Peio Mujika

ICT involved in UK's card scheme:
- The National Identity Register, a massive computer database, will contain data about every British citizen.
- Up to 10 fingerprints, facial scan, iris scan and all the places of residence of the person may be held by the NIR.
- Although in many cases, only 1 or 2 fingerprints will be taken, in some special cases a person's ID may contain all of the items stated above.
- The NIR will keep all the data, to connect different pieces of information.

Purpose of the ID card
- To fight terrorism, controlling British citizens to make sure they are not involved in any terrorist activity
- To avoid illegal immigration
- To stop the problem of identity theft

Will it meet its purposes?
- Both terrorists and illegal immigrants will be able to use foreign passports instead of an ID card to enter Britain.
- It is very difficult to maintain such a large database with so much data about so many people.
- Only certain people will need to get their irises and faces scanned for these IDs, so identity theft will still be a problem
- Overall, although the ID card may not solve all the problems it seeks to solve, it may improve them. For example, even if terrorist attacks are not stopped, their authors may be caught thanks to this new system.

Advantages and drawbacks
Advs:
Criminals and terrorists will be more controlled under this new ID regime.

Disads:
- It will have a very high cost, and will be paid by British taxpayers
- It may encourage discrimination. and iris scans do not work well with blacks
- Thousands and companies and government delegations will see the information stored in the NIR. This is a huge threat to privacy
- Identity theft may in fact be made easier as those who commit the crime only need to copy one document, instead of the many documents that nowadays identify you.

Recommendation
I believe normal ID cards are useful, but the ones that are about to be introduced in the UK are not. Too much information will be held in these cards, and the information about individuals will be too easy to obtain by anyone. Some kind of identification card should be introduced in a country, like Britain, that depends on drivers licenses for identification purposes, but this ID goes too far

January 8th:
- 3, 4, 5 and 6 (complete tasks)
- pg. 34 Activity 10
- navigation menus for e-book

1. Blogs
Apart from this blog, I have another, personal blog, in which i post my thoughts about different topics.

2. Chats/ Instant messaging
I use instant messaging services to talk to my friends. I do not use it much, but I find it useful

3. Bulletin boards/newsgroups
I have no interaction with any bulletin boards or newsgroups

- I use my mobile phones for personal purposes: talking to friends and family mainly, when I'm not at home. Never used for work purposes.

- I use my mobile phone whenever I need to communicate with someone who is not online, and I am not at home. SMS are useful when the friend's phone is turned off and when you have to send a short message, which is cheaper than making a regular phone call.

- The major benefits to me using mobile phones:
Being able to phone someone if I need to talk to that person urgently.
If someone wants to talk to me, the phone rings so I don't need to check my inbox every time. People can contact me whenever they want, as long as my phone is turned on (and has a signal).

- Problems/ disadvantages
If the phone runs low on battery and turns off, I might not be able to communicate with someone
It costs money to phone someone or to send an SMS.
Low privacy: people can know where you are at any time.

- My phone fulfils its purpose. It enables me to communicate with people urgently if I need to, but I need to control the number of phone calls I make, as I dont have enough money to waste. You can phone anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time, as long as you have a signal. You can even connect to the Internet using a mobile phone

- I use email mainly for personal purposes
- I use email at home, to talk to friends. I have hotmail and gmail accounts.
- The major benefits to me using email:
I can send attachments to my friends, such as photographs, music or videos
I can send emails to someone at any time, he/she will receive it when online: i do not disturb anyone

-Problems or disadvantages:
Sometimes I do not receive feedback as easily as during a telephone conversation
I receive lots of spam messages.
You cannot send physical objects.

-Email is more productive when you need to talk to many people at the same time: you can copy and paste an email to dozens of people. Email is not so productive when you need to communicate urgently with someone. It is not interactive: an email can leave you with some doubts, not knowing exactly what it meant: you cannot ask questions directly.

Designed to communicate quickly and cheaply. it fulfils this purpose. It is good for personal communication. although some people still prefer receiving hand-written letters.

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Book: Romeo and Juliet
Format: open ebook
Ease of Use: you can read it with a normal browser
Best feature: Offers you the opportunity of reading it online or downloading it
Needs improving: Pages are all separated, and you cannot use bookmarks. You cannot print the whole book at once: you need to do it page by page.

Book: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Format: pdf
Ease of Use: Relatively simple, but more complicated than word or text files
Best feature: Efficient search tools, showing sentences before and after what you are looking for.
Needs improving: You need to buy the program to be able to make changes to the document.

Book: The French Revolution
Format: MS Word
Ease of Use: Quite simple, you only need to scroll up or down
Best feature: Most people can use it and access it. Easy to use. Easy to edit.
Needs improving: You cannot select the chapter you want to start reading from. Need Microsoft Word. Changes can be easily made to YOUR work.

Book: Don Quixote
Format: text file
Ease of Use: Very easy to use. Hard to read.
Best feature: Can be opened easily, with practically any program.
Needs improving: A nicer interface would look better, no pictures or hyperlinks, only writing. No formatting. Can't search by chapter. Not broken into sections.

Book: Story of My Life
Format: html
Ease of Use: As simple as word or text files. Just like surfing the net. You only need an internet browser to be able to read it.
Best feature: Low memory use.
Needs improving: Some way of jumping between chapters and pages easily. External program needed to read multimedia material.

Book: The Time Machine
Format: Microsoft Reader
Ease of Use: A bit complicated if you are not familiared with the program
Best feature: Everything divided in chapters, nice interface
Needs improving: Every chapter is separate from the rest, difficult to print