Category: Current Event

PC Mag: Twitter Should Hire Curt Schilling as Sheriff

This article demonstrates that the dangers of being an internet troll¹. Curt Schilling tweeted about his daughter’s acceptance into college. Several people responded with vile tweets, including threats of rape. In response Mr. Schilling posted the identities of these trolls, causing one to be fired and some of them may be prosecuted as sex offenders. While the punishment for these trolls could be seen as harsh, it does help to demonstrate that the actions we take while online can have far reaching effects. Sadly it seems that all to often people feel that they are anonymous on the internet and free to say anything they want without consequence. Hopefully this incident will cause other people to think twice about what they say online.

Continue reading Current Event Post 3

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

http://phys.org/news/2015-01-era-cloud.html

In our increasing digital world it is becoming harder to protect our personal data, the above article proposes an interesting solution to the problem. I think Professor Jon Crowcroft’s idea has merit given the success of other peer-to-peer networks such as Bitcoin and BitTorrent. The biggest problem to such a network is adoption. To succeed it will require an application that is easy to setup and use, and easily found. With the increasing threats to our personal data I hope that someone takes the ideas presented in the article and implements them. However, I don’t agree with the idea of a pay-per-use system given that a peer-to-peer system depends on the contributions of the user’s computer power and network connection to work instead of a centralized corporate server.