Blown to Bits Essay

Technology has rapidly advanced, affecting standards on privacy, telecommunications, and criminal law. all(prenominal) day, we encounter unexpected consequences of data flows that could not have happened a few years ago. ascribable to the bits explosion, the world changed very suddenly. Almost everything is stored in a computer somewhere. Court records, grocery purchases, precious family photos, radio programs It is all creation reduced to zeroes and ones bits. The bits be stashed on disks of home computers and in the data centers of enormous corporations and government agencies. The disks lavatory hold so many bits that there is no need to pick and choose what gets remembered. So much disk retentiveness is being produced every year that it could be used to record a page of information, every minute or two, about you and every otherwise human being on earth. Once something is on a computer, it can replicate and move around the world in a heartbeat. reservation a million perf ect copies takes but an instant copy of things we wish everyone in the world to see, and likewise copies of things that werent meant to be copied at all. Due to instantaneous transfers, some data leak. Credit card records are mantic to stay locked up in a data warehouse, but thresh into the hands of identity thieves. And we sometimes give information away skillful because we get something back for doing so. A company will give you vindicate phone calls to anywhere in the worldif you dont sense watching ads for the products its computers hear you talking about. The book presents 7 koans or principles regarding the bits and the solvent of it on humanity. Koan 1 Even though your computer seems to present pictures, texts, songs, and videos, they are all composed of bits. Everything thats digital are ruled by bits. Even as we speak, bits are flying through the airwaves by our phones. Koan 2 Every copy made by a computer is perfect.The earned run average of booksbeing handwritten oftentimes resulting to mistakes, has now been closed by digital explosion. And even though these machines do fail as long as the bits have been communicated, the probability of error of the bits is so slim. Koan 3 Vast as world-wide data storage is today, quintet years from now it will be ten times as large. Yet the information explosion means, paradoxically, the leaving of information that is not online. Outdated software and information not stored in the computer are usually assumed as inexistent. Koan 4 The invigorate of a computer is usually measured by the number of primary operations, such as additions, that can be performed in one second. The windy computers available in the early 1940s could perform about five operations per second. The fastest today can perform about a trillion.Koan 5 Exponential growth is actually smooth and steady it near takes very little time to pass from unnoticeable change to exceedingly visible. In the rapidly changing world of bits, it pays to notice even itsy-bitsy changes, and to do something about them. Koan 6 Data stored will all be kept forever, unless there are policies to get rid of it. The Internet consists of millions of interconnect computers once data gets out, there is no getting it back. Victims of identity stealth experience daily the distress of having to remove misinformation from the record. It seems never to go away. Koan 7 In the bits world, in which messages flow instantaneously, it sometimes seems that distance doesnt enumerate at all.The instantaneous communication of massive amounts of information has created the misimpression that there is a place called Cyberspace, a land without frontiers where all the worlds concourse can be interconnected as though they were residents of the same crushed town. The book introduces two basic morals. The first is that information engine room is inherently neither intimately nor badit can be used for good or ill, to free us or to shackle us. Second, new technology brings social change, and change comes with both risks and opportunities.Any technology can be used for good or ill. Nuclear reactions create electric business office and weapons of mass destruction. The same encryption technology that makes it possible for you to email your friends with agency that no eavesdropper will be able to decipher your message also makes it possible for terrorists to plan their attacks undiscovered. The key to managing the ethical and moral consequences of technology succession nourishing economic growth is to regulate the use of technology without forbidding or restricting its creation.