CS 400/501 Reading Assignments and Detailed Syllabus

Risks of Technology

• Bill Joy's Why the future doesn't need us, Wired Magazine, April 2000.

Privacy

• Google location history fiasco
• Microsoft's GUID sparks fears of privacy invasion
• Taking a Bold Step Forward in Privacy Invasion
• Complaint and Request for Injunction against Microsoft's Passport and related .Net technologies.
• SANS Institute's Carnivore - Diagnostic Tool or Invasion of privacy?
• John Perry Barlow's Jackboots on the Infobahn about the government's Clipper chip
• Amitai Etzioni's The myth of privacy invasion

Intellectual Property

• Brad Templeton's A brief intro to copyright and 10 Big Myths about copyright explained.
• Latham & Watkins' Intellectual Property Primer
• the League for Programming Freedom's Against User Interface Copyright
• c|net's Time to rewrite the DMCA
• Wired's DMCA Protection at US Border
• the League for Programming Freedom's Against Software Patents

Constitutional Freedoms
Note: No reading the week of 10/?; I hope you have been writing your essay, and studying for midterms in your other classes!

Computers as Weapons; Weapons Against Computers

• Bureau of Industry and Security's Category 5 Part 2 of the Export Administration Regulations
• EPIC's Revised U.S. Encryption Export Control Regulations
• U.S. Government Restricting Supercomputer Chip Exports to China and the Register's take on it
• CNN.com's Digital assault against Pentagon rises
• GovExec.com's Mounting a Defense

Computer Crime

Topics to include fraud, embezzlement, sabotage, digital forgery, intrusion, hacking, cracking, and computer crime laws

• Department of Justice's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section documents and reports

Impact of Computers on the Workplace

Topics to include job destruction and creation, job hopping, telework, and employee monitoring

Impact of Computers on the Home and the Digital Divide

Topics to include bitwealth, the IT meal ticket, and computing in the 3rd world

• computer-aid.org was a society in the UK that takes discarded computers and ships them to africa instead of dumping them in landfills.

Here are some more links on computing in the third world:

• InfoWorld's Conference features technology for Third World countries
• EETimes' Developers unveil low-cost computer for third-world nations
• Nicholas Negroponte' Powerless Computing

The Digital Society

Topics to include chat rooms, online communities

• discussion on the ethics of web site hacking.
• talk about napster, morpheous etc.

Ethics I

Topics to include ethical theories, guidelines for computer professionals

• The ACM/IEEE Software Engineering Code of Ethics
• The USENIX System Administrators' Code of Ethics

Ethics II

Topics to include case studies and ethical dilemmas

• the Communications Decency Act and especially, the effect of section 230
• FOSTA-SESTA and this take on it
• Let's look for some Cyber Terrorism Examples

Final Exam Week

• no reading; the class will not meet
• you should plan to finish writing and polishing your second essay

Leading Your Discussion

At most three people can lead discussions in a given week, and therefore at most three people can write their final essays on a given week's topics. Discussion slots and topics will be given out in the order in which e-mail requests are received. A discussion slot request is an e-mail to jeffery listing a requested date, requested topic, and (preferably) a short description of what you want to examine within that topic. For example, a person requesting to lead the discussion on a certain day might request to talk about the digital divide, and whether computers are increasing the differences between rich and poor, and what the social impact of this change may include.