CSE 40175 Ethics Blog

Patents is an agreement with the government and a form of intellectual property which gives an inventor/creator a 20 year monopoly over their idea/invention as long as they disclose it. A patent doesn't give a right to make or sell the invention but does give the right to choose who can and can not make your invention or use your idea. There are many reasons for granting patents. One of the reasons is to protect the inventor from losing out on the benefits of his/her work if a larger company finds out about his/her idea and mass produces it without giving them anything. Another reason may be in order to spur innovation, because if an inventor can be convinced that their idea is safe to let other people know about then maybe they will make it public and allow others to build on to and improve on the idea. I think that patents should be granted as they do help inventors keep control over their ideas and help preserve their work while not harming the abilities of others to innovat...

The motivation for building self driving cars is to ease the task of transportation as well as to attempting to create an overall safer environment on the road. The thought is that with the number of sensors and cameras on these cars they will have a better visibility and feel of the road than any human possibly could and this would then allow it to make the best decisions and react quickly to dangerous sitations. The problem with this though is that these cars can be almost too safe. By that i mean self-driving cars would be coming to a stop at yellow lights instead of speeding up to get through or coming to a full stop at a yield when there is no need; which is a problem because self-driving cars don’t drive like humans so some things they do like coming to a stop at a yellow may cause a crash because the human behind and all humans around would be trying to get through the light on a yellow. The other problem with self driving cars is the social dilemma of autonomous vehicles which...

Fake news is the spread of mis-information whether it be for the reason of attracting clicks for money or attempting to sway the opinion of a population. A lot of the article took a look at the presidential election and the effect which fake news may have had on the outcome. The article  Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook gives examples of horribly false and slanderous articles about Hilary Clinton which where liked, shared, and commented on thousands and tens of thousands of times. Some people have no ability to filter false information or their wanting to accept the article as truth makes them do it causes the further spread of false information. If these false links can really sway people to vote for one candidate on false pretenses then this deluge of content is very dangerous and shows how brainwashed people are by what they read on social media. SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS ARE NOT AUTOMATICALLY FACTS PEOPLE!! I understand that with the amount of content that is already on and subm...

What trade-offs are you making when using the cloud? Have you consciously evaluated these trade-offs? What is your justification? When using the cloud the trade-off you are making is really just convenience for privacy/confidentiality. As I found, setting up your own GitLab instance takes maybe a total of 6minutes of actual work, but you have to have a computer running one of the supported OS's if you want to make it an easy process because installation from source did not look too simple (for a CS major, for a average joe would be a hassle). In the scenario of running your own host/server you have to pay for the host computer, maintain any updates, do your own troubleshooting on server errors, do all configuration and management of the host on your own. For some people this may sound like a fun and easy task, but for others it may be too much so they will default to the cloud services. Cloud services will manage everything for you, make sure you are able to reach the servic...

Net neutrality, which is also known as the open internet, " is the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) should give consumers access to all legal content and applications on an equal basis, without favoring some sources or blocking others." What this means is that an ISP such as AT&T would not be able to charge content providers, like Netflix, a premium fee in order for their service to propagate through the ISPs network quicker than other services and they ISP would also not be allowed to throttle the performance of services which are provided by their competitors via their network.  The arguments for net neutrality are that it allows an even playing field for businesses that depend on the internet for their service to be provided and provides an open forum for internet discussion and general activity as well as taking away power from an industry that is already a monopoly in most areas. Net neutrality allows all businesses equal access and priority to an...

From my understanding Cloud Computing is the use of servers to host data and different services for access from multiple data points. This hosting can be private, public, or hybrid. Private cloud computing is the case where all the resources of a server whether it be on site or hosted by a third party is used by only one company and is  maintained on a private network. On the other hand a public server is hosted by a 3rd party which deliver their storage and computing resources over the internet and from those two explanations hybrid is pretty self explanatory. The services which may exist on these cloud computing networks usually fall under 3 categories    infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (Saas) where infrastructure is just barebone computing resources, platform allows for quick testing and software development, and SaaS provides some time of software application over the internet. There are a ton of benefits t...

My initial reaction to Snowden as an angsty and rebellious Junior/Senior in high school was that of pride. Heck yeah! Take a stab against the government and open the eyes of people that think that living in the United States guarantees we have a government that isn't like the depicted "Big Brother" mentality in Russia, China, or North Korea and show them how corrupt and vigilant our government really is. I also originally thought that he was some type of hacker that got this information from infiltrating servers and gaining access to top NSA/FBI/CIA security credentials while working for the government. Since reading the articles and  Yes, Edward Snowden Is a Traitor  in particular, my ideas on the man and his actions have changed. The mentioned article gives a really good breakdown of how Snowden should have acted if he were to be considered a true whistleblower and hero to the American people. The author made the points that if Snowden was truly acting in the fashion ...