INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY IN
BUSINESS AND
SOCIETY
SESSION 13 – MIDTERM REVIEW
SEAN J. TAYLOR
ADMINISTRATIVIA
• Assignment 3 due 3/20
Varun will email with instructions for
handing it in.
• Midterm on Thursday
MIDTERM FORMAT
• 8 multiple choice
• 4 true/false
• 8 matching
• 18 short answer questions
YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR
1. Anything in a required reading
2. All lecture content and slides
3. Basic HTML knowledge from A2
4. “managerial level” knowledge of all
technical conceprts
S01:
TECHNOLOGY
SAMPLING: FROM ANALOG TO DIGITAL
Dhar and Sundararajan (2007)
EFFECT OF IT?
1. DIGITIZATION
2. MODULARITY
3. COMPUTING POWER
4. CONNECTIVITY
1. IT TRANSFORMS BUSINESS
AND SOCIETY
2. INVESTMENTS IN IT ARE
CRITICAL TO THE SUCCESS OF
ORGANIZATIONS
3. INNOVATION AND
CREATIVITY IN THE USE OF
DATA IS CRITICAL TO SUCCESS
S02/03:
INTELLECTUAL
PROPERTY
Before: protection only for published works with
© attached, otherwise public domain
After: protection for original works which are
fixed in a tangible medium of expression
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
REPRODUCE
CREATE DERIVATIVE WORKS
SELL, LEASE, OR RENT
PERFORM PUBLICLY
DISPLAY PUBLICLY
BUT NO RIGHT TO UNDERLYING IDEA IS GRANTED.
IT’S IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN.
FAIR USE
ANY COPYING OF COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
DONE FOR A LIMITED AND “TRANSFORMATIVE”
PURPOSE SUCH AS TO COMMENT UPON,
CRITICIZE OR PARODY A COPYRIGHTED WORK.
SUCH USES CAN BE DONE WITHOUT
PERMISSION FROM THE COPYRIGHT OWNER.
DMCA:
CRACKING DRM IS ILLEGAL
Passed in 1998, signed into law by President Clinton
Implements treaties signed in 1996 at the World Intellectual Property
Organization (WIPO)
Supported by software and entertainment industries
DMCA TITLE II: OCILLA
Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation
Act
Creates conditional “safe harbor” for online
service providers (OSPs)
• Can make temporary copies to transmit them
• Not liable for infringement of your users!
HOW TAKE DOWN WORKS
1.
Jack puts content under Jill’s copyright on YouTube
2.
Jill notices this.
3.
Jill’s lawyer sends a letter to YouTube’s designated agent detailing
the infringement.
4.
YouTube MUST take the video down and tell Jack.
5.
Jack can send a counter-notice to YouTube to have the content
“Put Back”
6.
If Jill doesn’t file a lawsuit within 14 days, YouTube must put the
material back up.
SOPA POTENTIAL EFFECTS
Upstream/Downstream?
PATENTS
The right to exclude others from making, selling, or
using an invention.
• Most comprehensive form of IP protection
• Even using independent discovery of same invention is excludable.
Criteria
1.
Useful
2.
Novel
3.
Nonobvious
PATENTS: STILL RELEVANT?
• Mutually assured destruction?
• Defensive only.
• Startups say that they are not important for competitive
advantage.
• The right incentives?
How would you change the system?
If you had a startup, would you seek patents?
S04:
IT STRATEGY
HOW DOES IT LOWER COSTS?
Substitute information for physical assets or goods
•
Information vs. parts inventory (Dell, Toyota)
•
Information vs. finished-goods inventory (Zara, Cisco, Walmart)
Substitute information technology for labor
•
Self Service (FedEx, Citibank, Delta)
•
Automation (e.g., factory automation—Ford, Toyota)
Increase the output from the same payroll
•
Enable employees to work faster (tax returns at H&R Block)
•
•
Expand skills of employees (Progressive)
Outsourcing to lower cost regions (Microsoft call centers)
HOW DOES IT ENABLE BETTER PRODUCTS?
Increase product quality
•
Create better products, enabled by IT (UPS, Progressive)
•
Overlay better IT-enabled service on existing products (Amazon)
Increase product variety and ‘fit’
•
Use local information about demand patterns (Zara)
•
•
Find out what your customers want and build it (Dell)
Convert uniform products into differentiated ones (Yahoo)
Increase pre-sale and after-sale support
•
•
Pleasurable Buying Experience (Amazon’s One Click Shopping)
Expedited shipping and easy return policies (Zappos)
FOUR KEY INTERNET-ENABLED
STRATEGIES
4 Key Internet-enabled Strategies for Competitive
Advantage:
1. Disintermediation
2. Mass Customization
3. Personalization
4. Global Reach
THE FIVE COMPETITIVE FORCES: REVIEW
firm = company = organization = business = competitor
Barriers to Entry, or
Threat of new Entrants
The extent of rivalry
between the existing firms
in the focal industry
The threat of entry
by potential entrants
(new firms) into
the focal industry
Industry that
you are analyzing
(focal industry)
Bargaining Power
of Suppliers
The bargaining power
of the firms that sell
inputs to the firms in
the focal industry
Rivalry Among
Existing Competitors
Threat of Substitute
Products or Services
The threat of products/services that could
substitute (be used
instead of) the finished products made by
the firms in the focal industry
Bargaining Power
of Buyers
The bargaining power
of the customers that buy
the finished products of
the firms in the focal industry
THE INNOVATOR’S DILEMMA
1. Sustaining innovations
• improve product performance
2. Disruptive innovations
• Result in worse performance (short-term)
• Eventually surpass sustaining technologies in
satisfying market demand with lower costs
• cheaper, simpler, smaller, and frequently
more convenient to use
S05:
PLATFORMS
PLATFORM OR PRODUCT?
• part of a technical system whose components
come from different companies or organizations
• relatively little value without complementary
products or services
PLATFORMS ARE INEVITABLE
DIRECT NETWORK EFFECTS
INDIRECT NETWORK EFFECTS
STANDARDS:
SOLVE COORDINATION PROBLEMS
• governments
• corporations
• consortia
• professional associations
• standards-organizations (ISO)
• volunteers or developers
• de facto standards
TECHNICALLY,
WHAT IS A PLATFORM?
•
A Hardware and/or Software system with an interface for
applications
•
Typically, a platform has an API--Applications Programming
Interface: an interface (i.e., a set of standardized commands)
that the underlying “platform” can execute
Software creators use the API when writing programs
•
Customized “programs” (e.g., Excel Macros)
Application Programming Interface
Application Software (e.g., Office)
Application
platform
Application Programming Interface
Operating System
Application Programming Interface
Processor (Hardware)
O/S
platform
Hardware
platform
S06/S07:
COMPUTERS
AND THE WEB
BASIC COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE:
INFORMATION REPRESENTATION
•
Numbers
42  00101010
•
Text
•
Pictures
IT 01001010 01010100
.gif, .jpeg, .bmp,…
•
Audio
AU-Sun, WAV-MS, AIF-Apple, MP3
FROM ANALOG TO DIGITAL DATA
000000000000
000111111000
001100001100
001000000100
010010010010
010000000010
010000000010
001011110100
001100001100
000111111000
000000000011
000000000011
000000000000
000111111000
001100001100
001000000100
010010010010
010000000010
010000000010
001011110100
001100001100
000111111000
000000000011
000000000011
BASIC COMPUTER
ARCHITECTURE
TELLING COMPUTERS WHAT TO DO
SIMPLIFIED STRUCTURE OF THE INTERNET
Hierarchy of privately-owned networks
•
Backbone network: High speed, city-to-city, with network access
points, owned by large service providers (AT&T, Sprint, Level3)
•
ISP networks: Connect from backbone to local areas (typically
providing access to consumers)
•
Local access networks: Access to individual computers
Internet:
•No single
•No single
•No single
•No single
authority
control source
entry point
type of application
LAYERS
INTERNET PROTOCOL
Each Internet computer (host) has an IP address
• String of 32 ones and zeros (IPv4 -> IPv6)
• Usually represented by four number segments separated by dots: dotted
decimal notation, e.g., 128.171.17.13
• IP names (e.g., www2.nyu.edu) correspond to IP addresses
Routers
•
•
•
•
Connect the Internet’s individual networks (subnets)
Cooperate to give an end-to-end route for each packet
Need to be very fast
Who is the world’s leading
seller of routers?
127.18.47.145
127.47.17.47
TRANSMISSION CONTROL
PROTOCOL
HTTP IN ACTION
HTTP IN ACTION
WORLD WIDE WEB
• web of hypertext documents
• viewed by browsers
• using a client–server architecture
• HTTP: communication protocol
• URLs: addressability
• HTML: hypertext!
BASIC DOCUMENT STRUCTURE
<html>
<head>
<title>My Awesome Webpage</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is the heading!</h1>
<p>It was the best of webpages.</p>
<a href=“http://google.com”>Google</a>
</body>
</html>
MORE TAGS
<ul>
<li>List item 1</li>
<li>List item 2</li>
</ul>
<h1>Big header!</h1>
<h2>Smaller header</h2>
<img src=“http://link.to/image.png”></img>
<div>Some content</div>
<span>Some content</span>
S08:
ATTENTION
ECONOMICS
S09/S10:
SEARCH AND
ADVERTISING
SEARCH ENGINES AND WEB
DIRECTORIES
Resources on the Web that help you find sites with the
information and/or services you want.
• Directory search engine - organizes listings of Web sites
into hierarchical lists.
• Search engine - uses software agent technologies (or
“spiders”, or “bots”) to search the Web for key words
and place them into indexes.
SEARCH ENGINES DRIVE
ECOMMERCE!
HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK
–
Search engines discover new pages by
following links
–
Keep track of words that appear in pages and
when you enter a query, the search engine
returns a ranked list
–
Text content is important! But is not enough!
(Why?)
How do search engines rank pages?
(why does this matter?)
PAGERANK
BOOK A
.400/3
People who bought this also bought…
.133/2
book B
book C
BOOK B
People who bought this also bought…
book A
.400
book C
.133
book D
.400/3
.400/3
BOOK D
.333
.133/2
BOOK C
People who bought this also bought…
People who bought this also bought…
book C
book A
.133
.133
.333
(ignoring damping factor for illustration)
EXAMPLE
AdWords Placement
Most relevant sites
AdWords
Placement
TARGETING BANNER ADS
Context:
Movie reviews
User Profile:
NYU user
New York
Request for
Ad from
Ad Server
Targeted Ad is
Delivered to
User
IP Address
Country, Domain, Company
Browser, Operating System
Surfing Behavior from cookies
Demographic Data?
FUTURE OF SEARCH
1. Information Extraction:
Search on Structured Data
2. Social Search
3. Privacy Preserving Search
S11:
IT AND
JOURNALISM
KEY POINTS
• New low cost models of “journalism”
• A/B testing and response to consumer
demand
• The move to real-time
• NY Times social media strategy (Tumblr
integration)
• Disruptive innovations (Wordpress as a
CMS)
S12:
COMPUTER
SECURITY
Computer crime and security
1. Understand some common forms of computer crime
and their impact on individuals and businesses
2. Recognize some common classes of viruses, how
they work, how they spread, and their impact on
individuals and businesses
3. Understand how denial of service (DoS) and
distributed DoS attacks are implemented
4. Discuss spyware, web defacing, identity theft and
their consequences
5. Discuss some typical computer security precautions
6. Understand the basics of cryptography, symmetric
key encryption, and public/private key encryption
(and the applications in digital signatures)
VIRUSES
What exactly is a virus?
•
Program or set of programs
•
Written to cause annoyance or damage (200 new ones every day)
Some commonly encountered viruses
•
Welchia, SoBig, Blaster, Slammer, Code Red, Love Bug, Melissa
Some common types of viruses
•
Stand-alone viruses – can run without a VB script.
•
Macro viruses – infects an app and runs a macro or program.
(can be an email virus like Melissa)
•
Worms – Self replicating, unlike viruses do not need to attach to
an existing program or app.
•
Trojan horses (not really a virus but usually classified as such) –
seems to one thing but performs another (e.g. install backdoors)
DOS AND D-DOS ATTACKS:
WHAT ARE THEY
Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks:
• Attack a machine/server and make it unusable (e.g., flood a Web site with
so many requests for service that it slows down or crashes.)
• Usually the attacker does not get access to the system which is being
attacked
Distributed denial-of-service (D-Dos):
• Attack a single machine/server from multiple computers (e.g., flood a
Web site with so many requests for service that it slows down or crashes.)
• The term “Ping of Death” is NOT used to describe the D-DoS described in
the textbook (i.e., the textbook is wrong)
E-trade, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, Whitehouse…
SPYWARE
Software that gathers information about users without
their knowledge
•
Initially created for marketing purposes, and called
adware.
•
•
Tracks Web surfing or online buying so marketers can send
you targeted--and unsolicited--ads
Potential Damage:
•
Monitor keystrokes (including username, passwords, email
content); take snapshots of screen; scan your hard disk.
•
Having a number of unauthorized programs running on
your PC at once makes it sluggish, unstable, and,
ultimately, more likely to crash.
•
Monitors and transmits user activity to someone else.
Other spyware may have a more malicious intent, such as
stealing passwords or credit-card information.
FOUR CRITICAL INFORMATION SECURITY ISSUES
 Confidentiality
 keeping information from unauthorized usage.
 Authentication
 determining whose information you are receiving
 determining who is on the other end before sending
information
 Non-repudiation
 preventing repudiation after an agreement by dealing
with digital signatures
 Integrity Control
 determining whether the information you receive is
genuine (or unadulterated).