Journal of Information Communication and Ethics in Society

Ben Fairweather, N; Rogerson, Simon

2003 Journal of Information Communication and Ethics in Society

doi: 10.1108/14779960380000221

Global cultural homogenisation has significant consequences for our responsibility for others in distant parts of the globe. ICT gives a powerful impetus to this cultural homogenisation. There are a number of distinct elements that contribute to this.

Lyon, David

2003 Journal of Information Communication and Ethics in Society

doi: 10.1108/14779960380000222

Airports are crucial channels of mobility for the global citizens of the twentyfirst century. They are points of entry and exit for tourists, business persons, workers, students and of course, for some refugees as well. The scale of operations is huge international passenger travel increased twelvefold in the second half of the twentieth century Urry, 2000 50 and the vast majority of this is accounted for in air travel. In the USA alone there are two million daily airtravelers on 20,000 flights Gottdiener,2001 1. Airports are placeless sites of temporary sojourn, airlock chambers for nomadic executives or sunseekers. But they have profound social and political significance, particularly in personal data handling.

Weckert, John; AlSaggaf, Yeslam

2003 Journal of Information Communication and Ethics in Society

doi: 10.1108/14779960380000223

Recently two reports appeared in the press, each of which expressed a very different attitude towards intellectual property. One, in the Australian press, discusses a bill before the US House of Representatives that would give American copyright holders freedom to hack PCs used to illicitly share files over peertopeer P2P networks, without fear of prosecution or litigation. That this represents a fairly strong view of the importance of intellectual property can be seen further as the report continues.

Bissett, Andy

2003 Journal of Information Communication and Ethics in Society

doi: 10.1108/14779960380000224

An intriguing development in the realm of commercial software has arisen over the last decade, from highly improbable beginnings. From its inception in the hacker ethic, freeware has had a huge impact on IT businesses around the world, most strongly in the guise of its spinoff, open source software. The eventual consequences are that, for example, more than 60 of all the servers on the World Wide Web are running the Apache open source system, and Linux, the open source cousin of Unix, is challenging Microsofts products as the most popular business server operating system. Major IT users such as multinational banks, and major IT companies including IBM, Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Oracle, Informix, Intel, Fujitsu, AMD and Computer Associates are investing in and supporting Linux. In 1998, Netscape Communications made public opened the source code for its Netscape web browser. In 1999 Apple published the source for the Darwin core of its Mac OS X. The Perl freeware programming language continues to gain popularity for webbased applications.

Harris, Lisa; Coles, AnneMarie; Davies, Richard

2003 Journal of Information Communication and Ethics in Society

doi: 10.1108/14779960380000225

A key debate about the nature and role of ecommerce centres around the question of whether it is merely an old activity in a new form, or a discontinuous process that rewrites the ideas and assumptions of the old economy. The objective of this exploratory and qualitative study is to shed some light on this issue through the lens of business ethics. We will examine whether established ethical principles still apply to ecommerce, or instead if the rule book now needs to be rewritten.

Jean Camp, L

2003 Journal of Information Communication and Ethics in Society

doi: 10.1108/14779960380000226

I begin with a discussion of code and its primary types embedded, source, binary and interpreted. I then consider three measures in which code is fundamentally different than print. In particular I speak of the trust inherent in connectivity, the organizational difficulties of information, andthe problem of archiving information that may change rapidly. Following each of these explanations I offer my own hypotheses about how code and ubiquitous digital media might alter society and the sensibilities of its participants.