Crime & Crime Prevention

Crime and crime prevention are two ever evolving things to do, as new types of crime are commited, new crime prevention methods are needed to find people who commit these crimes. As crimes start to utilise technology more, so must crime prevention. New technology can be used to assist crime though, however. Such as the rise of email leading to an increase in phishing as they use the new form of media to trick people into becoming victims of indentity theft.

Here is another example of criminals using technology to better commit crimes and illegally acquire money

By infecting computers with software which will force the user to pay, using logo's from key enforcement agencies to seem legitimate, and convincing 2.9% of users to pay, a statistic which adds up when installed hundreds of thousands of times.

However technology can go the other way. An example of technology helping crime prevention though, can be seed in this article

It shows how the theif usageof facebook caused him to be caught, as the police managed to find his facebook post and use it as evidence to find him.

All of this shows how the evolution of technology needs to be followed with a similar evolution of crime prevention, and as such law enforcement is trying to increase the level of technology available to it ahead of the criminals, leading to a decrease in crime year on year for the past decade. This is positive, but relies on crime prevention having access to technology at arate faster than the general public or criminals.

Copyright and Social.Media

copyright law is traditionally an effective way to protect your private content from being used by others without permission. However, the rise of social media and the sharing nature of it has caused issues with privacy, as when you upload a photo to a social networking site, you are uploading the picture for anyone to see (and without privacy settings that anyone can potentially see), allowing news networks and others to take your photos and use them without your permission, as they are public.

This creates a serious issue, as private images can be distrubuted through social media like facebook even after you close your account, which means these images can still be used. Where thye law decides to take this will be interesting, as it is currently a legal gray area.

Texting

Texting (SMS, or short messaging service) has changed the way society works since it's inception. It has changed our life in a variety of ways, as texting is mainly done on mobile devices, with harder to use key pads than a traditional keyboard (or spoken language), as well as having a fixed character limit to each text that can be sent between 70 and 140 characters, not only will you save time by making shorter messages, you will also save money/

This would lead to the assumption that people simply make messages as brief as possible. Although this is true to some extent, the actual result of essentially incentives being given to those who shorten their messages is the development of "text speak" text speak is essentially a cut down version of the English language, removing all non essential letters and shortening common words, removing the majority of vowels and more.

This has a big impact on our lives, as instead of using full language in our free times, we are using what is almost a completely different language, leading some to argue that English grades amongst those groups who text the most (teenagers) will lower. It also creates another gap between the young and the old in society, as only those who frequently text will understand text language, building barriers.

In conclusion texting has had a massive effect on all of our lives, allowing us to send short messages to each other while on the go. Although not all of it's effects are positive, it's still a great influence on our lives, and a step towards a more technological future.

Government Acts And Their Effects On IT

I did a presentation on ICT. Here It is, in picture form so we can close our eyes and pretend.