Mid term Questions - Assignment Example

The barrage of rumors in March, 2012 of an impending coup d’etat which flooded China’s blogosphere and convincingly reported gunshots and tanks in the streets of Beijing aptly exemplifies the extent of this cyber threat. According to Batchelor, Bobrowicz, Mackenzie and Milne (2012), the development can be dangerous and panic-inspiring when such information is created and disseminated by an individual of high social standing. In like manner, the extent of this danger is underscored by the fact that social networks are the very tools which were used for coordinating the Arab Spring.

It is clear that some of the organizers of the Arab Spring may have been stationed outside target countries, but instead used the cyberspace to manipulate the conscience of the masses. Q. 2: The Future of P2P From a casual glance, the future of P2P file sharing program appears bleak, considering the fact that it is receiving tremendous levels of resistance from governments, international trade agreements and lobby groups. This resistance may call for the need to annul the use of P2P file sharing program and replace it with another one (Pankaj, Hyde and Rodger, 2012).

However, P2P file sharing program may be compelled to exist in another format, without being faced out as a whole. There is veracity to the standpoint above because, totally facing out of P2P file sharing calls for the introduction of more and stronger restriction laws which may further bring constitutional problems (such as the contravention of the First Amendment to the US Constitution) which exceed piracy. Abdul-Rahman, Weiss and Santoro (2010) are poignant that it is inappropriate to use Napster’s failure to forecast P2P’s.

This is because, unlike P2P file sharing system, Napster failed because of it had a centralized system which bundled unfiltered search engines with software which uploaded and downloaded data. Q. 3: Reasons for Facebook’s large User Base According to Robert Metcalf (born April 7, 1946), the value of a telecommunication network is proportional to the square of the number of users who are connected into that network. This is known as the Metcalf’s Law. DeJong (2012) links the widespread use of Facebook and the notoriety which Facebook enjoys, to Metcalf’s law.

Herein, DeJong (2012) is categorical that the number of Facebook users increases, just as the value of a fax machine increases with the total number of machines in a network. Thus, Facebook enjoys an increasingly large and expansive population, simply because it has a greater number of users in the world of online social networks. Q. 4: On Second Life Being the Future It is clear that the future of Internet use and connections hold nothing promising for Second Life, due to a number of reasons.

According to Mayer-Schonberger and Crowley (2006), some of these reasons include poor quality assurance, congestion and moral problems. As for quality assurance, it is known that Linden Lab focused too much on the introduction of newer features to the production environment, in lieu of fixing long-term bugs which cause financial losses for Second Life users. It is against this backdrop that on April 30th, 2007, 700 frustrated Second Life users sent an open letter of protest to Linden Lab, highlighting their concerns over Second Life’s quality assurance.

In another wavelength, it is widely known that Second Life has had serious setbacks stemming from congestion. This is because a single region hosted on a single CPU accommodates a limited