Vocabulary exercises

Exercise 1. Give the equivalents

• into Russian: sending spam e-mails, to place spyware on a computer, stealing credit card details, identity fraud, distribution of a computer viruses, sending adware across the Internet, unsolicited junk e-mail, offensive content, insurance fraud.

• into English: коробочное ПО, несанкционированный доступ, заказное ПО, условно-бесплатное ПО, коммерческое ПО, бесплатное ПО, мошенничество с банковским счетом, поделка, нелегальная копия.

Exercise 4. Read the text and then answer questions.

Bloggers and the company

An employee who has been blogging for 12 years has just been sacked by a Waterstone’s bookstore in Edinburgh, Scotland for criticising his employer. In his weblog, or blog, he wrote negatively about his boss. This has started a discussion about the rights of individual free speech. In another case in the USA last November, a flight attendant calling herself Queen of the Sky was fired over a photograph of herself, which appeared on her blog, where she wore her Delta Airlines uniform. She is filing a discrimination complaint.

There are more than 5 million blogs or online diaries, and the number is growing. In 2003, Blogger, one of the first companies to produce easy to use blogging software, was bought by Google, the leading web search company. The word entered the Oxford English Dictionary last year. A recent US poll reported that 32 million people say they read blogs, and 7 per cent of Internet users in the US write blogs. People blog for many reasons. An ambulance driver in London writes a blog about his work, because he thought people would be interested in what happens in an ambulance. It gets about 4,000 hits a day. His blog is anonymous. Many people use their blog to complain about life at work. This can create problems for companies. Unhappy employees can now share their complaints with millions across the Internet.

This is such a new phenomenon that employee codes of conduct are not particularly clear about blogs. What happens if bloggers use company equipment and time? ‘Perhaps blogs can be good for companies’ suggested one manager. ‘They can respond sensitively to employee grievances.’ One thing seems sure; companies now need to accept that the world is moving on and make guidelines which take into consideration this ever more popular practice.

• Should people be fired for writing negative things about their employer or company online?

• Should employees have the right to use the Internet at work for private purposes?

• Do you think that companies need to clarify what employees can and cannot write in a “blog”?

• How can companies use “blogs” to their advantage?

Exercise 9. Write an annotation to this text.

Piracy

Losses due to software piracy are estimated at $12.2 billion a year just in business applications. The figures for the games industry are no less impressive. Up to 108,000 jobs, $ 4.5 billion in wages, and $1 billion in tax revenues are also lost. According to Peter Beuk (vice-president for anti-piracy programs at the Software Industry Information Association - SIIA), most of the software being sold on Internet Auction sites (91%) is pirated. Many of these copies are burned at home for about $1 a CD, and then sold as *warez for $25-500 plus shipping.

There is more to piracy than just disk swapping among friends. It has become an illegitimate business on its own, and is sometimes carried out on a corporate level (enterprises which use multiple copies of a single licensed program to cut down on costs), or in ways unknown to the end user (dealers who install pirate copies on new computers). With huge sums of money involved, it is no surprise that organised crime has taken an interest in it.

Even in the United States and Western Europe, where the issue is addressed very seriously, the piracy rate averages 30-40 % from country to country. Russia and Asia have the most active pirate markets, with Vietnam and China leading the list with 100% and 97o/o rates respectively. Revenue rates are not directly linked to piracy rates because in many countries with a high piracy rate, the software market is not very big, while regions with relatively low piracy rates like North America suffer higher losses due to the large internal market.

Of course the growth of the legitimate software market is affected as developers face the real possibility of pirate copies outnumbering legal ones, as turning an otherwise successful product into a financial failure for the company. Prosecution can prove difficult or impossible, as copyright laws differ from country to country. Imagine convincing the Indian police to arrest a Chinese citizen because of a court order emitted by a French tribunal on behalf of a US company!

*warez - pirated software

5 there wouldn't be any piracy.

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