Computer Science

Summery of social network fraud and the effect on cybersecurity.

What are your ideas on how to provide time to intervene and prevent an insider cyber attack?Find information about an insider attack, explain the attack, and did you agree or disagree with the actions? Were they justified?

Describe the meaning of schedulability analysis, static scheduling, thread scheduling, and monotonic algorithm by giving examples and making reference to the company Amazon.  In this case, I’m working on a real-time system of this company called Amazon E-commerce System

On February 8, 2013, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals met to consider a case that could shape the future of technology innovation in the United States. The case involved the Alice Corporation, an Australian company that obtains financial market patents from the United States, the United Kingdom, and other major trading nations.  Alice holds four patents for a business method that CLS Bank International employs to reduce risk in financial transactions. In 2007, Alice sued CLS Bank International and other companies for patent infringement, hoping to reap financial gain. CLS Bank, however, countersued Alice claiming that Alice’s patents were in violation of Section 101 of the Patent Act.Section 101 states that the U.S. government cannot grant patents for “laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas.”  Rather, patents must involve only practical applications of abstract ideas. But what is the difference between an abstract idea and a practical application? The answer to this question involves high stakes—billions of dollars in the IT industry.Many lawyers who represent IT companies describe patent-enforcing companies (such as Alice Corporation) as “patent trolls.” Such companies do not produce a product themselves. Rather patent trolls make money by threatening to sue technology companies that supposedly make use of their patented ideas. The patent troll is usually not the inventor, but rather a company that has purchased patents from bankrupt technology companies, usually failed start-ups. Patent trolls generally target companies with annual revenues between $50 and $200 million. These companies are large enough to pay licensing fees, but often lack resources to pay steep litigation fees.For example, a company called Ultramercial obtained a patent for the idea of “pre-roll advertisements”—ads placed prior to the broadcasting of free video clips broadcast on YouTube and Hulu. These ads are a major revenue source for YouTube, Hulu, and other companies. One of these companies, Wild Tangent, sued Ultramercial asserting that its patent claim was invalid; however, an appellate court upheld a lower court’s ruling declaring the patent valid.  In the summer of 2012, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in the case asking the appellate court to reconsider its ruling, which, if not overturned, would force companies such as YouTube and Hulu to pay large licensing fees to Ultramercial.According to Google general council Kent Walker, “Abuses of our patent system cost the economy $29 billion in 2011, raising prices and reducing choice. Technology moves incredibly fast, and the United States Patent and Trademark Office need to take prompt action.”Software patents were not even recognized by U.S. Courts until the States Street case of 1998. Up to that point, many companies had patented software ideas for business methods, but none of the patents had been enforced.  In 1998, the U.S. Court of Appeals recognized Signature Financial Group’s patent of a business method using computers and allowed the company to collect licensing fees from States Street Bank.Since the States Street decision, the U.S. court system has been floundering with the issue. Different courts have come down on different sides. In the earlier appellate hearing of the Alice case, two judges of the three-judge panel held for Alice Corporation and argued for an extraordinarily broad interpretation of patent law. Now, most of the heavyweights of the U.S. IT sector—Google, IBM, Facebook, Intel, and others—have filing amicus briefs, legal opinions in support of one side or the other. IBM, which has led the world in number of new patents for 21 years, filed a brief in support of Alice. Google and Facebook, which are leading product producers, filed in support of CLS Bank. Intel, a computer chip manufacturer that has many patents but is fearful of the large number of patents in the field of theoretical chip design, also filed on the side of the bank.The new appellate court decision will likely pave the way for the Supreme Court to weigh in on the matter more extensively. A decision in favor of Alice would mean an explosion of patent litigation and increase in costs for IT producers. A decision against Alice would be a boost for large IT software manufacturers and creators on online content and products who may be less careful about paying licensing fees to small patent holders. The Department of Justice has filed an amicus brief favoring neither side. Instead, the department has called on the appellate court not to issue a decision that would create a hard-and-fast rule, but that would allow the courts to consider each case individually.  This action indicates that the U.S. government feels that both positions have some merit. On the one hand, patent trolls are reducing U.S. productivity. On the other hand, the Department of Justice recognizes the need to protect the owners of intellectual property.(The length of your answer should be from roughly four or five sentences to a couple of paragraphs for each questions listed below).How unique does an idea need to be to warrant patent protection? Should the idea of pre-roll advertisements be patentable?Are patent trolls justified in their actions? Do they provide a means of rewarding small innovators?Are patent lawsuits likely to decrease or increase innovation in the United States?

Credit WoesA Credit Bureau Faces a Decision of Whether to Revise a SystemAnnabelle and Arvin Dorland made an offer on a three-bedroom house in Grande Pointe, New Hampshire. The sellers accepted the offer, and every- thing seemed to be going well. The home was their dream house, with all the features they ever wanted.Jenny Cartier works for First Fiduciary Trust, the bank through which the Dorlands applied for their mortgage. With the Dorlands’ permission, Jenny asked for a credit report from Canyon Credit Company. Canyon is one of three major nationwide credit bureaus.After an uneventful but anxious three days, the Dorlands received a phone call from Jenny at the bank. She said that the credit report from Canyon showed that the Dorlands had an outstanding lien on a fishing boat in Happy Jack, Louisiana. For that reason, the bank couldn’t approve their mortgage application. Arvin was incensed. He told Jenny that there had to be a mistake—that neither he nor Annabelle had ever even visited Louisiana, much less bought a boat there.Jenny replied that if the Dorlands wanted their dream house and a First Fiduciary mortgage, they’d better get the problem cleared up fast. Another couple wanted to make an offer on the house, and the seller wouldn’t wait more than 48 hours. Jenny gave Arvin the name and phone number of Louise Patella, her contact at Canyon Credit.U.S. law allows anyone to get the details of his or her credit report and suggest corrections. Arvin immediately contacted Louise. She researched the problem and discovered another Arvin Dorland, a man from Magnolia, Louisiana. Louise realized that the company had two different Arvin Dorlands on file—the Arvin in New Hampshire was in his mid-30s, while the Arvin in Louisiana was 72. By the time Louise corrected the database and issued a new report to First Fiduciary, the Dorlands’ dream house had been sold to someone else.Arvin and Annabelle’s concern is that the bank will always associate the Dorlands with “that problem with the boat in Louisiana.” Also, they worry that the other two credit companies the bank uses could distribute the erroneous information.Louise’s husband, Peter, also works at Canyon Credit. Peter is the di- rector of systems analysis and design, and he and Louise have often dis- cussed the increasing frequency of complaints concerning incorrect credit reports. After hearing about the Dorlands’ problem, he approached the chief information officer (CIO) of Canyon Credit to suggest a change in the database. Peter argued that the simple coding scheme used to identify a record for retrieval worked fine when the database was small. But now that the database system was large, it needed to be modified so all recordscould be more easily and correctly accessed. Such a change would allow growth to one billion records and eliminate the mistaken-identity prob- lem.The CIO directed Peter to do a full cost-benefit analysis of the matter. Peter discovered that to convert to using unique numeric identifiers would cost over $720,000 and save the company $90,000 per year. Some savings would result from the elimination of claims processing where clients were misidentified. Even larger savings could be realized from reductions in court settlements to those adversely affected by the system’s errors. Peter concluded that the gain in reputation and increased customer satisfaction would be enough to justify the change. The CIO, on the other hand, con- sidered the errors in the database a small problem. Based on the high ini- tial cost and the long payback period shown by the cost-benefit analysis, he was against the change. The dispute was reported to the Information Systems Steering Committee for resolution.Questions :What were some early warning signs that signaled things were not going well with the CityTime project?What steps should city managers and SAIC have taken at an early stage of the project to identify and prevent fraud?Sources:  “CityTime,” New York Times, March 14, 2012,

ENGLISH – Define primary sources and secondary sources. Where do you obtain primary source data? Where are secondary sources found?

The CityTime project was meant to replace a largely manual, paper-based payroll system for the city of New York (NYC). The goal was to provide a tool that would help city administrators manage a workforce of over 100,000 employees spread across 63 departments. It was also intended to simplify the employee time-reporting process, which was complicated by numerous union timekeeping rules, and to identify employees who tried to fraudulently inflate their paychecks. The project was initiated in 1998 when the city awarded the contract to a subsidiary of MCI, a telecommunications company that later ran into financial scandals and, ultimately, filed for bankruptcy.In 2001, the CityTime contract was reassigned to Science International Applications Incorporated (SAIC), a defense company. In an unusual move, the handoff to SAIC occurred without the contract going through the normal competitive bidding process required for contracts of this size. Around the same time, Spherion Atlantic Enterprises was hired as a subcontractor to provide quality assurance on the CityTime project, with an initial contract of $3.4 million. The city’s contract with Spherion was eventually revised 11 times, with a resulting cost of $48 million.Richard Valcich, the NYC payroll office executive director during the initial years of the project, accused SAIC of dragging its feet on the project and wasskeptical of the company’s ability to deliver a quality product. However, Valcich retired in 2004 and was replaced by Joel Bondy, a staunch advocate of the project.  In this role, Bondy was responsible for overseeing and re-awarding Spherion’s contract. It was later discovered that Bondy worked for Spherion for two years prior to joining the city.In another questionable move, the CityTime contract was switched from a fixed-price contract to a “time and materials” contract, and the project costs spiraled out of control—from $224 million in 2006 to $628 million by 2009. This switch in the terms of the contract plus lack of project oversight made it even easier for those involved with the project to commit fraud.At a city hearing in December 2010, Bondy revealed that Spherion employees were billing the city at a rate of $236.25 per hour and that a number of former city employees had become Spherion employees.5 Mr. Bondy resigned shortly after this meeting.That same month, federal prosecutors charged several consultants for the CityTime project with a multimillion dollar fraud scheme, which allegedly started in 2005. The consultants were accused of manipulating the city into paying for contracts to businesses that the consultants controlled, and then redirecting part of the money to enrich themselves personally.In May 2011, federal investigators arrested Gerald Denault, the senior project manager at SAIC, for allegedly receiving over $5 million in kickbacks and for committing wire fraud and money laundering. Denault had convinced his employer to hire TechnoDyne LLC as the main subcontractor for the project. TechnoDyne eventually received $450 million out of the $600 million paid to SAIC and siphoned off millions to a bogus India-based consulting firm owned by Denault.  The two owners of TechnoDyne are now fugitives and their whereabouts are unknown. Six other defendants are scheduled to go to trial in 2013.In March 2012, SAIC agreed to pay $500 million to avoid prosecution for its role in the CityTime scandal; most of that money was to go back to the city of New York. By this time, it was estimated that NYC had paid out $652 million—with an outstanding bill of $41 million—owed on the project, which was originally estimated to cost $63 million and to be completed in 2003.Questions :What were some early warning signs that signaled things were not going well with the CityTime project?What steps should city managers and SAIC have taken at an early stage of the project to identify and prevent fraud?Sources:  “CityTime,” New York Times, March 14, 2012,

Instructions Write a 5- to 7-page APA formatted research paper on any of the following topics. Research any associated tools, new developments, and benefits/disadvantages in relation to the topic. Including your introduction and conclusion, make sure to answer the following questions in your paper: Describe your interest in the topic you’ve chosen and why it interests you. What type of positive or negative impact has your technology topic had on society over the past 5 years? What opportunities have now become available because of the advent of your technology topic? What industries are benefiting from the existence of your technology topic? Make sure to cite examples. What improvements do you think could still be made in this area? What are 2–3 different tools that can be used in relation to your technology topic? Topics to choose from can include any of the following (or related sub-topics): Web Applications Social Media Cloud Computing Web Ethics Collaboration Technology Green Technology Mobile Computing Artificial Intelligence Virtual Reality Open Source Educational Technologies Make sure you put your research into your own words unless direct quotations are appropriate. Cite your sources using APA formatting. You have a tutorial on this in the Campus Common. Here is an example for a reference of a Web site address: Contributor, I. (Last edited date). Title of resource. Retrieved from http://Web address There are plenty of resources you can use to make sure you properly format your paper in a professional manner. You can use the Microsoft Office Word 2010 skills that you learned from this week’s textbook reading to format your paper. Click here for some useful information about APA and formatting research papers. Check out the documents that came with your text that you downloaded in Week 1. The South University Online Library has information about APA Standards. (Check the links at the bottom of the library home page.) Submission Details: Submit your paper to the Submissions Area by the due date assigned as a 5- to 7-page MS Word document named ITS1101_W5_Project_LastName_FirstInitial.docx.

Describe two digital footprints you have left within the last week. Analyze each one for potential risk on a scale of 1-10, 1 being low risk and 10 being high risk. Write about a situation in which you or someone you know was a victim of a privacy, safety, or security breach online. Describe the situation and how it was eventually resolved. Put your name into at least two different search engines (Google, Bing, Dogpile, Yahoo, Ask.com, and DuckDuckGo are some popular ones) and review your own digital trail. Pretend you are a potential employer. What observations could you make about your own online presence? Note: If you have a common name, you may need to add additional search terms or experiment with different search terms, such as the city in which you live (e.g., Dan Smith Clinton, Iowa). Now that you have explored your own digital trail, identify at least three steps you can take to enhance your privacy, safety, and security on the web.

Discuss the future of cyber warfare. Include the following as part of your discussion: a. How future wars will be fought. b. How ethical is cyber warfare? c. How the United States is preparing defensively to counter cyber-attacks? d. What is next? 1. Document Format. a. MS Word document b. One-inch (1″) margins c. Times New Roman font d. Twelve (12) pitch e. Not including your title page, this assignment should be 4-6 pages. f. You must use 5 scholarly sources in supporting this assignment. 2. Citation Format: The Chicago Manual of Style. As stated in the Academic Integrity Briefings, information taken directly from another source must be placed in quotations and cited following the Chicago format contained in the week one “lessons” folder. You must cite all other information from your sources, even if you do not quote directly. DIRECT QUOTING SHOULD BE KEPT TO A MINIMUM.