Paul Mosser Assignment 1 Information Literacy

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The first step in finding the technology current event article I would use for
this assignment, having some idea of a topic I would like to research, was to log onto
the Internet. Google is my homepage, so it was the first search engine I used.
Recalling the recent Target credit card information breach, I searched for credit
card security and got about 274 million results. The top third of the first page was
advertisements, but in the first few actual results I found an article about a similar
scandal with Home Depot. The article found at www.forbes.com was just a
summary paragraph, uploaded this morning, of another article written several days
ago. It also provided a link to the article at www.time.com.
Home Depot Breach Exposes 56 Million Credit Cards, an article by Eliana
Dockterman, was uploaded to Time on Thursday of last week. It is a short piece
about a statement that Home Depot released to the public. Apparently hackers used
malware software on cash registers to steal the information from 56 million credit
and debit cards in many Home Depot stores across North America. This happening
while Target is still recovering from the theft of 40 million credit cards last year has
worried consumers. Frank Blake, the Chief Executive of Home Depot, is quoted in
the article as saying We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and
anxiety this has caused and want to reassure them that they will not be liable for
fraudulent charges.
The next search engine I used was Yahoo because it seems to be Googles
biggest competitor based on the number of users. I entered the same phrase, credit
card security, and got 50.1 million results, much fewer than Google. Also, there
appeared to be even more ads covering a good portion of the first page of results.
Despite the ads, I was easily able to find a recent article at All Tech Considered on the
NPR website about how the U.S. is behind many other countries on credit card
technology. How U.S. Credit Card Security Lags by Alan Yu, was uploaded on
December 19, 2013 and although many readers commented on the article, it has not
been updated. The article is directly relevant to the first because it explains how the
thefts could occur and some ways to prevent this from happening again. I know
very little about the author but I know NPR to be a credible news source. The
author supports his claims by quoting professionals in the industry. The article was
written to inform the public about the problem. NPR is a non-profit organization, so
its not a sales pitch, and I dont think there could be any relevant biases.
For the third Internet article I wanted to use a less popular search engine so I
searched for popular search engines(on Google) and found www.listof
searchengines.org/ which was very helpful. On the site there was a chart that
ranked the top ten search engines by number of unique users as of 2014. At the top
of the list was Google with 182 million unique users, followed by Yahoo with 173
million. At the bottom of the list was Gigablast with 24K users. For the Gigablast
search I used the same phrase as I had the first two times and got 35.6 million
results. I was surprised this was as close to the amount that I got at Yahoo.
Gigablast describes itself as being different from its competitors because it is the
first search engine to be open source and transparent. On the first page of
results there were no ads, however, after scanning the first seventy results, I found
that most of the sites were for businesses and very few were news related or solely
Paul Mosser Assignment 1 Information Literacy


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informative. Hardly any of the results were links to relevant articles, but I was able
to find an article from 2009 in Security Management, an Internet technology
magazine, titled Credit Card Security Found Lacking.
Using the CCBC library databases, I was able to find two related articles in
scholarly journals quite easily. On the first attempt I clicked on article databases
and selected the first listed option, which was ProQuest Central. While typing
credit card in the search bar it prompted me to search for the phrase credit card
transaction security, which I thought might help narrow the search. For the second
article, after clicking on article databases again from the CCBC library database
homepage, I opted to search the databases by subject: science/technology. I then
chose the first on the list, which was Access Science. ProQuest Central gave me
220,562 results, while clicking search by subject-Science/Technology and choosing
one of the listed journals only produced 18. Even though there were a few more
steps to searching the library databases for journal articles than in using the most
popular public search engines, it did not seem any more difficult and produced a
higher percentage of informative and educational news articles instead of ads and
websites for companies seeking to make a profit. Both of these articles were written
in the last year making them as timely as the other articles located on the Internet.
Paul Mosser Assignment 1 Information Literacy


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Sources
(MLA format)

Dockterman, Eliana. Home Depot Breach Exposes 56 Million Credit Cards Time
web. 18 Sept. 2014

Yu, Alan. Outdated Magnetic Strips: How the U.S. Credit Card Security Lags All Tech
Considered. NPR. web. 19 Dec. 2013

Harowitz, Sherry. Credit Card Security Found Lacking Security Management. web.
15 June 2009

Voltage Security,Inc.; Researchers Submit Patent Application, Purchase
Transactions System With Payment Card Data, For Approval Journal of
Mathematics NewsRx. web. 11 Mar. 2014

Shelfer, Katherine and Meadows, Kevin. Smart Card Access Science McGraw-Hill
Education; 2014 web. 22 Sept. 2014