Current Events and Other Resources of Relevance to CSC 199/299:
Social Implications of Computing
Spring 2013
The following are links to (mostly recent) articles
related to the subject of
the course. They aren’t intended to be comprehensive or
even representative of anything in particular—they’re just things
that caught my eye, or were brought to my attention. You may find
them useful as starting-off points for current-events assignments.
You can also look at lists from previous versions of the course:
Fall 2010; Spring 2012.
- Tech-Related Public Policy Organizations
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- Security and Privacy
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- What They Know—Digital Privacy (Wall Street Journal)
- Jan. 23, 2012: Justices Say GPS Tracker Violated Privacy Rights (NY Times)
- Jan. 27, 2012: Google privacy policy: Who will be affected and how you can choose what information gets shared (Washington Post)
- Jan. 28, 2012: Privacy, Technology And Law (NY Times). Editorial by Prof. Barry Friedman, NYU Law School. Argues that the United States v. Jones decision reenforces the notion that rights erode as technology advances.
- Feb. 4, 2012: Should Personal Data Be Personal? (Somini Sengupta, NY Times)
- Feb. 4, 2012: Facebook Is Using You (NY Times). Editorial by Lori Andrews.
- Nov. 7, 2012: How to Devise Passwords That Drive Hackers Away (Nicole Perlroth, NY Times)
- Nov. 13, 2012: Petraeus Case Raises Fears About Privacy in Digital Era (Scott Shane, NY Times)
- Dec. 3, 2012: Border Agents’ Power to Search Devices Is Facing Increasing Challenges in Court (Susan Stellin, NY Times)
- Dec. 10, 2012: Apps for Children Fall Short on Disclosure to Parents, Report Says (Natasha Singer, NY Times)
- Dec. 19, 2012: New Online Privacy Rules for Children (Natasha Singer, NY Times)
- Dec. 18, 2012: F.T.C. Opens an Inquiry Into Data Brokers (Natasha Singer, NY Times)
- Dec. 23, 2012: Sneaky Apps That Track Cellphones (NY Times editorial)
- Dec. 25, 2012: The Dawning of Domestic Drones (NY Times editorial)
- Jan. 15, 2013: Facebook Unveils a New Search Tool (Somini Sengupta, NY Times). Early concerns about Facebook Graph Search.
- Jan. 17, 2013: Search of DNA Sequences Reveals Full Identities (Gina Kolata, NY Times). An example of de-anonymization.
- Jan. 18, 2013: Search Option From Facebook Is a Privacy Test (Somini Sengupta and Claire Cain Miller, NY Times)
- Jan. 18, 2013: Unpopular Full-Body Scanners to Be Removed From Airports (Ron Nixon, NY Times)
- Jan. 25, 2013: Silicon Valley Companies Lobbying Against Europe’s Privacy Proposals (Kevin J. O’Brien, NY Times)
- Feb. 2, 2013: Data Protection Laws, an Ocean Apart (Natasha Singer, NY Times). Contrasting US and European approaches to privacy.
- Mar. 9, 2013: Watchdog: License plate reading goes high-tech: Police policies and privacy laws haven’t caught up with advances in technology (Meaghan M. McDermott, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle)
- Mar. 11, 2013: These Data Brokers Know You Live in an Apartment, Play Yahtzee, and Voted Democrat (Lois Beckett, ProPublica)
- Mar. 12, 2013: Google Concedes That Drive-by Prying Violated Privacy (David Streitfield, NY Times)
- Mar. 30, 2013: Letting Down Our Guard With Web Privacy (Somini Sengupta, NY Times)
- Mar. 30, 2013: An American Quilt of Privacy Laws, Incomplete (Natasha Singer, NY Times)
- Apr. 2, 2013: Retailers Track Employee Thefts in Vast Databases (Stephanie Clifford and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, NY Times)
- Apr. 6, 2013: Wearing a Badge, and a Video Camera (Randall Stross, NY Times)
- Freedom of Speech, Transparency, Open Access, Anonymity
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- July 8, 2011: Technology’s Role In the Arab Spring Protests (Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas)
- Sept./Oct., 2011: How Egyptian and Tunisian youth hacked the Arab Spring (John Pollock, MIT Technology Review)
- Nov. 10, 2011: Twitter Ordered to Yield Data in WikiLeaks Case (NY Times)
- Nov. 14, 2011: Naming Names: Rushdie Wins Facebook Fight (NY Times)
- Nov. 28, 2011: Photoshopped or Not? A Tool to Tell (NY Times)
- Jan. 3, 2012: So
Much Fun. So Irrelevant. (NY Times). Editorial by
Thomas L. Friedman. Argues for Intenet bandwidth as the key
to economic prosperity.
- Jan. 4, 2012: Internet Access Is Not a Human Right (NY Times). Editorial by Vincent G. Cerf (the “Father of the Internet”). Argues for deeper rights, like freedom to information.
- Jan. 5, 2013: Everything is Connected: The New Politics of the Internet (The Economist)
- Feb. 19, 2012: WikiLeaks, a Postscript (Bill Keller, NY Times)
- Jan. 13, 2013: What is a ‘Hacktivist’? (NY Times Op-Ed by Peter Ludlow, Northwestern Univ.)
- Jan. 24, 2013: In a French Case, a Battle to Unmask Twitter Users (Eric Pfanner and Somini Sengupta, NY Times)
- Jan. 17, 2013: Disruptions: A Fuzzy and Shifting Line Between Hacker and Criminal (Nick Bilton, NY Times)
- Jan. 7, 2013: Google turns off China censorship warning (BBC News)
- Mar. 13, 2013: Death to Whistle-Blowers? (NY Times Op-Ed by Floyd Abrams and Yochai Benkler)
- Mar. 8, 2013: Cracking China's Skype Surveillance Software (Vernon Silver, Bloomberg BusinessWeek)
- Mar. 28, 2013: The Future of Publishing (Special issue of Nature)
- Provenance, “Urban Legends,” Fraud
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- Cyber Crime
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- Mar. 17, 2012: The Soul of the New Hacktivist (Somini Sengupta, NY Times)
- Jan. 8, 2013: Bank Hacking Was the Work of Iranians, Officials Say (Nicole Perlroth and Quentin Hardy, NY Times)
- Jan. 20, 2013: How M.I.T. Ensnared a Hacker, Bucking a Freewheeling Culture (Noam Cohen, NY Times). The Aaron Swartz case.
- Jan. 24, 2013: The Price of a Stolen Childhood (Emily Bazelon, NY Times Magazine)
- Jan. 27, 2013: Pentagon Expanding Cybersecurity Force to Protect Networks Against Attacks (Elizabeth Bumiller, NY Times)
- Jan. 20, 2013: Hackers in China Attacked The Times for Last 4 Months (Nicole Perlroth, NY Times)
- Feb. 10, 2013: E-Mails of Reporters in Myanmar Are Hacked (Thomas Fuller, NY Times)
- Feb. 18, 2013: Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against U.S. (David E. Sanger, David Barboza and Nicole Perlroth, NY Times)
- Mar. 11, 2013: U.S. Demands China Block Cyberattacks and Agree to Rules (Mark Landler and David E. Sanger, NY Times)
- Mar. 26, 2013: Firm Is Accused of Sending Spam, and Fight Jams Internet (John Markoff and Nicole Perlroth, NY Times)
- May 1, 2013: Use a Software Bug to Win Video Poker? That’s a Federal Hacking Case (Kevin Poulsen, Wired)
- Legal Issues
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- Intellectual Property
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- The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA);
Summary of the Act from the US Copyright Office
- UR IT information on file sharing and downloading
- Dec. 2005: A Risky Gamble With Google (Siva Vaidhyanathan, Chronicle of Higher Education)
- Jan. 18, 2012: USACM Statement on SOPA and PROTECT IP. From the US Public Policy Council of the Association for Computing Machinery, the leading professional organization for Computer Science.
- Apr. 9, 2012: Forget SOPA. Is CISPA the Internet’s New Enemy? (Fahmida Y. Rashid, PC Magazine)
- Nov. 30, 2011: Text of CISPA (Library of Congress)
- Jan. 2013: The Apple-Samsung Lawsuits (Michael A. Cusumano, Communications of the ACM)
- Feb. 8, 2013: Innovation Nation at War (NY Times Op-Ed by Joe Nocera)
- Mar. 4, 2013: F.C.C. Backs Consumers in Unlocking of Cellphones (Edward Wyatt, NY Times)
- Apr. 29, 2013: What
happens when pirates play a game development simulator and then go
bankrupt because of piracy? (Patrick Klug, Greenheart Games)
- Electronic Publishing, e-Learning, etc.
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- Sept. 10, 2012: Disappearing
ink; The transformation of the book industry (editorial) (The Economist)
- Jan. 28, 2012: The Bookstore’s Last Stand (NY Times)
- Jan. 25, 2012: Amazon’s Hit Man (Brad Stone, Bloomberg Businessweek). Discusses Amazon’s move into direct into competition with traditional publishers.
- Nov.1, 2012: Technology Changing How Students Learn, Teachers Say (Matt Richtel, NY Times)
- Nov. 2, 2012: The Year of the MOOC (Laura Pappano, NY Times)
- Mar. 7, 2013: Imagining a Swap Meet for E-Books and Music (David Streitfeld, NY Times)
- Mar. 12, 2013: California Bill Seeks Campus Credit for Online Study (Tamar Lewin, NY Times)
- Apr. 7, 2013: The Slow Death of the American Author (NY Times Op-Ed by Scott Turow, best-selling author and President of the Author's Guild)
- Apr. 7, 2013: Scientific Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too) (Gina Kolata, NY Times)
- Risk Management
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- Computer-Related Risks, by Peter G. Newmann. Addison-Wesley, 1994.
- Geekonomics: The Real Cost of Insecure Software, by David Rice. Addison-Wesley, 2008.
- In general, see the long-running Inside Risks column, originally started by Newmann, in Communications of the ACM.
- Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine, by Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Edward W. Felten. Proc. of the 2007 USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop, August 2007.
- Insecurities and Inaccuracies of the Sequoia AVC Advantage 9.00H DRE Voting Machine, by Andrew W. Appel, Maia Ginsburg, Harri Hursti, Brian W. Kernighan, Christopher D. Richards, and Gang Tan. Expert testimony prepared for the New Jersey Superior Court, Sept. 2008.
- Jan. 17, 2012: Drones Close to Home (Louis Macaluso, City Newspaper)
- Jan./Feb. 2013: Too Fast to Fail: Is High-Speed Trading the Next Wall Street Disaster? (Nick Baumann, Mother Jones)
- Sustainability
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- Killer App, by Kiera Butler. Mother Jones magazine, Nov.–Dec. 2012. Discusses the impact of rare earth minerals in electronic equipment.
- Screen Savers, by Dashka Slater. Mother Jones magazine, Nov.–Dec. 2012. Profiles iFixit.com.
- Work/Employment
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- Jan. 27, 2013: Great Recession’s Aftermath: Middle-class Jobs Being Lost to Technology (Bernard Condon and Paul Wiseman [Associated Press], Rochester Democrat and Chronicle)
- Feb. 3, 2013: Human Workforce Nearly outclassed: Ever Smarter Machines Replacing People in Jobs (Paul Wiseman, Bernard Condon, and Jonathan Fahey [Associated Press], Rochester Democrat and Chronicle)
- Feb. 7, 2013: Hewlett Directs Its Suppliers in China to Limit Student Labor (Keith Bradsher and David Barboza, NY Times)
- Feb. 10, 2013: Smart Machines Driving Concerns about Future Jobs (Paul Wiseman and Bernard Condon [Associated Press], Rochester Democrat and Chronicle)
- Feb. 25, 2013: Yahoo Orders Home Workers Back to the Office (Claire Cain Miller and Catherine Rampell, NY Times)
- Ethics
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- Technology in the Public Interest
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