IT407 Assignment 2: Ethical Analysis of Computing Issues

This document presents the solutions to IT407 Assignment 2, focusing on professional issues in computing. It addresses scenarios related to spam management for an ISP, ethical considerations of software bug fixes using Kantianism and Social Contract Theory, Solove's taxonomy of privacy harms, and the impact of cookies on user privacy. The solutions provide detailed explanations and ethical analyses, offering a comprehensive understanding of the topics. Desklib is a platform where students can find such solved assignments and study tools.

Assignmen
t 2
College of Computing and Informatics
Student Details:
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Instructions:
This Assignment must be submitted on Blackboard (WORD format only) via the allocated
folder.
Email submission will not be accepted.
You are advised to make your work clear and well-presented, marks may be reduced for poor
presentation. This includes filling your information on the cover page.
You MUST show all your work, and text must not be converted into an image, unless specified
otherwise by the question.
Late submission will result in ZERO marks being awarded.
The work should be your own, copying from students or other resources will result in ZERO
marks.
Use Times New Roman font for all your answers.
Professional Issues
IT407

Pg. 1 Question TwoQuestion Two
Question One
Consider a scenario where you are working as a head of an Internet Service Provider
(ISP). Every day, you are getting several complaints about the large amount of spams
being received by your customers. At the same time, it comes to your knowledge that
some spammers from your area are hacking into the PCs in another country and using
them to spam your users. After analysis, you notice that almost 98% of the emails
originating from the other country are spam, however still 2% messages remain
legitimate. Will you do anything to restrict the flow of email messages from the other
country to your customers, yes or no? In either case, provide solid reasoning to support
your answer. Your answer should contain at least 130 words.
Ans: Yes, I will take necessary steps to restrict the flow of email messages from other
country to my customers. There are various methods to manage the incoming traffic to
a particular user (Rueben et al., 2017). All I need is to create some transport rules and
configure recipient filters and making changes in level of mailbox. Out of the give
option, user can go for transport rule in which he or she needs to create a particular rule
for returning NDR to sender. This can be achieved by a list of steps like
 User needs to open exchange management console.
 Expansion of organization configuration
 User needs to click on hub transport
 In condition page, user needs to select from inside or outside the organization.
 In the action page, user needs to be send bound message to sender along with
enhancing the code.
Learning
Outcome(s):
Recognize the
responsibilities
and duties of a
computer
professional
Use the code of
ethics in
computing within
the process of
decision making
1 Mark

Pg. 2 Question TwoQuestion Two
 In exception page, User needs to click on Next, New lastly finish option.

Pg. 3 Question TwoQuestion Two
Question Two
Salman downloads (or purchases the license to use) an xbox game titled as ‘Airfighter’
from the Internet for 100 SAR. After usage, Salman notices that the game is usable but
it has a few bugs in it, which are quite annoying. Salman expects Microsoft to release
software patches to handle the bugs, however this does not remain the case (since
Microsoft decides not to release any patches). Next year Microsoft releases ‘AirFighter
2’. This new version of the game fixes all the bugs from ‘AirFighter’. Do you think
that Salman deserves the right to receive the bug patches for AirFighter? Did
Microsoft do anything wrong by not releasing the bug patches for AirFighter and
fixing all the bugs in AirFighter 2? Perform your analysis on the basis of Kantianism
and Social Contract Theory. Also, provide a conclusion for each of your analyses.
Ans: Yes, Salman deserves the right to receive bug patches for Air Fighter. He has
paid full money for the Xbox game but after using it he found some bug in it. Salman
deserves to have software patches which can handle the bug. Yes, it tricky on the side
of Microsoft to release a new version with fixed bugs rather than fixing bugs for the
first version. ‘AirFighter’. Kant theory is a well-known example which is based on
deontological theory. As per the theory, both right and wrongness of the theory do not
depend on the consequence rather it fulling the overall duty. Kant focused on supreme
principles of Morality which is referred to as categorical imperative (Quinn, 2014). As
per social contract theory, people who live in the society are with respect with
agreement that focuses on moral and political rule of behavior. People around the
globe believe the fact if they live as per social contract then they live morally by
choice but not because of divine. The conclusion can be drawn that Microsoft was
Learning
Outcome(s):
Recognize the
importance of
Intellectual
Property, Patents
and Referencing
Systems
Illustrate social
and ethical issues
in computing as a
computer
professional
3 Marks

Pg. 4 Question TwoQuestion Two
ethically wrong for not fixing the bugs in first version. They overcome the situation by
providing much better version which does not have any kind of bugs. This particular
step helped Microsoft in two ways that are generated huge amount of revenue from
latest version and did not have to fix the bugs in the first version.

Pg. 5 Question TwoQuestion Two
Question Three
Privacy is too vague to be adequately defined, and can be, instead categorized into
different types of harms. In your own words, enumerate these types of harms
according to Solove taxonomy.
Ans: Taxonomy of Privacy is well known work by Daniel J. Solove that focus to order
on different kind of harms which may arise from infringements of Privacy(Pagliari &
Pinto, 2015). There are mainly four kind of harmful activities like
 Intrusion upon plaintiff or solitude which is into the private affairs.
 Public disclosure is all about embracing private facts and plaintiff.
 Publicity aims to places plaintiff in hoax light in the eye of common public.
 There are defendant’s kind of advantages which is needed for plaintiff or even
likeness.
Learning
Outcome(s):
Illustrate social
and ethical issues
in computing as a
computer
professional.
1 Mark

Pg. 6 Question TwoQuestion Two
Question Four
Cookies are small files which are stored on a user's computer. How could the
“cookies” created by a Web server affect a computer user’s privacy? Provide the
answer in your own words.
Ans: Cookies are used by hackers to gain information about user with their
authorization. Cookies aim to present huge amount of threats to online privacy.
Cookies are not used for improving experiences but instead of that it is needed for
keeping a track of activity in certain websites. All the collected information can be
used for creating browsing history profile. It is needed for targeting users by the help
of specific advertisement. Both malware and virus can be disguised into internet
cookies. Super cookies can be used by hackers to get control of any website which is
malicious. It comes up with potential to legitimate user to request for another website
so that they fix issues. It ultimately allows the hacker to easily fake the login in
particular website. It is all about making use of personal information for their own
purpose.
Learning
Outcome(s):
Recognize the
responsibilities
and duties of a
computer
professional.
1 Mark

Pg. 7 Question TwoQuestion Two
References
Cahn, A., Alfeld, S., Barford, P., & Muthukrishnan, S. (2016, April). An empirical
study of web cookies. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World
Wide Web (pp. 891-901). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering
Committee.
Pagliari, D., & Pinto, L. (2015). Calibration of kinect for xbox one and comparison
between the two generations of microsoft sensors. Sensors, 15(11), 27569-27589.
Quinn, M. J. (2014). Ethics for the information age. Boston, MA: Pearson.
Rueben, M., Grimm, C. M., Bernieri, F. J., & Smart, W. D. (2017). A taxonomy of
privacy constructs for privacy-sensitive robotics. arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.00841.