and a modicum of technological expertise on the part of the lecture and symposia sponsors, both can be broadcast out via the Internet to a geographically, albeit technologically linked, audience. As a result, the traditional notions of a classroom, lecture hall, and symposium venue (to name only three) have begun to undergo a radical reconceptualization. Instead of understanding such notions in spatio-geographic terms, we are now being asked to understand (and, so too, plan for) such notions in techno-topological terms. The classroom, with its desks, lights, chalkboards, and other educational tools, that students in the twentieth century are accustomed to is being replaced by the “virtual classroom” of the twenty-first century.

It is true that this shift to the virtual classroom has been welcomed by many. It promises the promulgation of education to many people who might not otherwise, for geographic, economic, or other physical reasons, have access to education. Prima facie, if one accepts a kind of educational egalitarianism with respect to the accessibility of instruction, this seems to be a welcome consequence of the advent of the virtual classroom. It is, though, all too easy to be swept up in the fervor attendant with the introduction of technological innovations, and to fail to reflect critically on the broader ramifications of such an introduction. The purpose of this paper to is to provide critical reflection on two aspects associated with the use of the virtual classroom. First, I will examine whether it is indeed the case that students are more closely linked together as a community of learners through the use of the virtual classroom. Contrary to the claims of many technological advocates who say that the use of the virtual classroom will enhance the development of “distributed communities” of learners and so link together people who would otherwise be (educationally, at least) isolated, I will suggest that the so-called communities that emerge with the use of the virtual classroom are isolating rather than connecting. This will require a re-examination of what exactly is the point of post-secondary education. Second, I will examine whether the use of the virtual classroom leads to the possibility of “many voices being heard” a kind of educational democratization or whether, instead, it leads to the progressive silencing of certain points of views. I will argue that there is reason to suppose that, contrary to its supporters, the virtual classroom, at this stage in its development, is educationally autocratic, not democratic. I will conclude with some suggestions for how these tendencies can be countered as computer mediated instruction moves into the twenty-first century.

AUTHOR
Richard Volkman

ABSTRACT

It may seem as if intellectual property rights in computer software are especially difficult to justify within the Lockean natural rights tradition. Some have even contended that software is so unlike the other products of labor as to require totally new ways of thinking about ownership. I will argue that this is not so. To the contrary, there is a very simple and straightforward argument from within the natural rights tradition that justifies exactly the sorts of rights usually conceived in terms of copyright or patent. My interest is to investigate the moral force of such rights in terms of the moral force of promise-keeping and contract. It is not my intention to explore the tangled legal issues surrounding copyright, patent, or contract law. However we should choose to spell out the precise legal rights of a programmer, I contend that the general moral grounds of those rights can be readily found in one’s natural rights to life and liberty, and the correlative rights to voluntary exchange.

Far from being a troubling case for the natural rights tradition, current practices and expectations in the sale and distribution of software are easily accounted for in terms of the natural rights view, and these transactions may actually serve as a paradigm for property relations on such a view. At bottom, we should regard the distribution of software as typically involving an explicit contract limiting what one may or may not do with that software. That one has the right to require acceptance of these conditions follows from basic commitments to one’s freedom to share or not share the products of one’s labor as one sees fit, at least under normal circumstances. These limits can and often do extend to restrictions against unauthorized copying or reverse-engineering of a piece of software. The moral force of keeping such promises is obvious in light of various examples of promise-making in other contexts.

Importantly, this approach to the ownership of software extends to our intuitions about the explicit and implicit terms and conditions of use often associated with non-commercial and quasi-commercial software, such as GNU/Linux, WarFTP, and other freeware and shareware licensed software. This view of intellectual property is partly drawn from and informed by the current debate about Open Source and “copyleft” software, and has important implications for that debate. In particular, GNU-founder Richard Stallman’s account of the advantages and even the definition of “free” software seems to be at odds with some of the claims of Linux-author Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative. The account of property outlined here illuminates the philosophical underpinnings of this debate, and can be found underlying some of the claims of each of the participants. Thus, the account corresponds to widely shared intuitions about software ownership, and also suggests a way of resolving the dispute.

FULL PAPER AVAILABLE: here

AUTHOR
Albert Vlug

ABSTRACT

Medical data
At the Erasmus University in the Netherlands we developed the national drug-safety system IPCI (Integrated Primary Care Information). A central database with Computerized Patient Records (CPR) of about 500.000 patients enable researchers to assess the effects and side-effects of the prescriptions. About 150 participating primary care doctors deliver weekly an update of all the changed CPR\x{FFFD}s to the IPCI database. In the Netherlands it is allowed to use CPRs for scientific research, but after 6 months the data must be destroyed. Since we aim to built a continuously increasing database of at least 5 years, we have to anonymize the data before they are sent to the central database.

Anonymization of the data
Both the patient identification in the data and the doctor identification in the data must be anonymized. We skip the name and address; only the sex and the month-year of birth will be sent from the doctor to the central database. Even the number of the patient in the doctors database will be replaced, because once the doctor may be a researcher using the central database who recognizes one of the patients based on the number. When data are collected for sending all patients are randomly numbered. The list of these numbers are stored in the database of the doctor, because each time a follow-up of a CPR is sent, the random number of the same patient must be the same in order to reconstruct the whole CPR in the central database. Not only the patient and the docter identification in the data, but also the doctor as the sender of data must be anonymized. An empty envelope around a floppy disk is sufficient for the anonymization of the doctor as sender, but electronic envelopes receives automatically a sender identification in the header of the electronic message. We cut this electronic head by creating a virtual postbox, that forwards all the incoming electronic data thereby replacing the doctors address by its own address. All the data we receive in the central database have one sender: the virtual postbox. Once this problem was solved a large complication occurs.

Encryption of the data
Collecting medical data electronically requires, according to our moral belief, also some kind of encryption. To be sure that the data are really sent by the sender of the electronic message, the double encryption of PGP is a suitable and widely used protocol. The sender encrypts his message with his secret key firstly and with the public key of the receiver secondly and afterwards he sends the message. The receiver must decrypt that message first with his own secret key and second with the public key of the sender according to the header. When the message is readable after this double decryption, one can be sure that the message was meant to be received by the decrypting receiver and the message was really sent by the sender named in the header of the message. Thus: double encryption needs the sender identification in order to decrypt the message with the senders public key. The problem with an anonymized electronic message is that the senders identification was anonymized by the virtual postbox!

Encryption of anonymized data
To use double encryption for anonymized electronic communication, new requirements must be specified. In this paper we suggest additional features that network providers must incorporate in the functionality of electronic message handlers. In fact we propose to add some ‘intelligence’ to the virtual postbox: instead of automatically forwarding, the postbox must now be able to read the sender from the header, select the appropriate public key from that sender, decrypt the message with that public key, replace the senders identification and encrypt the message with its own public key. On the receiver side (the central database) we have to decrypt the message with the secret key of the virtual postbox and after that with the secret key of the central database receiver. This procedure requires the availability of a list with only public keys at the virtual postbox, as well as a prgram to intervene the electronic communication. Unfortunately, so far none of the network providers is willing or has been able to implement it. We are building it ourselves first, to convince the technical feasability. Meanwhile it is a nice example of ethical constraints demanding new technology, instead of the opposite

AUTHOR
Anton Vedder

ABSTRACT

Providers have responsibilities relating to the textual information, images and sound recordings, accessible through their services. Apart from the people who, themselves, put information on the net, providers are the only ones who are in a position to fend off certain potentially harmful or offensive information. Furthermore, both the enormous scale on which information and other materials can be distributed through the Internet and the lack of barriers formerly present when people tried to take cognisance of the same kind of information and materials invite us to attribute these responsibilities to the providers.

Finally, three potential objections to this view are expounded and refuted. First, the alleged analogy between Internet providers and transportation companies. Second, the argument that the Internet is to be consid ed as a free zone with complete freedom of expression and freedom to perform experimental activities. Third, the idea that providers have no such responsibilities because they have no special expertise concerning social and moral matters.