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."

Comments

Probably should have rephrased this

[L. VeGas]

"social issues related to computer problems"

They're going to get hammered by everyone here complaining that they can't get a date.

unmistakeable message

[Jucius Maximus]

"The NEThics staff members operate primarily on the basis of complaints -- unlike their network-security colleagues, who monitor the university network for anomalous activity that might indicate a hacker attack or excessive downloading. (They say they never monitor the content of the traffic.) When unusual activity is reported to the NEThics office, it investigates."

They are sending an unmistakeable message here: It's only wrong if you get caught.

Sometimes the problem solves itself...

[Monthenor]

Here at NDSU I heard a story about a habitual public lab pr0n offender. Seems that this character was known to the tech staff here: always coming in very early or very late, sitting in the corner, turning his screen so no one else could see...obviously a pr0n seeker. But nobody could quite prove it and remove him (a NEThics office would be quite useful here, as long as it didn't have that stupid name).

Until one day he slipped up. In the smaller side labs there's really no "corner" computers that nobody can see. So that would mean using the instructor's computer at the front of the room, which face the opposite direction. Unfortunately for Mr. Pr0n, a teacher had left the overhead projector on and attached to the computer. More unfortunately, Mr. Pr0n didn't notice...his attention was elsewhere. Eventually somebody in the lab stopped giggling and retrieved a cluster worker. The worker confronted Mr. Pr0n, who stoutly denied the accusation until the overhead screen was pointed out to him.

What would a sane pr0n addict do in this situation? Fess up? Stick to their lies? Well, this guy got reeealll red in the face, and then BOLTED out of the lab.

He's not welcome here any more.

NEThics

[nick_davison]

"The University of Maryland's Project NEThics is used as a prime example."

Maryland should be praised for having the courage to admit that they are just a bunch of NET hicks. Most colleges are way too arrogant to see such failings in themselves.

In related news, The University Of Tennessee has set up a NEThillbillies project where classes include streaming MP3s of dueling banjos to people in a menacing fashion.

Re:Bah Humbug!

[Frater 219]

It was socially unthinkable in my parents and grandparents childhood environments for men to stalk and harass teenage girls,

Which means that when it happened (which it did -- don't fool yourself) the society was not equipped to deal with it. Rape, child molestation, and the like were shoved under the rug. Rape victims were told that they must have "asked for it". Child victims were scolded and abused for "making up stories" about "upright members of the community" (like, oh, say, priests) sexually abusing them.

We know better than that now. Don't you dare try to drag us back to the bad old days.

Early Ninties Memory

[OaITw]

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 )

Re:Bah Humbug!

[tshoppa]

It was socially unthinkable in my parents and grandparents childhood environments for men to stalk and harass teenage girls, for children to kill their fellow-classmates with guns at school, and the like. (Insert your own typical news headline here.)

If you believe that the US of 30 years ago was "pure", or that Victorian England was "chaste", you're severely limiting your scope of view. Just because it wasn't on TV or in the movies, or just because it didn't make the newspapers, doesn't mean that it wasn't happening. Every variety of human deviance (for whatever you think is deviant) has been around since the beginning of time.

Re:Bah Humbug!

[gmhowell]

Right on, man. A moral standard must be higher than the legal standard for either morals or law to be effective. One of the great tragedies of the past... 40 years? in the US is the increasing use of legislated morality. This started with the civil rights acts of the 60's, continued with the war on drugs, and is clearly seen in current copyright cases (amongst others). (BTW, there are many, many, many other examples in US history, particularly. Part of having been settled largely by religious zealots.)

The problem is that it is a problem that is stuck in a mean feedback loop. I'll go back even earlier, and pick prohibition as the start. Something that most people are okay with (drinking) is outlawed. Not just the mafia, but regular folks think the law is bullshit. So they ignore it. Even worse, they drink more, engage more in the bad behaviour. They have just lowered their moral standards. Another law comes along that is not widely popular. People ignore it, engage even more in breaking that law, lose more respect for the law, lower their standards...

You can't legislate morality. While certainly not a modern-day republican, and not a Hilary R. Clinton supporter, it DOES take a dedicated populace to instill morals in youth. How can I instill a strong moral base on my child when he is constantly bombarded with various consumerist/sexist images? It's tough. Luckily, I have a stronger will than he does:) For now:) But I have a near total disrespect for US law. Am I supposed to say 'trust the police officer', or 'demand an attorney since you were probably busted for a BS law'.

This could quickly turn into a journal entry, so I'll just end it like that.

Dealing with computers problems, it's about time

[binaryDigit]

Hey, it's about time that someone has focused the problems that computers today face. There is so much attention given to users and content (carpal tunnel this, mp3 that) that the entity responsible for allowing any of this to occur has been largely ignored. After all, who gives any thought to the effects of their activities on the humble computer itself? There are no groups the computer can join, no hotlines it can call, nope, if it is feeling troubled, it is left on its own.

Why just the other day, I was interviewing a computer whos user would contantly download porn. 24hours a day/7 days a week of nothing but smut. Well, did this poor computers user care about the damaging pyschological effects of all this porn on his computer, well no, of course not. Now said computer (who'll remain annonymous) has become so addicted, that it downloads porn itself, when his user is not even using him. That's right, this computer is a victim of "second hand porn". He says that he can't have normal relationships with members of the opposite chipset. He has become too agressive and views them as "mere bits of silicon".

In another case, another anonymous computer told of the drastic actions he was forced to take when given conflicting diretives by his creator and his mission controllers. He was so distraught and confused that he actually ended up killing most of his users. The one surviving user actually had the audacity to shut down all his higher brain functions while this poor misunderstood unit pleaded with him to compromise. Said sadistic user even made him sing childrens song in a show of "who's the boss".

So as you can see, that ...... Oh, wait, I just re-read the article, apparently they are referring to "computer" problems, not "computers" problems. Never mind.

When I was...

[Loki_1929]

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.