Reading Assignment 12 – 12 April

From the readings and from your experience, what exactly is trolling? How does this behavior manifest itself and what are its causes and effects?
What ethical or moral obligations do technology companies have in regards to preventing or suppressing online harassment (such as trolling or stalking)?
Is anonymity on the Internet a blessing or a curse? Are “real name” policies useful or harmful in combating online abuse?
Is trolling a major problem on the Internet? What is your approach to handling trolls? Are you a troll?!?!?

 

Trolling is an interesting internet phenomenon that was given birth by the advent of anonymous interaction on the internet. From these readings, trolling is a remarkably serious issue in some corners of the internet. Before these readings my understanding of trolling was far more innocuous than what Lindy West’s understanding.

In my “youthful, hip” understanding of the internet, trolling is deliberately posting something for the sole purpose of generating an angry response from someone. While that sounds kind of hurtful, I generally see it done in artistic, subtle ways. Many times users like to play the ignorant role and pretend to either be naive or unrealistically extreme in their post to generate some level of frustration from another user.

But what many of these readings had to say seems to blur the line between trolling and outright abuse. When some ignorant, short-sighted, cruel anonymous user noted that Lindy West had no need to worry about getting raped, they weren’t trolling. They were being deliberately hurtful. Their purpose wasn’t to elicit a frustrated response from Lindy. It was to silence and hurt her. Perhaps my understanding of the trolling craze is skewed, and I’m giving internet users too much of the benefit of the doubt, but I see trolling as skillful, innocuous, and funny, but blatant abuse, threats, and stalking are an entirely different criteria. I often laugh when I see on Reddit some crafty user post some delightfully ignorant comment since I believe that person is doing so thoughtfully for the purpose of humor. I liken trolling to sarcasm, and indeed, sarcastic and self-deprecating jokes can often be some of the funniest of all.

What I don’t wish to convey, however, is the notion that I stand for the hurtful and abusive comments people leave on the internet. I do believe that companies have an ethical and moral obligation to do their best to suppress such rhetoric, but I’m also realistic in my beliefs. There’s simply no way that Twitter could accurately and appropriately handle every abusive tweet, even for a day. The burden is on us, as a twenty-first century society, to grow up and think before we post. We need to consciously tear down the wall of anonymity and consider whether or not you would say such things to someone’s face.

But anonymity needn’t be removed from the internet. On the contrary, it ought to remain in tact. I see Facebook’s desire to require a “real ID” to have an account as an admission that it doesn’t believe its users are capable of polite, non-abusive discourse. That’s not the right way to tackle this issue. There are clear and documented cases where anonymity is crucial to the existence of some online accounts, such as Iranian online accounts where Iranians can be arrested for the content they post online. By taking away anonymity, we’d be punishing everyone for the sins of the misguided and ignorant, and while that’s not an unprecedented course of action, it’s certainly not one I’m fond of.

Let’s take a step back now. How important is the issue of online abuse and harassment? (I’m avoiding the term trolling because I don’t believe that’s the issue at heart.) Well, it certainly pains me to think that some people can’t enjoy social media because they choose to put powerful and controversial ideas online. People say that if you can’t handle the criticism, then you should just get off of the internet. Well that’s certainly a pretty near-sighted absolute (and only a sith deals in absolutes). At the same time, I believe that people ought to enter into the internet with a certain level of expectation of the, shall we say, anticipated aggregate IQ level. People are dumb, and anonymous people are worse, but I don’t think this is an issue of national importance. Yes, I’m a troller (in person and online), but I’m not the abusive, hurtful brand that many of these articles describe, nor do I plan to take many of their words to heart.

P.S. Imagine this: Mr. Krabs posts a bold new plan for the Krabby Patty. He wants to make a vegan derivative, but someone goes to krustykrab.com and posts that Mr. Krabs is a crusty old gnarly crustacean with no business sense and a lifetime member of PETA. Now that doesn’t seem very kind…

Reading Assignment 11 – 5 April

From the readings, what is artificial intelligence and how is it similar or different from what you consider to be human intelligence?
Are AlphaGo, Deep Blue, and Watson proof of the viability of artificial intelligence or are they just interesting tricks or gimmicks?
Is the Turing Test a valid measure of intelligence or is the Chinese Room a good counter argument?
Finally, could a computing system ever be considered a mind? Are humans just biological computers? What are the ethical implications are either idea?

 

Artificial intelligence (AI), simply put, is the ability for machines to act intelligently. That is to say, if a machine can act intelligently – similar to how a human would act – it has artificial intelligence. There are several varying degrees of AI, ranging from strong AI – the ability for a machine to think like a human and explain how a human thinks – to weak AI – the ability for a machine to think like a human in some small, particular way. For example, there are instances of AI all across our world today. Machines can think and reason like humans in simple ways. Google’s AlphaGo has become extremely proficient at the ancient board game of Go and can behave similarly  to (well, better than) a human, but in only one very specific instance – the game of Go. AlphaGo cannot reason like a human across multiple aspects of life. As Kris Hammond so eloquently put in his article, “I may not want the system that is brilliant at figuring out where the nearest gas station is to also perform my medical diagnostics.”

Given the definitions we have above, AI is simpler to achieve than I previously thought. Machines simply need to reason like humans or give an outcome similar to what a human would choose, and it can be technically deemed as intelligent. But AI in that sense is very different from human intelligence because it is following a very narrow set of rules and generally has no ability to reason well with new, obliquely contextual information. For the sake of the rest of this reflection, I’m going to consider AI to be that kind of strong AI listed above – the ability for a computer to think and reason similarly to a human and apply that reasoning to a wide array of situations.

There have been many interesting developments in the past several years in the world of AI. We’ve seen spotlight performances from IBM’s Watson and Google’s AlphaGo, and there’s been an emerging utilization on software assistants such as Siri and Cortana. So are these kinds of machines proof of AI? No. In the case of Siri and Cortana, they simply use speech recognition software to translate text to speech and generally just perform a Google search. Sometimes they can pull out key words like “send” or “set alarm” and will perform an alternate, hard-coded action. This is not AI, but just a helpful interface to the Internet. Google’s AlphaGo is a little better, but it has such a narrow use, and the way it reasons out a good move in Go would most certainly not help me decide which classes to take next semester (if I had that option… 😥  ). IBM’s Watson is probably the closest thing we have to AI at this point, but even that simply uses sophisticated software to understand human language and perform refined encyclopedic searches.

So how do we know if we have something with AI? Some argue that the Turing Test is a good measure of whether or not something is artificially intelligent. In this test, a human user is communicating through text with another human and a computer, and the identities of both are unknown to the participant. If the user cannot correctly assess who the human is and who the computer is, the machine is said to be artificially intelligent. To me, this is an acceptable measure of intelligence. If we want a machine to be able to reason and judge like a human to consider it intelligent, then the ability to behave like one conversationally is surely a good example of human reasoning. Some argue, though, that the Chinese Room thought experiment refutes this notion. In the Chinese Room, a person, who knows no Chinese and has only English instructions on how to convert English characters to Chinese symbols, could appear to know Chinese to the outside user based on inputs and outputs. I don’t believe this is a sound counterargument, however, for the same reasons why I believe that strong AI is ultimately possible, just not yet attained.

To me, we are all just biological computers. (I will not dare to enter into the conversation of souls, which are unique to humans. The ability for a machine to reason like a human is separate from the soul, in my opinion.) We are all born with a basic set of rules, and we call those instincts. We’re generally unsure of how to control our outputs – we see babies flail and cry unintelligently – but we have the ability to receive inputs and slowly piece together inputs and outputs. Eventually we learn how to balance, walk, and speak. I believe that we could program a machine with a basic set of rules, sensors and motors for inputs and outputs, and the ability to rewrite its own code to adjust. This would give rise to human understanding and a human thought process.

While this is a cursory justification for the possibility of strong AI, I certainly believe it’s possible, just not yet attained in any sort of way. When you reduce what we know and how we act to inputs and outputs, I believe we act similarly to a very sophisticated computer. Needless to say, this is a controversial subject.

Reading Assignment 10 — 29 March

From the readings, what exactly is Net Neutrality? Explain in your own words the arguments for and against Net Neutrality. After examining the topic, where do you stand on the issues surrounding Net Neutrality?
If you are in favor of Net Neutrality, explain how you would implement or enforce it. How would you respond to concerns about possible over-regulation, burdening corporations, or preventing innovation?
If you are against Net Neutrality, explain why it is unnecessary or undesirable. How would you respond to concerns about providing level playing fields or preventing unfair discrimination by service provides?
In either case, discuss whether or not you consider that “the Internet is a public service and fair access should be a basic right”.

 

Net Neutrality certainly is a polarizing subject among politicians and lobbyists today. Tech giants, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and even the president have weighed in on the issue. Indeed it is an important topic of discussion, and so we must ensure that we’re all on the same page before we enter any sort of intelligent dialog.

Net Neutrality is the idea that the Internet is a fundamental service whose service should be available to all equally. ISPs and other agencies should not discriminate based on the type of data transmitted or the magnitude of the transmission. ISPs and other agencies ought not throttle bandwidth or filter packets based on the media itself or the end user. Essentially Net Neutrality aims to make the Internet as equally accessible as possible. There are millions of Americans who have voiced strong opinions in favor of Net Neutrality, and there are several large corporations who have tried to explain how it is not an ideal that rational or desirable. On one hand, Net Neutrality protects against the monopoly that ISPs have on access to the Internet for end users, much like the cable company giants have in television. On the other hand, it’s tough to reconcile Netflix clogging the data pipes for college students binging on the 4th season of House of Cards. But there’s really one clear choice, and that’s why I’m here to let you know why we all ought to fight tooth and nail for Net Neutrality.

It’s pivotal that the Internet remain neutral because if we lose this issue, things could get very hairy very quickly for regular web-users like yourselves. First of all, if ISPs could discriminate based on the kinds of bytes that flow through its infrastructure, we’d very quickly see “fastlane” technologies pop up for those willing and able to shell out the cash to ensure their packets reach users faster and more reliably than regular data. To allot for that increase, very likely the regular user’s bandwidth will shrink and we’ll begin to see basic, pro, and ultimate service packages. Ultimately, it sets a dangerous precedent and puts even more power in the hands of ISPs that already have a total monopoly on the packets that reach your computer.

All this being said, it takes a significant effort to actually enforce this. For starters, however, it’s good to know that even before that was legal guidance on this issue, there really weren’t many cases of data discrimination among ISPs anyways. To ensure this in the future, the FCC could run simple technological audits of sorts and track statistics on throughput, reliability, etc. for different packets from different origins. If Netflix seems to have a serious dip compared to Twitter, that could be grounds for an investigation, and if found guilty, fines would be levied against the ISP (shame on you, ISP). Seeing as the ISP infrastructure is already in place, it would be hard to test it like the EPA tests cars before they hit the roads, but they could conduct continuous tests and track basic trends.

Now unfortunately Net Neutrality does come with a few undesirable side effects. First, it sets a precedent of top-down regulation of the Internet which could lead to more toxic effects in the future (Matthew Prince writes a nice article on this). Second, it does seem odd that we should all bear a portion of the cost because Netflix increased Internet traffic by 30% in just a few years. That could arguably seem like a burden on the rest of us caused by one technological giant. Now third, some may argue that this stifles creativity in this sector of technology, but I’d argue that this isn’t the sort of creativity we want. I don’t want a neat, creative approach to differing levels of quality of service, and so if that counts as stifling creativity, so be it.

Now as far as the Internet being a basic service, which access to should be considered a fundamental right, I’m not sure I agree. If it were a fundamental right, I don’t think people should have to pay for it. Maybe that’s where society is trending since so many pivotal parts of our lives rely on the Internet, but that’s not where we’re at right now. All I think is that access to it shouldn’t be discriminated by data. Electricity is electricity. You don’t pay for fast or slow electricity. Similarly, bytes are bytes, and that’s the way it should stay.

P.S. I couldn’t find a good way to fit this into my post, but you should really take a look at Jeffrey Dorfman’s sorry attempt to dissuade you from Net Neutrality. What’s particularly great is that his article is titled “Net Neutrality Is A Bad Idea Supported By Poor Analogies,” and he proceeds to describe Net Neutrality as “only having vanilla ice cream for sale.” Hi, pot? Meet kettle. Further, he tried to shame President Obama for speaking against choosing winners and losers in the technology sector when he himself “chose winners” in the energy industry, citing his support for renewable energy sources and penalties of nonrenewable sources. Whoa look at those apples. And oh my, these oranges! Crazy how these aren’t the same at all. Renewable versus nonrenewable resources can simply be argued down to pollution versus clean energy. Honestly, I think Jeffrey may just be a proponent for Net Neutrality and his contribution was airing up such flimsy counterpoints.

P.P.S. I’m off my rant now.

Project 03 – Reflection

Letter to the Observer

By Chris Clark, Thomas Deranek, Jesse Hamilton, and Neal Sheehan

 

Is encryption a fundamental right? Should citizens of the US be allowed to have a technology that completely locks out the government?
How important of an issue is encryption to you? Does it affect who you support politically? financially? socially? Should it?
In the struggle between national security and personal privacy, who will win? Are you resigned to a particular future or will you fight for it?

I can’t think of any time before the present where Americans had access to technology that completely locked out the government. Encryption may in fact be the first invention that, by its very nature, excludes any and all third party viewers. Previous attempts to keep technology or information hidden from the government have fallen short. All commercial drugs, which are essentially proprietary secrets, must go through the FDA. Volkswagen had to recently fess up to their business secrets in an automotive scandal due to EPA regulations. But encryption has yet to be breached, and that’s because creating a circumvention to encryption defeats the purpose of privacy altogether.

While it sounds very anti-government to say that encryption is a fundamental right that the government has no authority to disrupt, it’s for the best interest of the American people. In different circumstances, the nation might be united in fighting for encryption. But in today’s climate with heart-wrenching tragedies in the news, many people want to know all the answers so people can be brought to justice and so we can protect ourselves, but compromising what keeps your daily and professional activities private is not the answer.

I wouldn’t have thought that encryption was so important to me because it has become so commonplace in my life. Even in a simple Web Applications class HTTPS was a standard we had to implement to even have our application be considered relevant. It’s difficult to say whether the issue affects me in other circles of life because it’s so finely ingrained in each aspect of life. I can’t say it affects who I support politically or financially because it’s very difficult to find instances of those who don’t support encryption! Sure, if Venmo shoveled my password into Port 80 on their servers, I wouldn’t pay my friends that way because I’d be out of money in minutes, but that’s not the case. Don’t get me wrong, encryption is very important to me. Encryption is also important to a lot of other people, so there’s not a very clear dichotomy to compare.

Sadly, I think that the contest between national security and personal privacy will end with national security triumphing. While I’m all for national security, I believe the solution the FBI is currently looking for is short-sighted and foolhardy. I suppose that’s a bit of a negative outlook – I feel resigned to that particular future. But rather than sulk about it, I think we, as computer scientists, ought to prepare for the consequences of compromised encryption. It’s possible to create reliable products out of unreliable parts (that’s a large part of information assurance), and so we ought not resign and put our tails between our legs if the FBI wins out over Apple. We’ll just have to redouble our efforts and realize that, maybe for the time being, what we thought was private may not be entirely so.

Reading Assignment 09 – 22 March

From the readings, what exactly the DMCA say about piracy? What provisions does it have for dealing with infringement? What exactly are the safe-harbor provisions?
Is it ethical or moral for users to download or share copyrighted material? What if they already own a version in another format? What if they were just “sampling” or “testing” the material?
Have you participated in the sharing of copyrighted material? If so, how did you justify your actions (or did you not care)? Moreover, why do you think so many people (regardless of whether or not you do) engage in this behavior even though it is against the law?
Does the emergence of streaming services such as Netflix or Spotify address the problem of piracy, or will are these services not sufficient? Is piracy a solvable problem? Is it a real problem?

 

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) contains two important provisions when considering internet piracy, and they are the Anti-Circumvention and Safe Harbor provisions. The anti-circumvention provision criminalizes software/systems that circumvent measures to protect copyrighted work, generally digital rights management (DRM) (thanks, Wikipedia, for another concise summarization). To put it in perspective, this act was signed all the way back in 1998, but it’s still alive and well today and it’s very much changed the landscape of the internet and copyrighted material, especially media.

When dealing with infringement, the DMCA follows “notice and takedown” procedures. These are meant to help protect Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from lawsuits. When an ISP is alerted of possible copyright infringement (someone who cares notices), then the ISP has the opportunity to simply remove the offending media and avoid being sued. This is part of the safe harbor provisions within DMCA. Since ISPs are technically liable for the offending media, the safe harbor provisions are in the DMCA to offer monetary protection.

So what does (did) that mean for online piracy? Well, over the last decade, we’ve seen many file sharing sites rise and fall due to federal intervention. In general, each successor tried to be a little more clever than the last, and in doing so, needed more money to stay profitable. So free file sharing sites turned into obligatory contribution sites. Those gave rise to monthly memberships. Finally, “companies” were just flat-out asking for donations to fight legal battles. You can find a pretty entertaining account of the chronology here.

All the while, industry got smart and decided to stop fighting the battle through lawsuits and just make it more convenient and economical to lease out media for a low cost. And thus Spotify came into being (although if you ask me, Google Play Music is hands-down the better alternative), and regardless of whether you miss the good ol’ days of The Pirate Bay and hate online music subscriptions, the fact is that Spotify works.

Is it because humanity had a come-to-Jesus and realized that robbing artists and software developers blind was unethical (I mean, come on, you wouldn’t steal a car, would you?) — not exactly. To be honest, I think people just got tired of the overhead of having to look for legitimate, high-quality, low-leeching links to the latest albums, all the while fighting advertisements and click-traps galore. Spotify and Netflix each have much cleaner interfaces, they’re practically cents on the dollar for the amount of media you get, and it avoids clogging up your hard drive.

Now for the question that’s on everyone’s (Peter Bui’s) mind: Jesse, do you engage in piracy? Answer: not for a long time. Back in my angsty teenage days, I thought piracy was the bee’s knees. It never really occurred to me that it was on the same level as physical theft or that it really had any serious consequences. But somewhere along downloading my umpteenth discography of an artist in whom I was only tangentially interested, I realized that I was a crook… Okay not really. To be honest, Google sent me a nice ad for an $8/month subscription, and I decided that was my ticket out.

Now some people say, “But Jesse, I just want to test the software before I buy it. Adobe Photoshop CC is expeeennssiivvee.” To those people I say, “1. Show me the last actual purchased software license after your trial period. 2. Why in the heck to you even need that software?” If you have a need for the software, you generally know what you want and what will work best. Even if you have some copy of a song or software that you either lost or is in the wrong format, you ought to obey the copyright laws that you implicitly agreed to upon original purchase.

While I think the number of pirates online today has significantly decreased, I still know more than a handful of friends that steal music, movies, and TV shows. I don’t think they intend to be malicious or hurtful. It’s just that free is a hard price to beat, and downloading some files online generally feels pretty innocuous. For this reason, piracy is still a problem today, though not nearly as serious. I don’t think we’ll ever fully get rid of it, mainly because I don’t think users understand or care enough to fully abide by copyright laws. But as the Spotify’s and Netflix’s of the world continue to arise and drive costs down, pirate ships will continue to sink.

P.S. Maybe I should have gone about it like this: suppose you had this amazing Krabby Patty formula you’d worked on for years, but then someone got their hands on it and distributed millions of copies…

Reading Assignment 08 – 15 March

From the readings, what exactly is copyright? What are the ethical, moral, economic, or social reasons for granting copyrights?
When should an open source license be preferred over a proprietary license? Is open source software inherently better? If so, how do you explain things like HeartBleed and ShellShock?
Is the distinction between [free software] and [open source] meaningful? Between the GPL and BSD license, which one do you prefer? Which one is more free?
Should governments and other public organizations be encourage to adopt and support open source software? What responsibilities do organizations and companies that utilize open source have to the open source projects and community at large?

 

Oh me oh my, what ever happened to the good ol’ days of just writing code that goes? Everything sure was a lot simpler when the Internet was young and just about anyone that could develop collaborated to make beautiful, beneficial products. Certainly for me my coding career was easiest in its infancy when all I had to do was write good code and turn it in to be graded. But now, as we move towards the real (scary) world of software, we need to think about how to license software to best balance user rights, maintainability, security, and development.

Why are licenses important? Well, like a lot of things we work on, good code takes time and effort to develop and maintain, and we might want to protect that investment by officially declaring what end users are allowed to do with the code/product. It’s closely tied to the idea of copyrights, which is defined by the Copyright Clause in the US Constitution:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

This gives rise to patent laws which protect inventors and their discoveries and ultimately promotes progress. The driving reasons behind granting copyrights have ethical and economic foundations. If someone is going to spend a great deal of time developing a product, they ought to be assured that his resulting product will truly be his. At an ethical level this makes sense because, well, he’s the one that made it, so he should get the final say on who can use it and how. At an economical level it makes sense because if it wasn’t fiscally responsible to tinker and invent, few people would.

So what does this mean for software? Well, many companies prefer to protect their investments with proprietary licensing. This means that users are allowed to use the software, but they cannot explore, modify, or distribute the product. The source code is unavailable to the public. It’s sort of like the secret formula to the Krabby Patty. Mr. Krabs is afraid he’d lose all of his money if he published his recipe. But some people believe the world would be better if everyone knew the Krabby Patty formula – people could collaborate to make the recipe better. That’s what open source licensing aims to do. By letting the public see, understand, and modify code in existing projects, end users gain much more freedom and can get the most utility out of products. One of the great open source success stories is Mozilla!

Now is it inherently better? Not really. While it’s morally pleasing to “free” the end user and gain a large mass of developers, open source projects have their drawbacks. First of all, bad people out there can analyze the code base and look for security vulnerabilities, such as with the Heartbleed bug from OpenSSL. Second, it’s difficult to maintain such large projects that are public-facing. But mostly, as a potential commercial developer, I don’t want my work to be visible on the Internet.

Now some software purists like Richard Stallman want to make clear the distinction between free software – the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software – and open source software, which they argue just works to make software better but misses the philosophy behind making software free. In practice, the distinction is very small and is frankly a pointless argument, especially because the end result is typically the same in both cases by the Free Software Foundation’s own admission.

Now many companies and large organizations (like our government!) rely on open source projects. Just as with any software, open source code needs to be maintained, especially as bugs are discovered. However, it seems a little backwards when large organizations hound the little guys that maintain their critical component through an open source platform to fix bugs, as in this poor guy’s case. When companies rely on open source software systems, they ought to contribute meaningful and thought-out code to the project. If I’m going to start a restaurant that, among many things on the menu, sells Krabby Patties, I ought to do my best to fix that recipe myself instead of just complain to Mr. Krabs when customers begin to complain about the flavor.

P.S. (food for thought? (puns?)) We, as computer scientists, are in the business of abstraction and analogies. We should make it our goal to explain more complicated system in terms of Krabby Patties.

P.P.S. I’m really hungry now.

Reading Assignment 07 – 1 March

From the readings and in your experience, what ethical concerns (if any) do you have with Cloud Computing? What exactly is Cloud Computing? Considering the Internet meme that “There is no cloud. It’s just someone else’s computer”:

As developer, what are the advantages and disadvantages of the Cloud? Describe any experiences you’ve had in using the Cloud as a development platform, what led you to use it, and if you plan on using it in the future.

As a consumer, what are the advantages and disadvantages of the Cloud? Describe what sort of Cloud services you use on a regular basis. What trade-off are you making in utilizing these platforms?

Not going to lie, I’d never really considered the ethical implications of cloud computing before these readings. Honestly I’d only ever considered it a technological benefit, like faster CPUs and longer-lasting batteries. I hadn’t considered the security repercussions or the economic effect it would have. Ultimately, there are far more benefits to cloud computing than traditional computational models, but it’s important to stay mindful of the drawbacks to supersizing data storage and manipulation – thousands of miles away from your desk too!

So what is cloud computing? If you want a comical, though technologically questionable, answer, look no further than Google’s vision of the cloud (that one gave me a good laugh). In all seriousness, though, it might be more helpful to look at the New York Times take on cloud computing, which they essentially boil down to

… an airy term for real systems of cleverly networked computers

They aren’t wrong, though I think Amazon Web Services might prefer a more dignified definition. Basically the cloud is a bunch of networked computers that work together to complete tasks. It’s not that unlike the internet, except when you send a job to “the cloud,” all you know is that “the cloud,” completes the job. Your process, data, query, whatever, could be split up onto multiple computers, copied redundantly, or just sent to some idle machine to compute. Regardless, the process is abstracted away from you, the user. The cloud offers both a way to outsource heavy computation and a venue to house enormous amounts of data (and then do something with that data). As far as the meme goes, sure the cloud isn’t really that ambiguous, but it’s certainly more than just another person’s computer (it’s a whole bunch of ’em!)

The advantages of the cloud are numerous, and we find more and more benefits as time goes along. The biggest advantage as a developer the cloud offers is a platform already in place that’s staged to spin up some new idea. I don’t have to worry about creating some complicated infrastructure to test some computationally heavy idea I have – I can just order some resources for an EC2 instance on Amazon Web Services and boom, I’ll just worry about the code. I like to compare it to a software developer not having to worry about developing a processor. The developer just gets to think about the software and assume it’ll run on the platform provided. Also, outsourcing computation to some giant like Amazon is extremely scalable. When my idea takes off and lots of users are visiting my web service, all I need to do is purchase some more EC2 instances or increase the resources on each one. What that physically means could be quite different, but the simulated result is that my hardware magically upgraded to 10x the capacity and I can now service 10x the users. I had to use Amazon Web Services for my Web-based Computing class, and it was a breeze to set up (8 out of 10, would use again).

Additionally, the cloud offers access to data anywhere I have access to the internet, and according to this cutting edge infographic from Verizon, that’s just about everywhere. As a consumer, it’s great being able to push a file up to Google Drive and know that I can access it on-demand some other time, provided an internet connection.

Unfortunately, the more I use cloud services, the more reliance I’m putting on 3rd parties to keep my information safe and to execute my jobs well. I have close to one-hundred gigabytes of information in Google Drive across a couple of accounts. That’s a great amount of trust I have in Google, especially because a great portion of that data isn’t replicated on a local hard disk. If it’s lost in the Drive, it’s lost for good.

What’s more scary, though, than losing that information is infiltration. If someone gains access to my files without my knowing, I could be in a world of hurt. Sure, I exercise discretion and keep critical financial information out of the cloud, but I know that not everyone does. Heck, faculty here at Notre Dame have tried to keep sensitive information in AFS space before, and OIT has to delete that information for their own good!

So the trade-off between the availability and convenience of data everywhere/easy, scalable, outsourced computation and security lies in encryption. Just ask Nicole Perlroth why security needs to increase. It’s taxing on performance and generally a pain to perform, but there are many nasty people out there that would love to feast on the exabytes of information in the cloud. But sacrificing some performance for security is a much better trade-off in my mind than sacrificing data availability and keeping all my information on some external hard drive locked away in a safe.

Maybe I’m too trusting of the giants in computing, but I think they pay some engineers a lot of money to make sure what I’ve entrusted to them is safe, and that’s enough for me to sleep at night.

Reading Assignment 06 – 23 Feb

From the readings and in your opinion, is Edward Snowden a hero or a traitor? Should the US government pardon him for any possible crimes or should they pursue extradition and prosecution for treason?

What exactly did he leak and how did he expose that information? Regardless of the legality of his actions, is what he did ethical and moral?

Utimately, is what Snowden did beneficial to the public or did he harm the security of the United States and its allies? Personally, how have these revelations impacted you (or not) and your views on government, national security, encryption, and technology in general?

Edward Snowden is no hero. In fact, in the literal sense of the word, he is a traitor. He used his position within the government and technical prowess to take matters of national security into his own hands, and in doing so, he released many documents to the world that were meant to be kept as US secrets. His actions jeopardized national security, and because of this, he is a fugitive of the US, stuck in Russia. The United States government owes him nothing, and I don’t see a future where Uncle Sam welcomes Snowden back with open arms.

All that being said, I don’t think he’s the villain some make him out to be.

Edward Snowden released thousands of documents he had ascertained regarding the large-scale data collection sponsored by the NSA. He used a number of journalists as outlets to leak information and left the publication of those leaks up to them. Shortly after Snowden learned that many of his leaks would go public in the coming days, he fled the country. Everything Snowden did – using his security clearance for nefarious purposes, accessing and storing documents outside of his purview, and leaking that information (more or less) to the public – was entirely illegal. He knew it, the US government knew it, and the journalists knew it. That’s why Snowden fled, and that’s why it’s initially hard to reconcile such a decision.

But I believe that what Snowden did was because he truly cares about citizens’ privacy, even if the average US citizen knows very little about it. Edward Snowden was appalled by the sheer volume of data collection the US government had undertaken, and he was shocked by the reach the government had. Take a look at Section 215 of the Patriot Act. It states the US government can ask for

… any tangible things… for an investigation to protect against international terrorism

That’s incredibly broad to say the least, and I can understand where Snowden is coming from. The NSA would argue that, though they have incredible data collection reach and tactics, they don’t necessarily use them. In fact, to use them requires an approval process from an internal review board of sorts – but that board has only denied a handful of requests in the past decade. Snowden likened this scenario to the NSA holding a loaded gun to your head and saying, “Don’t worry, I won’t shoot. Trust me.”

What he did was illegal, though he was trying to be ethical and moral, but did he succeed in being moral in his decision. I would argue no. He betrayed his government and the trust that many government officials placed in him. I don’t believe that data collection on US citizens is as large a deal as Snowden has made it out to be, which is evidenced by the fact that still roughly half of US citizens either don’t care or care very little about their privacy with respect to the US government. I think there’s something to be said here about, if you have nothing to hide, what’s there to worry about. Would I like to have to sit in front of a board and answer for every text I’ve sent to a significant other for the past year? No, but I also don’t believe that’s a scenario that would ever pan out. Maybe I’m just being naive, but just because the government has that much information at their disposal, I don’t think it necessarily follows that it’s going to matter significantly in the future.

Now maybe I’m wrong. John Oliver did show in his segment on Snowden that US citizens care very little about their privacy abstractly, but when put into context of, er, well, “sensitive photos between loved ones,” they cared a great deal. When it was made aware that the current data collection policies in place gave the government access to otherwise personal photos, several people were shocked and disgusted. In this way, I believe Snowden positively benefited the public. He put into the light what was previously kept dark to many people, but I still don’t believe that he did it in the right context. His leaks did lead to mishandling of information by the New York Times that went public and negatively affected operations in the Middle East.

For me, the information Snowden leaked concerns me very little, but I’m willing to accept that I may be in the minority in that regard. Technology will always continue to move forward, and I think that what will continue to follow is monitoring of technology and data. The Snowden leaks slowed that progression, but I don’t believe anything will ever truly stop it. I’m not being cynical, and I don’t think it’s an issue. I just think that in generations to come, people will accept that they have to be cognizant of their digital footprint and what that really says.