300578 Teaching Professionalism and Ethics in Information Technology Assignment Sample

• Subject Code : 300578
• University : Western Sydney University My Assignment Services is not sponsored or endorsed by this college or university.
• Subject Name : IT Computer Science

Table of Contents

Question 1.

Question 2.

Question 3.

Question 4.

Question 5.

Question 6.

Question 7.

Question 8.

Question 9.

References.

Professional Development - Question 1

As per Lester and Ward (2019), ethics have always been a major point of consideration for governments and organizations across the world to provide a safe environment to cybercitizens. Ethics revolve around a group of elements which provide its true meaning which is that ethics is not just a set of rules which classify a task as right or wrong but a set of choices and the reasons behind those choices. These elements can be summed into some of the key concepts of ethics. Some of the concepts are:

1. Rights:

Rights are a set of constraints which have a justified thought process which lead to setting up of those rights either by a government or the society, etc. ICT is a collection of some of the major industrial sectors such as electronics industry, media, entertainment and the internet. All these sectors provide their own set of rights. These rights vary from place to place and many other factors such as regional laws and governmental laws. For example, the internet provides the right to people to browse, upload and download ethical content which do not go against the laws set up.

2. Duty:

Duty refers to the responsibilities a person has towards other things. It can be classified into two kinds, legal duties and moral duties. The main difference between the two is that legal duties are set by someone else and moral duties are set up by one’s own believes and rules. An example for legal duty can be following the laws set up the government and moral duty can be helping someone choose between what is right and what is wrong.

3. Trust

Truth is having a sense of reliance over something or someone. Trust is something that is valued across various things ranging from businesses to relationships. For example, trust is the basis of success for most e-wallet companies such as Google Pay. The reason Google Pay is widely acknowledged and used is because people trust the organization with the entire information related to their bank accounts.

Professional Development - Question 2

1. The actions of the computer technician cannot be termed as entirely wrong. Although he made the right decision of deleting the objectionable content from the hard drive of the client’s computer but what went wrong was that he did not inform the authorities about it.
2. The right choice made by the technician was deleting the files off the client’s hard drive. By doing this, the technician made sure that the content was not shared to other people and thus violate the rules set up by the government.
3. The wrong action carried out by the technician was not informing the official authorities about the client and the content he possessed. One of the concepts which leads to being ethical is following duty. In this case, the technician should have placed his legal duty of informing the authorities over his moral duty of not browsing his client’s hard drive.
4. If I would have encountered a similar scenario, I would have accepted of browsing the hard drive. The process of making an ethical decision is to set out all the obligations related to it. Although as a technician I might be obligated to practising maximum restrain from browsing the client’s hard drive but it lays under my obligation towards my country and its people. Making use of the property belonging to others for self-interest is morally incorrect but it was successful in stopping the client from having possession of objectionable content and sharing it eventually leading to more crime in the country.

Professional Development - Question 3

Organizations have always been under the constant threat of facing cyber-attacks. Hackers tend to use new and improvised attempts to hack in to systems either internally or externally. Honeypots and honeynets are used to safeguard the organization from hackers especially external hackers. As per Cutler (2020), external hackers can be defined as someone who do not have legal access to the data possessed by the organization. With new effects being made to safeguard the organization’s data, honeypots refer to a server which is not the actual server holding the data of the organization. These servers act as pretend servers which force hackers into thinking that they are attacking the main server. There are different functions of the honeypot including keeping a track of the firewall logs of the honeypot server, the data entering or exiting the server, to determine the nature of tasks being carried out by kernel and user processes and to act as a tripwire to inform the administrator that unknown entities have made an attempt to enter the server. This methodology was upgraded using honeynets. Honeynets are groups of honeypots combined to together to trick the hacker into thinking that they were attacking a much larger system and the system they are attacking is real. It also provides a detailed information about the attack and is used to determine attacks over various components of a network. The idea of placing a honeypot is to only learn about an attack and the owner of the honeypot should not attempt at any countermeasures against the attackers. However, some considerations towards making a honeypot ethical would be that data used by it should be public. It should not interact with other accounts or devices over the network except those which are a part of the honeypot (Zhang, Zhang, Yuan & Tzeng, 2019).

Professional Development - Question 4

The purpose of codes is to define the obligations a professional person has towards its clients and customers by combining them into certain benchmarks to serve as minimum qualifications to serve as an IT professional. They are used to inform a person about what is expected from them as a professional. Professional codes of conduct play a major role in defining the minimum standards which are required to be termed as an IT professional. They are not listed or formed in one time and are a product of evolution from feedback over a period of time. They are used for the betterment of responses of the members of an organization when confronted by ethical situations and helping them understand their ethical responsibilities. They are also used to lay forth the conditions in which the members of the organization are subjected to disciplinary action. Codes as a whole are used to describe 12 functions which sum up the professional codes including professionalism, etiquettes, good conduct, discipline, ideals, educating others, expressing ideals, forming rules, setting up guidelines, rights, promoting external relations, respecting interests of others and inspiring others to follow good conduct.

Some of the shortcoming associated to these codes include their lack of completeness and their inconsistency. For a value which is set on the basis of feedback and innovation over a period of time cannot be complete and correct at any given point of time. Also, a code may seem relevant at one time and may not be useful later. These are some drawbacks of these codes.

Professional Development - Question 5

1. As per Stack (2013), it is legal to taka a photo of someone standing in public property and there is no such rights to privacy which forbids a person from doing so. People are even allowed to capture pictures of people in their house or backyards, as long as you don’t step on their private property. As per Dahlstrom (n.d.), it is very easy for someone to take a photo of an individual whether in a public or private space and upload it on the internet. With access to cameras in the form of mobile phones and media players, taking pictures seem a task too often to be experienced in daily lives. Although, there is no fixed law which prohibits capturing images of people, the Australian Government does provide special considerations towards celebrities and influencers. If a person is well known to the public especially as the endorser or ambassador of products, they are entitled to a licence fee given the fact that people perceive celebrities to be clicked only after they are paid to endorse products or services (Givoni, n.d.). 
2. The Australian government criminalises any attempt made to take a picture of a person and upload it on the internet if it includes photos of a person in a restricted space such as a courtroom, or if it is photo belonging to objectionable content or if the photo was taken in a safe zone such as an abortion clinic (Dahlstrom, n.d.). It is also not illegal to capture images or videos of children without the permission of their parents as long as they do not breach the rules set up about child abuse material. It also becomes illegal to capture photos of public and private properties and use them for self-purposes such as advertisements. It can also lead to legal issues if a person captures a picture of other people whether individual or groups and use them for commercial purposes. Entering someone’s private property is not a permission in itself to capture a photo of the property and the people residing on it. Also, if a picture is captured of someone who supposes to be under the age of 18, then their faces should be blurred to hide their identity especially if they are in a vulnerable position.

Professional Development - Question 6

1. The Privacy Act 1988 holds the 11 foundation points related to privacy principles which are used to provide standards for the collection of personal information, its storage, distribution and security by the Commonwealth Government and its agencies. These agencies are used to describe organizations or individuals which possess a connection with the commonwealth government and telecommunication carriers.
2. The principles listed in the Privacy Act 1988 mention key points to be adhered to for privacy protection procedures carried out by an organization. As per Morris (2019), the Privacy Act 1988 has helped the people of Australia in protecting sensitive information including information belonging to racial or ethnic origins and sexual orientations and practices, etc. But as per Wallbank (2014), the act was only beneficial to the people of Australia when there a grow in concern about their information storage and usage by organizations. The act in general provides a sense of control over their information and also answers important questions related to it such as how and why is their information stored. The organizations making use of this information are entitled to disclose to the public the ways and the purposes for which particular information is being used (Vaile, 2018). However, the act has been limited to handling of the information but does not necessarily provide the general right to privacy. It does not focus on regulating the privacy norms in general sense but only the regulation of information privacy only. The act also provides certain exemptions the most important of which is that private sector privacy protections do not apply to small businesses until they are related to collect and store health related information. Another exemption under the act is that the organizations who collect and store health related information are not entitled to comply with privacy obligations in respect to that information.

Professional Development - Question 7

As per Business Queensland (n.d.), a trademark is used to differentiate between different goods and products. It is also used to describe its other types of goods in relation to which that particular product is used. A domain name on the other hand is used to specify the website address of a particular organization or business. As per the Australian Government (n.d.), the owner of a registered trademark has all the rights to use the trademark in relation to the goods the trademark was registered for but it cannot be used as a domain name. The domain name licences are issued by the Australian Domain Name Authority and is not entitled to having a trademark registered. There have been cases where organizations have registered same trademarks. Before setting up of new rules in Australia, this led to the phenomenon known as cybersquatting. It is used to refer a situation in which domain names associated with successful companies are registered and thereafter sold to make money. As per the Australian Domain Administration Limited (2019), whenever an organization approached the officials for a domain name with a registered trademark, the trademark must include a word mark and the domain name applied for must be an exact match of that word mark.

Professional Development - Question 8

From: serveradmin@abc.com

To: everyone@abc.com

Subject: For information regarding the crashed server

Greetings of the day,

This to inform everyone that the crashed server is back online and functional. The server had crashed due to system overload. This led the server to heat up to threshold limits which caused it to malfunction followed by a downtime of almost 2 hours for the employees at office.

A backup of the system has been created and has been placed online to help everyone restart from where they were affected by the crash. Parallel to this, the backend team is working on restoring the crashed server and shall be fully functional in some time. The team in also putting in efforts to minimize the effects of over load on the server by setting up over load balancing solutions to divert the incoming traffic and distributing it over a group of servers.

We regret the time and efforts lost during this unavoidable situation. We shall learn from this and put in our best efforts to prevent such happenings in the future.

Best Regards

XYZ

IT Administrator

Professional Development - Question 9

Kleinsteuber laid forth the four kinds of regulations which consists of various rules set by different institutions to control various issues involved in cyberspace. The four kinds of regulations are:

1. State-regulation: State regulation involves the governments acting as the regulators in areas of conflict. As per the Australian Public Service Commission (n.d.), A federated system of governance for ICT will advance ideal results over the central government, as far as those government projects and services that are supported by ICT. Organizations will continue managing their own data innovation techniques, innovations and usage and support yet there are areas in which these federated standards ought to apply.
2. Self-regulation: Self-regulation is the used to describe a condition in which the parties involved in mutual disagreement prefer to solve their issues among themselves rather than asking for the government to take control of it. In such cases the organization acts as the moderator.
3. Regulated self-regulation: Regulated self-regulation is used to describe a situation in which the self-regulation conditions are set up and structured as per government norms but the government does not act like a physical entity in between the parties.
4. Co-regulation: Co-regulation takes place when the government and the private sector regulators cooperate in joint ventures. In such cases, the organization makes its decisions under the watch of the government. The government hold the authority to intervene in the case if the interests of the public are exploited. However, a government regulator is appointed to keep track of the process undertaken by the organization.

References for Professional Development

Australian Government. (n.d.). Trade marks, domain names and your online brand. Retrieved from: https://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/ip-for-digital-business/idea/trade-marks-and-domain-names#:~:text=The%20owner%20of%20a%20registered,use%20as%20a%20domain%20name.&text=au%20country%20code%20%E2%80%93%20it%20doesn,domains%20such%20as%20.com%20or%20.

Australian Public Service Commission. (n.d). Australian Government use of information and communication technology. Retrieved from: https://www.apsc.gov.au/australian-government-use-information-and-communication-technology

Cutler, T. (2020). Internal vs External Threats. Retrieved from: https://terrycutler.com/internal-vs-external-threats/

Dahlstrom, F. (n.d.). Can You Photograph Someone Without Permission? Retrieved from: https://www.gotocourt.com.au/civil-law/photograph-someone-without-permission/

Givoni, S. (n.d.). Photography without Permission: Is it Always Legal to Snap? Retrieved from: https://www.sharongivoni.com.au/photography-without-permission-legal-snap/

Lester, L. J. Y., & Dalat-Ward, Y. (2019). Teaching Professionalism and Ethics in Information Technology by Deliberative Dialogue In Information Systems Education Journal. 17(1). p 4. Retrieved from: https://isedj.org/2019-17/n1/ISEDJv17n1p4.pdf

Morris, M. (2019. The Privacy, Data Protection and Cybersecurity Law Review - Edition 6 AUSTRALIA. Retrieved from: https://thelawreviews.co.uk/edition/the-privacy-data-protection-and-cybersecurity-law-review-edition-6/1209990/australia

Stack, M. (2013). Australia: When photos break the law: breach of privacy or breach of contract? Retrieved from: https://www.mondaq.com/australia/privacy-protection/262736/when-photos-break-the-law-breach-of-privacy-or-breach-of-contract

Vaile, D. (2018). Australia should strengthen its privacy laws and remove exemptions for politicians. Retrieved from: https://theconversation.com/australia-should-strengthen-its-privacy-laws-and-remove-exemptions-for-politicians-93717

Zhang, Y., Zhang, H., Yuan, X., & Tzeng, N. F. (2019). Pseudo-honeypot: Toward efficient and scalable spam sniffer In 2019 49th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN). pp 435-446.

Australian Domain Administration Limited. (2019). .au Licensing Rules: Trademarks and Eligibility for .au Domain Names. Retrieved from: https://www.auda.org.au/news/au-licensing-rules-trademarks-and-eligibility-for-au-domain-names/#:~:text=Under%20the%20new%20.,match%20of%20that%20word%20mark

Remember, at the center of any academic work, lies clarity and evidence. Should you need further assistance, do look up to our Computer Science Assignment Help