The Survey of Intellectual Property Rights in Canada confirms the Canadian software industry's dissatisfaction with IP protection. Software developers were the high-technology sector most dissatisfied with Canadian IP laws.

Software firms said that intellectual property protection is insufficient and incompleted and that existing laws are poorly enforced. However, the survey took play only a few months after Bill C-60, which provides explicit IP protection to computer software, was passed into law.

Potentially even more important than software piracy, in the long term, is the complex task of sorting out the ownership of the technologies and innovations used to create successful programs. For example, Apple Computer claims proprietary rights over the graphics-based user interface that makes its Macintosh computers so accessible. Apple is suiing both Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard in the United States to prevent them from developing a similar user interface for IBM-compatible personal computers.

Some countries such as US and Canada, use copyright to protect software. But other countries, such as Japan and France, have limited the application of traditional copyright principles to software.

Even if all nations agreed that full copyright protection should be granted, it is possible that imitators could still duplicate the essential features of a program if they changed it in minor ways. To guard against this eventuality, many U.S software firms back up copyright protection with patents which protects only the structural and operational processes.

On the communication network, the right of privacy can be divided into three categories: confidentiality, anonymity, and data protection. For confidentiality, it means that the existence of the communication should be known only by the parties involved without disclosure to a third party. Anonymity means the individual's right to disclose his/her identity in a network. Data protection is the collection and use of personal data. There are three exceptions of privacy protection. They are criminal investigation, consent is given by the owner of the information, and for the maintenance of the network.

Computer viruses work by sitting with executable files so that the virus part acts before the original purpose of the program. They are able to spread through file permissions and they are difficult to detect because cause and effect are impossible to fathom when faced with randomness and long time delays. Most viruses contain a marker that allows them to recognize copies of themselves.

Two main types of PC viruses: They are Boot sector and File/Program viruses.

A Boot Sector virus (BSV) infects the boot sector on a diskette. Normally the boot sector contains code to load the operating system files. The Boot Sector virus replaces the original boot sector with itself and stores the original boot sector somewhere else on the diskette or simply replaces it totally. When a computer is then later booted from this diskette, the virus takes control and hides in RAM. It will then load and execute the original boot sector, every diskette inserted in the computer will be infected with the virus, unless it is write-protected. Many BSVs are also able to infect hard disks, where the process is similar to that described above, although they may infect the master boot record (also known as partition table) instead of the DOS boot record.

Second type of computer viruses is File/Program viruses , which infect executable programs, usually .COM and .EXE files, but sometimes also overlay files. An infected program will contain a copy of the virus, usually at the end, but in some cases at the beginning of the original program.

A few common misconceptions about viruses:

Top four commonly reported viruses:

A Trojan is a program that pretends to do something useful (or at least interesting), but when it is run, it may have some harmful effect, like scrambling your FAT (File Allocation Table) or formatting the hard disk. The major difference between viruses and "Trojan" programs is that the virus replicates, but the Trojan does not. The Trojan program is the most common means of introducing a virus into a system. It is sometimes suggested that Trojan programs can be detected by scanning a program's source file for statements that perform operations outside the program's specifications.

Worms are self-replicating programs that can run independently and travel from machine to machine across network connections; worms may have portions of themselves running on many different machines. Worms do not change other programs, although they carry other code that does, such as a true virus.

Internet Worm On the evenving of Nov. 2, 1988. A self-replicating program, called a worm, was released on the Internet. Overnight, this program had copied itself from machine to machine, causing the machines it infected to labor under huge loads, and denying service to the users of those machines. Although the program only infected two types of computers (Sun-3 systems and VAX systems), it spreads quickly, as did the concern, confusion, and sometimes panic of system administrators whose machines were affected. The worm itself did not destroy any files, steal any information (other than account passowrds), intercept private mail, or plant other destructive software. However, it did manage to severely disrupt the operation of the network. Several sites, including parts of MIT, NASA's Ames Research Center disconnected themselves from the Internet to avoid recontamination.

Two types of firewalls:

Host Protection: Application Server Firewall

Network Protection: Simple Routing Firewall

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