Category: Communications Lab

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My HTML Page – Mingyue Deng

Project: My First Communications Lab Page

Documented by: Mingyue Deng

Link: imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~md3606/commlab/week1/index.html

I made this portfolio page for myself, and it contains a lot of information about me. When I wrote the codes, I had trouble putting the image source in the codes. After I directed the path to the images and I opened the preview on the browser, the images are shown as broken. Then I asked Professor Chen and figured out that it was because I did not put the index.html page in the right folder. I put it in the right folder, then I changed the path to the images. I tried again and it worked. My images are not broken anymore.

The other problem is that the heights and widths of the images are hard to determine, so I tried my best to fit it in scale and not too small. The last problem is when I was trying to upload the site to IMA NAS, I opened the site to check if I did it correctly and the images are broken again. Then I realized I have to upload the images too so it could be seen through opening the link. When writing the link, I encountered some problems too since I forgot to put in the “~” sign before my net ID. Otherwise, putting in the paragraphs and other contents are not a problem.

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Response to Tim Berners-Lee and Ingrid Burrington – Mingyue Deng

In Tim Berners-Lee’s Long Live the Web, he made a very interesting point on the difference of using HTTP as an open standard system and using iTunes as a closed standard system by Apple. He thinks that the closed worlds are not going to grow as much as the open worlds, and says “If a walled garden has too tight a hold on a market, however, it can delay that outside growth.” However, many evidences have pointed out that since Apple as a company expanded its business, many software developers are developing softwares for iOS and MacOS systems besides the ones compatible to the Windows system.As a result, there are more applications in the iTunes realm. Also, Apple has expanded its acceptance to the Web which uses HTTP instead of iTunes so there are more people in its target market.

In both Tim Berners-Lee’s Long Live the Web and Ingrid Burrington’s The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud, the idea of violation of Internet citizen rights are discussed to a great length. This topic is very controversial since the day of the birth of Internet and the World Wide Web. Both authors tried a different approach to explaining this phenomenon.

In his article, Berners-Lee viewed the violation through his explanations of the basic terms which forms the Internet as we know it today. Firstly, he claimed that the Web is an online location where free speech is protected. Then he said that the Web is where people practice free speech the most, and that universality is a huge factor in how people use the Web globally. However, many countries are trying to prevent the uses of what they call improper usage of the Internet. In Berners-Lee’s words, there are no improper uses since the Internet or the Web is the main medium for freedom of speech nowadays. In Ingrid Burrington’s The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud, he dedicated the majority of the article to the discussion of human rights on the Web. He gave the example of Microsoft and Deutsche Telekom’s data storage and the access of data from these two storages. Of course, the example was talked about by Burrington through the two companies’ perspective and especially the U.S. perspective. However, from this part, there are questions which rose up of how would the data center of Deutsche Telekom be different from Microsoft when it comes to the data usage in building private digital profiles of people and its harms and benefits from the global citizen perspective. This is a very interesting point since he also talked about other companies like Amazon and Alibaba, which still the same questions remain.

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Week 1 – HTML Portfolio Page (Jiannan Shi)

Project: An HTML portfolio page for myself

Documented by Jiannan Shi

Webpage link:  http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~js9686/week_1/index.html

Date: Feb. 14, 2019

Description:

I made this portfolio for myself using all the tags we have learned in class and recitation. It went on smoothly when I was building this webpage, and here’s one thing worth documenting:

I made a navigation division at the top of my page, but I wanted to mark that the default “index.html” page is exactly the “Home” page in the menu. One solution that I found was to bold merely “Home” these letters, and leave the other items in the menu in the regular font. Similarly, when directing to the “Contact” page, the item “Contact” would be bolded and “Home” would be in the regular font again. By doing so, I made the navigation explicit about which page the viewer is looking at.

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Week 1: “The Machine Stops” Response – Val Abbene

E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” written in 1909, imagines the condition of the future if humanity became entirely dependent on technology to complete the simplest tasks of life. It is remarkable that this narrative was written in the early 1900s since Forster has envisioned a future that has been partially realized in the present day. The Machine, the omniscient apparatus that has sheltered and assisted generations of subterranean humans, has advanced to the point that humans interact with nothing of substance besides its interface. Mother and son have not spoken face-to-face in decades, reproduction has been sterilized and regulated, ideas have been commodified, humans are deathly afraid of touching another human after years of isolation—These are all normalized consequences of the machine. After travelling to the surface of the earth, Kuno has the epiphany that “man is the measure” (12). Decades of bending to the rules and measurement of The Machine had caused man to forget himself, to forget that The Machine is not a fixed part of his existence. In the age of the internet and artificial intelligence, we often fear that our existences could be diminished or replaced by machines that have destroyed the essence of humanity and the organic state of nature.

Modern society has already been transformed into a civilization with wires running above and below ground, overtaking and winding around the Earth, to establish worldwide connection. As in Eckert’s fictional world, we rely on our personal devices and the internet to contact others that are physically far and also to “summon” items to ourselves (Eckert would be very impressed that he predicted the rise of Amazon). Although many new and exciting opportunities have emerged from the internet, it can also be argued that humans are hiding behind their devices and distancing themselves from reality. Technology has also affected our desire for direct experience by bringing us images, experiences, and stories from around that can stand in as a substitute for our own experiences. It is important for us as a society to be aware of the grip that machines have on us and occasionally step away from our device to see the world from beyond our screens.

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Week 2: Response to “Long Live The Web” and “The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud” – Taylah Bland

After reading both “Long Live The Web” by Tim Berners-Lee and “The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud” by Ingrid Burrington, I found a striking similarity. Whilst we often praise the internets structured existence (in terms of connection points, paths, and information storage) there still exists so much ambiguity within the realm of the internet. This ambiguity mainly stems from an issue that should be at the forefront of our endeavors – internet law. Both articles presented so many issues that pertain to security, encryption, hacking, identity theft, and the profiting of personal information (in the case of social media platforms). Whilst we have internet protocols, we are missing legal protocols that offer individuals protection every time they make use of the internet. 

The issue of legislating the internet becomes very difficult as it falls into international law. International Law as a branch of law doesn’t have an excellent track record of achieving much. Establishing and maintaining clear legal protocols and enforceable sanctions across International jurisdictions is negatively impeded by notions of state sovereignty. In the articles this was referenced as “data sovereignty” and when you have the competing perspectives of individuals, nation states, and companies all vying for the rights to personal data, legalities get very complicated, very quickly. 

It made me reflect upon how grand of a scale the internet is. Data centers are strewn all over the world, deep sea water cables connect continents, and the improvement of national wifi provides connectivity to literally billions of people. Yet, with all these advancements have we become slightly blind sighted to the Pandora’s Box the internet has inadvertently opened? It seems that we are focusing more on the newest IOS update rather than enacting laws to control the ability for corporations to profit of the personal information of individuals. 

Burrington especially in her article presents more pessimism on this topic as she explores the current legal battles of Microsoft in establishing ownership and accessibility of information in foreign data centers. These areas of grey in the law do permeate a sense of fear and anxiety for internet users who are not completely aware of their rights, or if they have rights at all. 

We should be making a conscious effort to progress both our operating systems but also our legislation in regards to protecting the rights of individuals online. In order to achieve, universality, net-neutralism and accessibility, we must also have law and order as a regulator.