Contemporary Design Issues in Modern Programming Languages (Modern Programlama Dillerindeki Tasarım Sorunları)

Design Issues in Modern Programming Languages (Modern Programlama Dillerindeki Tasarım Sorunları)
Ahmet Alp Balkan <ahmet at ahmetalpbalkan.com>

Details of a programming language design is one the most controversial issue in the theory of programming languages. Many years ago, languages designed for programming computers have

a syntax such that only a machine can understand and translate. Such languages were called “low-level programming languages” and they were not providing any abstraction functionality while coding a new program using these languages. [1] These machine languages are evolved to assembler and many years later we have “high-level programming languages” which sometimes hide all details of computer architecture and language implementation details with abstracting many kinds of functionality.
People “create” something when they do need it. With evolution of computers and computer programming, many reasons triggered creation of new programming languages. Most of the time, these reasons are about efficiency, usability, style, functionality (capability) of usage of these programming languages. Let’s say if a company hires a software engineer and request a computer program does a particular job, if engineer would code this program in assembly language, it may take months; on the other side, most probably, it would take a few days using a new-generation programming language. That is about the efficiency and saving money for enterprise market in software engineering. To do particular jobs in computers, labs or people design new programming languages which developers can get rid of unnecessary parts of implementation.

Readability and ease of coding are also reasons behind appearance of new programming languages. Recall from low-level programming languages, the first languages i.e. FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL were not consist on good readable codes. This is a big deal since many software is created collaborated today, the code written on a language must be readable easily by other developers as well. However, major languages designed in last 15 years consist on a syntax which is human-friendly. In this issue, it is not all about programming language design but also developers’ coding style. [2] On the other hand language syntax is exactly a limiting factor for code readability. Any code written on a language may not be readable even it has been coded by a pretty good developer. Besides that, collaboration is limited by readability. When Hejlsberg released C# language, one of the important benefit was ease of coding and readability of code.[3] Devamını Oku »

User Data Privacy on Web Sites (Web Sitelerinde Kullanıcı Verilerinin Gizliliği)

1 yıl kadar bir süre önce yazdığım fakat yayımlamadığım bu yazıyı Türkçe’ye çevirecek zamanı bulamadığım için özür diliyorum.

User Data Privacy on Web Services
Ahmet Alp Balkan <ahmet(at)ahmetalpbalkan.com>

The growing number of Web technologies and their usage have revolutionized the web. Web startups will play an important role in the next web generation (Web 2.0 or Web 3.0) together with Semantic Web technologies. One of the biggest challenges in Web Services is privacy issues. With the widespreading of World Wide Web in 1990′s, web sites started to collect user data and many details in different ways.

In June 1994, Lou Montulli created the one of the biggest features and problems of Internet. “At that moment in Web history, every visit to a site was like the first, with no automatic way to record that a visitor had dropped by before. [...] Visitors would have to work their way through the same clicks again and again; it was like visiting a store where the shopkeeper had amnesia.” [1] Then he created the solution which is a small file placed by Web site on the computer called “magic cookies”.

Born of web cookies was the milestone in history of Web. Visitors are able to store their preferences and data on the web and browsers were asking users to let Web sites reach their cookies via browsers such as IE, Netscape etc. Thanks to cookies, when a visitor chooses the city where he or she lives in a weather forecasting service, this option is saved under cookies and the same city appears automatically on the next visit. This process can be performed without knowing visitor’s personal details. Because he or she is an anonymous visitor and does not give personal details. However, these when visitors have an account from this site, they give their names, e-mail addresses and such personal details with their passwords, “then the cookie becomes a powerful mechanism for personal tracking.” [1] Today, many sites remember their previously logined users by cookies and many user behaviors are recorded to improve user interfaces and navigation by developers.

Web became a dangerous platform which users can users can lose their privacy easily. Users started to give their personal details such as name, email address, city, zip code, phone numbers, hobbies, interests, secret questions and their answers, credit card numbers by signing up an account from a Web site without any hesitation. According to Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of personal data of European Union [2], web site owners are obliged to store user data “from the third party or parties to whom the data are disclosed”. After this point, there a few concerns about the safety of personal data.

• Is anyone able to know his/her personal data exists on anyone else’s computer?
• Are law enforcements and authorities allowed to reach the stored personal data for security or intelligence reasons?
• If personal data is stolen from somebody and carried away to another county, does it become untraceable? [3]

There are many directives about protection of personal details and free movement of such data in European Union. However, there are not any directives about this issue in United States of America. Because of this problem, many US companies working with EU countries accepted “Safe Harbor”3 certification “which aims to harmonize data privacy practices in trading between the United States of America and the stricter privacy controls of the European Union Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of personal data.” [4] US-EU Safe Harbor license is created by United States Department of Commerce.

With the launch of new Web Services such as personal helpers and information services users are started to use remember option of user name and password on many sites and allowed a risk to let hackers to get hold of their credentials. For instance, Gmail of Google launched [5] new appearance settings for users and one of them changes its skin by the weather conditions of the location which users live in. Many social platforms such as Facebook and Myspace, started to show advertisements related to user’s own and his/her friends’/connection’s interests and hobbies to increase CPM rates of advertisements. Many online stores and merchanting platforms such as eBay, Amazon started to show related products related to searched or bought items and they collect payment details of customers[6]. “Cookies also allow sites to show advertisements tied directly to the parts of the site a visitor has seen, so that someone visiting a health-oriented site who reads information about diabetes drugs might see an advertisement for a newly approved medication for the condition.”(page 4) [1] This usage of personal data is applied under condition of user’s acceptance of Terms of Service (TOS) and Privacy Policy of the Web Service. This method should not be recognized as steal of personal data. It can be used for improving search engine qualities to retrieve more relevant results for user.

Another point of privacy is right of private communication. Everyone uses mobile phones, e-mails and instant messaging (IM) softwares for daily communication. But there are concerns about trace of our private communication. Actually, we know that NSA (National Security Agency) or CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) has caught many terrorists before who uses web-based mail and IM services. “However, logs of accused using Yahoo mail or Hotmail are provided immediately upon request as Yahoo and Microsoft both have their subsidiaries in India,” says an intelligence official. [7]  Same story heard on Orkut (which is a social networking platform, established by Orkut Büyükökten and acquired by Google, Inc.), a terror strike is obstructed by detecting private messaging (PM) and Mumbai Mirror Daily Newspaper reported that so many terrorists and under world people are connecting through Orkut.

In this case, every site and online software which is collecting user data and personal information should prepare a “Privacy Policy” with appopriate rules and explicitly ask users for confirmation even if it is for improvements of the software. The next step for site owners is to protect user data very carefully. On leakage cases, many scandals may happen (see further reading). As is seen, our privacy is under risk. If you lose one of your passwords, you may lose your credit card number, secret details, personal data and much more easily. You should think for a while when you are giving personal data to a website on registration form.

Further Reading

• AOL Search Data Scandal, Wikipedia Article.
• Technology and Web User Data Privacy: A Survey of Risks and Countermeasures, John Linn, ACM Computer Society.
• Privacy, Facebook and the Future of the Internet, Marshall Kirkpatrick, RWW

References

1. Giving Web a Memory Cost Its Users Privacy , New York Times, Published : September 4, 2001. Last access: Jan 5, 2009.<http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE1D61639F937A3575AC0A9679C8B63&scp=9&sq=privacy%20web&st=cse>
2. Directive_95/46/EC_on_the_protection_of_personal_data, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Last access : Jan 5, 2009.
3. Amerika ile Avrupa Birliği Hukuki Düzenlemelerinin Gizlilik Haklarına Bakış Açısının Kararlaştırılması, Av. M. Murat Bilgin. Last Access : Jan 5, 2009. (Turkish)
4. Safe Harbor, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Last access: Jan 5, 2009.
5. The Official Gmail Blog, Spice up your inbox with colors and themes. Annie Chen. Released: Nov 2008. Last access: Jan 5, 2009.
6. Privacy term-preserving e-payments using one-time payment details, Mafruz Zaman Ashrafi – See Kiong Ng, Released: May 11, 2008. Last Access : Jan 5, 2009. Article on ScienceDirect,
7. Orkut won’t let cops hack terrorists, Harsimran Singh. The Economic Times : India Times. Release Date: Dec 12, 2006. Last Access : Jan 5, 2009.

MLA Citation Format of this Text

• BALKAN Ahmet Alp, “User Data Privacy on Web Sites”, Ahmet Alp Balkan : Blog,  from <http://www.ahmetalpbalkan.com/blog/user-data-privacy-on-web-sites>

Çankaya’da Java ve Kariyer Günü

Çankaya Üniversitesi’nde 19 Şubat 2010 10.30-17.00 arasında CETURK tarafından “Java™ ve Kariyer Günü” gerçekleştiriliyor. Kayıt olmak ve detaylı bilgi almak için etkinliğin sitesine gidiniz. Katılanlara da katılım belgesi verilecekmiş. Ankara’daki yazılım geliştiricilerin bilgisine sunarım.

Takip Ettiğim Teknik Olmayan Bloglar

Takip ettiğim development bloglarından sonra programlama gibi teknik konularla ilgisi olmayan eğlenceli blogları da yazmaya karar verdim. İşte şimdi klasik bir listeye hazır olun. (aşağıdaki bloglar arasında herhangi bir sıralama yapmadım)

• Webrazzi: Türk web girişimleri ve internet pazarından gelişmeler, dünya pazarından güzel haberler.
• Farketing: Pazarlama üzerine kısa kısa düşünceler.
• Uğur Özmen: İş hayatı ve başka bir kaç konu üzerine güzel yazılar.
• xkcd: Geek işi hoş karikatürler.
• Turkcell Blog: Turkcell’in resmi şirket blogu.
• Eatliver: Komik resimler ehehe.
• The Next Web Türkiye: Webrazzi gibi ama bazen daha farklı hoş piyasa haberleri.
• Fikir Bulutu: Bazen güzel fikirler hakkında yazılar.
• Erhan Erdoğan: Sosyal medya ve web piyasasına dair incelemeler, öngörüler.
• mObsession: Mobil dünya üzerine güzel yazılar.

Bunlar dışında Güneşin Tam İçinde, Fikir Atölyesi, Nahnu, Bobiler de güzel rss feed’lerine sahip kültürel yanınızı geliştiren zaman geçirgeçleri Aslında çok da düzenli blog okumadığımı fark ettim.