Courses/CS 575/Spring 2006/Martin Olsen

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[edit] Course page for Martin Olsen

Welcome to my course page for CS 575 Human issues in computing. I can be contacted at molsen@calstatela.edu.

[edit] My work

[edit] Extra

  • During my presentation in week 8 about Sketchup, I was asked about youtube. I popped out a few numbers from the back of my head, namely; "1 million a month on bandwith", "40 million streamings a day". Well I found a blog that pins it down more accurately, turns out I wasn's so far off: http://blog.forret.com/2006/05/youtube-bandwidth-terabytes-per-day/ (the blog has links to respective sources)
  • Big brother:

It's sad to see how much data is flowing over the internet unencrypted. Especially the IM traffic. The IM traffic could so easily be encrypted. Like, lets say, just keeping the protocol unencrypted (servers can direct all data), and letting the clients handle the encryption themselves. (perhaps some problems would occur if the clients are using different clients, i'm talking homebrew clients) Also, let the clients, initiate the necessary handshaking, agreeing on the encryption algorithm, sharing keys in a normal PGP fashion and the server will be left clueless about what is going on. This handshaking can go through the protocol (the server) or client-to-client. Client-to-client is a problem because then you need to open ports to the outside world and start listening for traffic, and this is the reason why there is a server-client architecture in the first place.

The reason why it's important to keep things encrypted is not always because you are sharing your social security information or your credit card number, for this there are other unsecure channels. Also it's not because some person might sniff the traffic and might find some of your chatlogs amuzing. It's the american government trying to control the internet, some call it big-brother.

It all started back in 1969 with arpanet and the mother of all protocols. TCP-cowriter Bob Kahn was well aware of the problems by letting all data flow unencrypted among it's peers and in fact they were about to do something about it. Unfortunately they were stopped by the Defense department which had a huge involvement in the development of the protocol. (Source: Interview with bob kahn http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/shows/)

It continues today and the big masses does not really care. Corporations like AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft are all letting goverment have free access to their systems. Only corporation that comes to mind that showed some kind of resistanse when it came to the Privacy act, is Google. Which has been in a long-time legal battle against the government on this issue.

Have I made you depressed by this ranting? There is still hope. Get involved. (House panel votes for Net neutrality)

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