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Universities Creating Computer Discipline Offices
geisler writes "The Chronicle of Higher Education has a very good article on how larger colleges are beginning to create departments to deal with the social issues related to computer problems and not depending solely on technical solutions. The University of Maryland's Project NEThics is used as a prime example."
A few years ago I was in the UMD dorms and after numerous violations of the network AUP I finally got a call one morning before going to class. It was Mr. So-and-so with the Nethics department. He told me there were some violations and asked if I knew what he was talking about. (Of course I did, what? was I just gonna confess? Idiot.) He then suggested that I come over to the computer and space sciences building for a 'chat.' Meanwhile at the CSC building I entered the Nethics office and was greeted by Mr. So-and-so, and he began his Gestapo interview of me. It came down to the fact that I had egregiously broke their rules, and I knew it, and he knew it, but he had no real proof (I firewalled almost everything, including all of the UMD space) with the exception of an email written by a barely literate teenager Narc'ing on me. Needless to say, I walked out unscathed. They are just a bunch of James Bond wanna-be jokers.
heck most places do not even teach you to analyse your ideas in terms of what are the consequences of a particular thought pattern. (what would a person who thinks 'X' do?")
for that matter Morals and Ethics are usually jumbled together into a nicely packed wad.
You can see this just from the actions of folks, like that guy who was email stalking in the story.
they get into this "well since I don't like the rules of belief system 'Y', I think I'll try things without any rules whatsoever for a while" - which immediately invokes the LART school of social education.
[grumble mode = infinite loop]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
A funny thing happened while I was a graduate student; it was about 1992, the dorms where not wired and web browsing was just emerging. The internet meant mainly ftp and the newsgroups. In our department the system administrator was having a disk space problem and decided the problem was to many redundant copies of binaries in home directories. His solution was to make a complete download in a central place each night of the alt. binaries.* newsgroups and let it be known if you wanted to look use these groups don't go making copies in your home directies. He wrote scripts that basically acted like Agent works these days. Deleting files after a few days and updating the files each night of the new server.
This went on for about a year with no problems. Then a student who did not pass their qualifying exams and had a grudge went to the school newspaper with a print out of a ls of these directories. The newspaper made a article about smut on the internet and exposed our departments secret directories. I remember the listing in the newspaper had file names refering to lesbians, farm animals and scat.
Well needless to say the directories went away and the system administrator transferred. Now its just a funny memory. ( The system adminstrators career did not suffer; he is now a senior systems person at the University )
Inarguably, there's a problem with widespread lack of ethics today.
Claiming it was better in the past is pretty ambitious.
Go back 20 years, you have the Reagan administration. Go back another 20, it was socially acceptable to beat up African-Americans who tried to vote. Go back another 20, Americans of Japanese ancestry were being put in concentration camps with the approval of the Supreme Court. Yet another 20, you have Teapot Dome and a thoroughly manipulated stock market.
Go back 200 years and ruminate on how ethically the native Americans were treated.
Go back 2,000 years and read what some great thinkers had to say about the ethics of the people around them.
Now to get back on topic: humans have ALWAYS needed to organize and enforce codes of ethics. The question that comes to my mind is, why a separate office for computer ethics? Stalking is stalking, copyright infringement is copyright infringement, trespass is trespass. Just because computers are (relatively) new doesn't make them a special case.
Maybe you should read first nations of the net... velly intavesting
-- OMFG = Oh My Floatse Goatse
When I was at UMD, about 3 years ago, we had plenty of people telling us about the AUP. Yet none of this stopped the rampant err.. violations of the AUP. The closest thing they did to even attempting to stop people from downloading things illegally was to put a cap on our bandwidth. After the cap was put in place, we couldn't upload any more than about 2mbps over DCC, and our downloads outside of the campus network didn't go above 3mbps or so. This was the only effort I saw in my time there to curb the massive downloading. They didn't even bother monitoring the students' shared files, of which 90% were unprotected in terms of passwords and the like - and take a wild guess as to what was being shared. The funniest part about that is the fact that some CS students had written applications specifically designed to search shared files on the UMD network for specific files. I can honestly say that every single student there had plenty of downloads that would violate the AUP, if not a high number of laws. Windows 2000 was readily available the first day of classes in Feb. 2000. Within about 1 month, about 2/3s of the people I knew in the dorms were running Win2k, yet most didn't have much cash at all. There was always talk of monitoring, but my multiple GB/day of uploads and downloads never got me a phone call or message from anyone. They can advertise this program all they want, but in reality, they've been talking for years about stopping people from abusing their high speed line, and they've done virtually nothing about it. Using UMDCP as an example of a university curbing AUP violations is like using Brittain as an example of a totalitarian monarchy.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
I received this message from our university IT (Idiot Troupe) department within an hour of the Slashdot posting. If ever there was a reason to encrypt your e-mails, this is it.
Please be advised that monitoring of your system, email accounts,
domains and servers may be necessary to detect, prevent and eradicate
illegal or otherwise damaging use by internal and external users of the
University computer network in order to protect the security and
integrity of the University computer system. Such monitoring efforts
could lead to the imposition of criminal and civil penalties to those
users whose actions are illegal, unlawful, damaging, or threatening to
the University computer systems.
The problem is not that porn is wrong or a crime, but that it is a liability. Sexual harassment laws are extremely vague, and there are any number of seemingly harmless situations that could get the school sued. Basically, anything that could be slightly offensive to anybody in a vaguely sexual way can fall under these rules. Schools protect themselves from these extremely expensive lawsuits through their AUP, and it is vital that the lab staff enforce those policies. It's far better that peoples surfing be limited "voluntarily" through such a policy than that internet access be censored, or even cut off.
I agree with your sense that there's nothing wrong with pornography, but there are far to many people in the world who are way too uptight and will do anything in their power to prevent people from doing what makes them happy. That includes suing schools into oblivion with sexual harrasment/hostile environment lawsuits.
It's an ethics violation in the sense that, no matter what precautions you might take, it's still a public place, and your actions are exposing someone else to liability. It is certainly within that someone else's rights to defend themselves from that liability, even preemptively, which is what those AUPs are all about.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
First, a disclaimer: I didn't attend a "Computer Science" course.
:-)
Nonetheless, and I am not bragging, I have a very good idea of what they learn and see here, where "Computer Science" is called "Applied Mathematics".
Alas, Computer Science is kind of funny -- it's like calling aerodynamics "Rocket Science".
Well, you are somewhat right about hypothesis and etc. OTOH, when you look at the work of less "practical" guys like Hoare or Wirth, it's undeniable that what they do is science. If you don't know them (like I barely know the names of important guys in Physics), let's just simplify things and say they're great at Number theory, Linguistics, Graph theory, among others.
Of course, you're right about most courses which are, literally, trash. They teach Computer Science by teaching Visual Basic. This is akin to those 3-month MBA courses. I wonder what you gain beside status and a contact phonebook.
And, writing from a developing country with severe cash problems, I'd say I can relate to that money problem of yours. My only suggestion, albeit a little naive: be ingenuous. Act McGyver-style, improvise, do "Gedanken Experimente", use proxy variables, whatever.
In the end, money is not a panacea. I'm typing this reply in a 7-year old computer which would only beat a 486. Sure, if you can get the funding, all the better. Don't refuse money.
I may be wrong... but I venture to say people put too much confidence on money as a problem solver.