portfolio
Assignment 1: Web Policymakers Visit the following websites to see how organizations involved in making policy are using technology. Browse around each site to get an idea of what the organizations are trying to do and how they do it. Record your impressions in your Portfolio. Check out the links. Are these organizations "biased" or "balanced" in their presentation of information? http://thomas.loc.gov This site is concerned with functionality and not user friendliness or appearance. It reminds me of rfc repositories or a pure research database web interface (EBSCO, IEEE, etc), because of the large volume of information it must continually be processing this is probably intentional. This is the least biased .gov website I have ever seen, it is pure record with no commentary or connotation associated with any of its content. Find the homepage of a senator or congressman. Browse some other Congressional or Senatorial homepages and record your impressions. Are there common standards? How do politicians use their sites? For education, self-promotion, and outreach? Which purpose seems most important? I used Senator Joe Lieberman’s homepage: http://lieberman.senate.gov I found it trite and unfocused. Rather than focus on concrete accomplishments, the senator from Connecticut chose to use his web space to parade around his activities in a crass and unorganized manner. The page mainly focuses on “internship opportunities”, “tour information” and even referrals to where a visitor may order US flags. Buried deep is any semblance of factual information; this is more a public relations homepage than anything. Comparisons with Senator Conrad Burns from Montana (http://burns.senate.gov) yield similar results. Politicians seem to use their sites for the extremes, on one hand as another organ in their PR system and on the other for clear public record keeping. For the pages surveyed, public relations seems to have priority. http://w3c.org Take note of the social as well as the technical issues associated with this organization’s work. What is their social contribution? This page has a clean layout and succinctly lays out massive amounts of information on technology specifications. All references and documentation are presented directly on the main page as well as informational documents about the World Wide Web Consortium (w3c) itself. Additionally tools such as the HTML validator are impressive. The social contributions of a page like this are to provide transparency to the workings of an open standards group (e.g. minute meetings are posted unedited) and to disseminate open technology standards to the industry and to regular users, no special authentication is needed to view this site and it is all free of charge. http://www.whitehouse.gov Is this page mainly a publicity or informational and access page? This page is exactly what you would expect a page about the Whitehouse and executive branch of government to be: news about their activities, reproductions of speeches and very non-offensive photographs of the president at official functions. This page is meant mainly as a publicity page. http://www.eff.org Take a look at some of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) links related to security and other contemporary issues. This organization supports unfettered openness on the Web. Record your impressions about their positions on two issues. The Electronic Frontier Foundation takes, by some standards, an extremist organization. An advocate for the rights of technology users, the EFF site is mostly a very stylized page containing their views on current topics (e.g. filesharing) and links to technologies used to circumvent these types of controls. Their views on the patriot act are very well formed and I agree with them in their condemnation of it. I do not agree that sharing music on the internet should not be treated as a crime, it by current legal definitions, _is_ a crime. http://www.nsa.gov The National Security Agency {NSA) gained an unfavorable reputation during the Clinton Administration for trying to take over control of domestic standards for security. Does the current NSA page strike you as the home of government bureaucrats seeking backdoor entry into private electronic space? Take a look at their work on secure Linux. The NSA homepage is very Spartan and contains mostly public information rather than anything pertaining to the current NSA nor its activites/policies. The terse “About NSA” page says in so many words, nothing. There’s even a “page for kids” about the agency. The page doesn’t strike a visitor as the page of an agency dedicated to destroying the privacy of private citizens. Assignment 2: Web Security Visit the following sites and use them to find answers to the following questions. Clisff Stoll was one of the first Internet users to publicize "security" as a policy issue in The Cuckoo's Nest during the early days of a trusted network. Find a website for Stoll. Is Stoll a computer scientist? What does he say about current developments on the Web? Stoll is a computer scientist, he analyzed computer systems and studied their behavior with respect to users and security. I found Cliff Stoll’s homepage on UC Berekely: http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~stoll/ He seems formally more versed in astrophysics, and while he didn’t use Automata Theory or finite state machine theory to catch the east Germans in “The Cuckoo’s Egg” I consider him a computer scientist nonetheless. Originally the term "hacker" referred to someone who was skilled at the art of networking and could get into systems and navigate around to find things. These "hackers" lived by a code of trust not to disturb anything or do any harm. They regarded computer systems as something that could not be and should not be owned. and the meaning of the term during the early days of the Internet and computing. "Crackers" are individuals who use their skills for malevolent, criminal purposes. Today, there are many cases of crackers who uses software tools for anti-social purposes. Take a look at the story of how a publicly available software tool, a "sniffer," was used to commit a crime. Click on sniffers at the phrack.com and astalavista sites and browse to get an impression of how accessible and powerful sniffers are.