Month: February 2015

Current Event Post 2

http://www.wired.com/2015/02/eff-eliminate-software-patents/

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that works to protect peoples rights and freedoms in a digital world, released a proposal for improving the US patent system. One of the suggestions in the proposal is to “Abolish Software Patents” (Kamdar, Nazer, and Ranieri 27). I agree with this idea. Continue reading Current Event Post 2

Loss of Trust Due to Hacking – Analysis Paper

Computer hacking can potentially cause monetary, emotional, and even physical damage. Even if there is no apparent damage caused by a hacker’s attack, trust is damaged by all forms of hacking. This loss of trust has far reaching effects; in the Cuckoo’s Egg Clifford Stoll says that hacking isn’t “measured in dollars ripped off, but rather in trust lost” (196). Continue reading Loss of Trust Due to Hacking – Analysis Paper

Study Journal 3 – Law & Computing

Feb 10 – IP:  Patents, Copyrights, Trade Secrets, & NDAs

  • Intellectual property rights can help promote research by allowing companies to know that they can monetize the results and recuperate their losses. At the same time the lack of sharing can hamper other researchers.
  • It seems the more you dig into a topic the more problems you discover that have no clear answer.
  • Interesting that reverse engineering is allowed and illegal.
  • Intellectual property is a part of life, therefore I should keep learning about it.

Post 1 – Hackers

In the Cuckoo’s Egg the author asks “what word describes someone who breaks into computers?”1 This is an interesting question that still hasn’t been answered even 15 years after the author asked it. The media would call them hackers, but now a days people will use the word hacker to describe someone who is cheating or just exceptionally good at something. Continue reading Post 1 – Hackers