From the category archives:

User Issues

Google Not Being Evil

20 October 2010
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Why does Google want to know so much about you?
The company provides us with services ranging from maps to email, phones to video, books to social media — all free. Why do they do this, and how can the company afford to do this?
The more products and services the company provides for [...]

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Denial of Service Attacks — Cyber Vandals and Cyber Activism Explored

19 October 2010
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When a Denial of Service attack occurs, is it vandalism and mischief, an act of war, or a new form of democratic protest? The answer to that question might depend on which side you are on — it is a bit like the quote that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter“. Regardless of [...]

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How Advertisers Use Internet Cookies to Track Your Online Habits

18 October 2010
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What is behavioral targeting? Is it a violation of your privacy for businesses to track your movements online via cookies? What are cookies, anyway? Are cookies helpful, or do they provide too much information? Should you worry about how much digital exhaust you trail?
Christina Tsuei of the Wall Street Journal explains how advertisers use cookies [...]

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Satire No. 2: Colbert Takes on Eric Schmidt, Google, and Facebook’s Mining and Selling of Personal Data

8 September 2010
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Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, “predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites”. Schmidt made the statement in an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins that ran [...]

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Satire No. 1: Eric Schmidt, Google and Your Digital Exhaust

7 September 2010
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Is Google Evil? What secrets do your family members hold? What does Google actually know about you based on your digital exhaust? Is there a difference between having something to hide and some things not being anyone’s business?
Consumer Watchdog has created an animation that shows Google CEO Eric Schmidt driving an ice cream truck around, [...]

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The Internet’s Black Holes by Reporters without Borders

20 August 2010
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Where on earth can data roam free, and where is it filtered, controlled, and contained? Where are the black holes of information flow on the Internet?
According to Reporters without Borders, the Internet’s “Black Holes” are Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Iran, Libya, Maldives, Nepal, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. How do [...]

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Is the Internet Remaking Us? Part II

29 June 2010
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Does the Internet make us smarter or dumber?
@smalljones dug up the following news articles in response to a discussion on this topic that will be held in our department this Friday afternoon. It is pure coincidence that the topic of the discussion is whether or not the Internet is remaking us — a topic [...]

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Is the Internet Remaking Us?

29 June 2010
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“We wonder, as the sum of all our knowledge and memories is uploaded, converted into bits, tagged and indexed, are we sacrificing what makes us human? Or evolving what it means to be human?” Jordan Clarke asks in his animation below, entitled Internet. The tagline for the animation is that it is “a visual metaphor [...]

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Multitaskers Still Unable to Multitask Well

21 June 2010
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Matt Richtel at The New York Times wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago called, “Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price“. He profiled the Campbell family, who live outside of San Francisco, to demonstrate the toll the constant barrage of data via smartphones, computers, and the iPad, takes on both individuals and [...]

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Bruce Schneier on “Security, Privacy, and the Generation Gap”

10 April 2010
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Bruce Schneier gave a great talk on privacy at the recent CACR Higher Education Security Summit. Basically, he argues that privacy isn’t dead and we should aim for more privacy laws. It is a thought-provoking talk that is worth watching. I also enjoyed hearing the questions from attendees, and his thoughtful responses to them.

His talk [...]

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