Too much of a good thing

I love coding. It is an incredibly rewarding experience, financially as well as personally. I program for work, school, and leisure. Sometimes, I code too much. I’ve stayed up all night coding before, skipping meals, showers, and even quality time with my wife. When taken to the extreme like this, even a good thing can turn into a negative. To make sure that the good things in our lives don’t become the bad things, balance and moderation are key. Sometimes I just need to turn off my computer and enjoy real life.

CS 404 Position Vlog

Title IX: Equality in Athletics and...Computer Science?

I am a firm believer that women can do anything they want.  I am also a firm believer that the government creates more problems than it solves, as Title IX demonstrates. This well-known law seeks to eliminate discrimination on the basis of sex in athletics and academics.  While this is a noble goal, in practice, the theory doesn’t hold water. Already there have been athletics cases where men wish to participate in an activity but cannot because doing so would mean more money spent on men’s athletics than women’s.  Think of the infamous Cal Berkley men’s gymnastics debacle, when the year after the team won a national title, the program had to be cut to make the school Title IX compliant. In academics, I believe government should wait to act until there is more evidence that the lower enrollment rates for women is a problem that can be fixed by government. Otherwise, problems similar to the athletics biases might arise in academics.  Lower enrollment rates for women in technical programs might be caused by something completely natural like a lack of interest, and government intervention could mean pushing people into a major or career that they don’t like.  

Magnifying our calling as programmers

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints judiciously uses the varied talents of its members to further its work.  This practice is evidenced by many of the smart phone Church apps. These apps aren’t created by paid developers but instead are community developed.  Members of the Church who have programming talents volunteer their time and work together to create apps for the Church, which in turn saves the Church money.  As an LDS programmer, I would like to start contributing to these community developed projects for the Church so that I can grow my talents while helping the work of the Church, just as in the Biblical parable of the talents, which teaches that people should use their talents instead of hiding them away.

Open-source learning

Google groups are amazing; they are also the perfect metaphor for why the open-source software development model is so successful. Most upper division CS classes utilize a Google group so students can collaborate. Students receive answers to their questions much faster than waiting for specific times to ask the teacher or TA because the nature of Google groups allows collaboration and learning 24/7. Letting anyone, even the dumbest person in class, answer your question seems counterintuitive to learning. The beauty of the open-source model, though, is that if a question gets answered wrong, others will inevitably answer it right. The power of anytime, any-person collaboration drives open-source projects, like Linux, and fuels a competitive model for software development.

The lifecycle of Hackers

Hackers don't emerge from the womb exploiting emacs's backdoors. The road from law-abiding citizen to fugitive hacker is one that takes years of honing a very specific skill set. These skills are the very same ones that many legitimate IT professionals need to do their jobs. Because every IT professional is not a hacker, having the skills to hack does not entail that you are a hacker. The difference between your company's honest help desk guy and the fellow stealing your credit card information boils down to certain traits, curiosity, intelligence, and a lack of regard for authority, that make specific people more suited for hacking.

The pull of hacking can be overpowering. There is money to be made and a sense of power and accomplishment that accompanies a successful hack. For this reason, hackers, like Kevin Mitnick, describe themselves as being addicted to hacking and the almost narcotic rush it can create.  As with drugs, continued hacking can impair judgment and blur the lines of the law. This leads to more boldness on the part of the hacker until they find themselves in jail.
Some lucky hackers are able to turn their skills into legitimate careers. Sometimes, after getting caught, companies and corporations will hire “white hat” hackers to test their security. Giving a former hacker permission to break into your systems seems like a bad idea, but it is akin to a former counterfeiter helping the FBI to catch other counterfeiters. The potential implications and risks of such trust in a felon should be considered carefully. Even those hackers that have always been “white hat” still possess a dangerous skill set and often a matching personality type that can lead to serious temptation.

To tweet and preach and work as missionaries do

Most of “Generation Y” are naturals when it comes to computers.  They tweet, Facebook “stalk,” and check-in on Foursquare.  This might mean that they are excellent time wasters, but it also means that they have certain skills that older generations may lack.  Elder David Bednar said of the skills of Generation Y-ers, “Your fingers have been trained to text and tweet to accelerate and advance the work of the Lord.”  This means that acquired technological skills can be more than self-serving--they can be used to serve the Lord.  

Yet Another Piracy Blog

The entertainment industry believes there need to be new laws and punishments to protect their intellectual property.  Entertainment ‘content theft’ is a crime and those who commit it should be punished.  Current punishments for analogous ‘real-world’ crimes should be used to scale penalties that the entertainment industry can claim on infractors.  Downloading a movie or song is akin to not paying rent, not feeding a parking meter, or jumping a turnstile on the subway.  These crimes all have punishments attached.  Andrew Bridges, a copyright lawyer, crunched the numbers and noted,

“If we take copyright law’s maximum-penalty-to-price ratio as applied to an illegal download, and apply that same penalty-to-price ratio to the New York subway, the maximum penalty for jumping that turnstile and avoiding the $2.50 fare would be $375,000 instead of $100.”

These numbers make it clear the entertainment industry is seeking punishments that far exceed the crime.
 

No more legislation

DCMA, SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA are all attempts to bridge real world laws to the digital world.  It is argued that our current laws are outdated and can’t deal with the explosive growth of technology and the new problems that creates.  And yet, I’m not so certain we need a lot of technology specific legislation.  If stealing a record, cassette tape, or cd is wrong, and most would probably agree that it is, then stealing an mp3 should not be any different.  Laws already exist that punish physical and intellectual theft; these could be made to apply to the biggest areas of concern in the digital world, which are also types of theft: entertainment piracy, hacking, etc. Instead of passing technology specific legislation we should let the courts decide on a case by case basis how our current laws apply in a digital context.

http://www.newser.com/article/d9sjvs0g0/dutch-supreme-court-forcing-teen-to-drop-virtual-objects-in-online-game-was-real-world-theft.html

Sue me

As a doctor, one of the biggest expenses you have is malpractice insurance. Doctors don't mean to hurt people, but mistakes happen, and people often turn to litigation when mistakes do occur. IT engineers also make mistakes, mistakes which can lead to user's sensitive information being stolen.  This can lead to wide range of problems, from simple frustrations, like having to change a password, to serious financial problems, like a trashed credit score. When an IT professional or programmer makes a mistake that leads to a user's information being compromised, the question arises, should they be financially responsible? Will "malpractice" insurance one day become a necessity if you work in IT?

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/13/MN4Q1MO9JK.DTL

When your BlackBerry becomes a CrackBerry

When I first got my smart phone, I was so excited; I knew I would be able to be much more productive.  The world was at my finger tips!  I could respond to emails, use the internet to answer questions, and I would never be lost again thanks to the phone’s integrated GPS system. What I failed to realize is that with all technology, and most things in general, there are always positives and negatives.  Before I knew it, my phone’s miraculous data powers, accessibly almost anywhere at anytime, began to invade every aspect of my life. I started playing games in class, browsing the Internet during church services, and wasting precious free time playing Angry Birds.  Was this the fault of the technology itself?  No, the problem was in the way I chose to use the technology.  Since I realized how much my smart phone had interfered with my life, I changed the way I use it. Now, I play fewer games and instead use the device’s calendar and to-do list features to be more organized.  Remembering this potential for both good and ill in all electronics, I will look past the ads the next time there is a new technological craze and contemplate the impact the technology will have on my life before buying anything.