5.1 questions

1: Come up with three of your own Beneficial and corresponding Harmful Effects of Computing

Computing has created many powerful advancements in technology that would have been impossible without computing. The Worldwide Web and email are just 2 different developments only possible by computing that have completely changed our lives. however, theses new developments come with positives and negatives. The worldwide web, while being able to spread information and make knowledge more accessible, also puts this same info in the hands of anyone who would use this information for immoral tasks. Drones can be used for entertainment or to take breathtaking picutres, or could be used for warfare or invasions of privacy. Videogames can create unforgettable experiences and bring people from different parts of the world together, but can also become an obsession or cause a divide between reality and virtual world. basically not all developments are completely black and white.

2: Talk about dopamine issues above. Real? Parent conspiracy? Anything that is impacting your personal study and success in High School?

Dopamine and getting it from phones and games can definetly spiral into a problem without any self control. People can definetly become addicted to getting dopamine from social media/games and spend way more time on these things than they really should. I know because I have sometimes found myself being too immersed in a game and forgetting that I have a life outside of it. But i haven’t let it become a huge problem.

5.2 questions

How does someone empower themself in a digital world?

My ANS: You can empower yourself in a digital world by using knowledge found from the internet to help you make informed decisions or to inform you on current world problems so that you can discuss them. You could also empower yourself by finding other people who share your beliefs or hobbies and learning from them.

How does someone that is empowered help someone that is not empowered? Describe something you could do at Del Norte HS.

My ANS: people who are empowered can help others who are not empowered by giving them confidence in themselves and showing them that there is some truth to whatever ideas or decisions they made or want to make. I can empower people at DNHS by giving compliments or showing people that I care about their endeavors and that whatever they have accomplished is impressive or meaningful. I know I would feel more empowered in my COMP SCI class if i was reaffirmed that the work I made is high quality or is teaching me something beneficial.

Is paper or red tape blocking digital empowerment? Are there such barriers at Del Norte? Elsewhere?

My ANS: I believe that paper is only a minor block to digital empowerment as there aren’t many differences between using paper or a computer for doing work. However I think that “red tape” and an excessive desire to control and regulate technology by the school is heavily interferring with empowerment at DNHS and learning via technology as a whole at this school. The schools’s firewall is incredibly opressive and could be compared to chinese censorship with the amount of banning and problems it has caused. Educational content or even stuff in comp sci like accessing AWS last tri were blocked by the firewall last year, and I feel like it heavily impacted the potental for digital empowerment at DNHS. In general, censorship by governments is the biggest roadblock to digital empowerment, as it prevents certain people from metting others and getting empowered from people online.

extra questions 1

Q 1: Think of three beneficial effects of your projects based on 5.1 Unit:

ANS: One of the benefits of our news project is that users will be able to get reliable and unbiased news if we are able to implement a filter for biased news. This would be helpful for people who want to filter out the opinions in news and get the straight facts.

Another benefit will be that users will be able to gain some neat information they might want through the use of the sports feature or the educational feature, which differs from traditional news sites which give primarily news and not much else.

Lastly, our project will be able to provide credible news sites to users if we are able to implement the filter feature, since getting reliable news is becoming more and more difficult by the day.

Q 2: Think of a potential harmful effect of your project.

ANS: One harmful effect of our project could be that we may end up accidentally spreading harmful or biased news on our site if our algorithm for filtering news is not completely working, which would tarnish our reputation and would be misinforming users.

Q 3: Answer with an opinion and learnings so far this year: What are pros/cons on internet blockers at router and lack of admin password on lab machines at school?

ANS: Internet blockers at school only serve to prevent students from abusing the internet and using it to look up bad content. Even this is a problem because the blockers usually are unreliable and will block sites that have no reason to be blocked. Another con of the blocker is that it installs certain addons on chrome when students log into chrome on their laptop through their school accounts. These addons, while being able to filter out more bad content, are also an intrusion of privacy and i’m sure it’s only a matter of time before they are hacked and all of our data is stolen. Lastly, im sure that they cause the wifi to be unreliable, as I am constantly disconnecting from school wifi, yet I never randomly disconnect from other wifis. I hope that you (the teachers) will hopefully find a way to convince the school to either remove the blockers or invest more money in a better I.T department.

Q 4: What concerns do you have personally about the digital divide? For yourself or for others.

ANS: I am mainly concerned about the digital divide for others, and how it makes it so that those who can’t get their hands on good tech will be disadvantaged. Without a laptop, I find it hard to believe that any student could have the potential to succeed or have nearly as much potential as those who did have access to those resources. Hopefully providing tech to those who need it will become more of a priority, as a laptop in the right hands could bring people out of poverty.

5.3 Computing Bias questions

My thoughts:

I think that most bias generated by Computing and algorithms are made unintentionally or for profit. in the profit instance, the bias are made so that users will be swayed to purchase or give money to a company. These biases are made through the use of targeted ads and skewing results to user information. These “for profit” biases made through algorithms cause people to use their money on things that they really don’t need to spend money on, but are mostly harmless.

unintentional bias can be generated by computing/algorithms when these algorithms cause people’s feeds of information and how their getting their info to become skewed to a side. An example of this would be youtube giving users conservative-sided videos when those users become interested in that side, causing that user to be only exposed to that political side and them to not be given videos that are actually true.

I think that the best way to avoid biases in our project will be to ensure that we have filters for our news that are thoroughly tested and are well equipped to block out biased news, seeing that our project would have nothing special about it if it was a biased news site like every other news site. We could also make sure that our news site brings in news from all different viewpoints to ensure that this project isn’t unintentionally being skewed to a certain side/viewpoint.

5.4 Computing Bias questions

1.CompSci has 150 ish principles students. Describe a crowdsource idea and how you might initiate it in our environment?

ANS: A crowdsource idea that I might be able to initiate for this enviorment could be a simple site that allows Comp Sci students to give their opinions on the course and basically help the teachers improve the curiccullum. This could be done using a site that allows users to submit reviews of the Comp Sci course to this site, and then the teachers can view this info later to improve the curriculum.

2.What about Del Norte crowdsourcing? Could your project be better with crowdsourcing?

ANS: Implementing crowdsourcing in Del Norte could be done through volunteering or with an easily accessible site. My idea is to have a club that starts projects that people can join and contribute to, perhaps for example, a project to add a chalkboard to a wall in the school could be started, and then crowdsourced to students so that they can contribute to the creation of this project. Our Project can be better with crowdsourcing if we crowdsource our news database to users and allow users to add credible news to the site, as a way to basically keep the news feed fresh. Crowdsourcing the news feed would also ensure that our news feed would have a variety of news from many different people’s perspectives. However, It would be hard to moderate this and ensure that no one desiced to add bad news to our

3.What kind of data could you capture at N@tM to make evening interesting? Perhaps use this data to impress Teachers during finals week.

ANS: I already stated an idea for crowdsourcing earlier but I could create another page on our project that would allow visitors of our project to log reviews of our project. That way, we can get feedback from users and see what we need to work on in our Comp Sci skillset. Capturing user feedback and their experience with our project would be interesting to see as we would be able to see the appeal of our project to regular people who have lives, and we would be able to know how much use our project would have in the real world.

5.5 Legal and Ethical concerns questions/notes

-each different license of a program or work wil determine how others can use the work and whether or not you can use it without citing an author or paying something up.

The following are all OPEN SOURCE licenses:

Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal license ensures that the work is in public domain and anyone can use it

Open Source MIT License allows the code you have made to be used by others, including allowing people to distribute closed source versions. of closed source versions. you may need to cite author though.

Open Source GPL License ensures people can do almost anything they want with your project, except distributing closed source versions.

Open source licenses ensure that when users want to open up their projects to the public, their works are worked with exactly how the author intends. Although this license stuff isn’t too applicable to what we are working with now, it certainly is applicable to companies or for profit buisnesses who may be breaking open source licenses.

For my personal blog, I would use an Open Source MIT License. This is because I want people to be able to use my blogs and code to help themselves, but I also want to be credited so that I can build myself a reputation. I want the credit for my work so that people don’t steal my works and claim it as theirs. Hopefully people will use my blog as a guide or something and I can be credited for making the works.

For the entire team repository, I think that a MIT license would be good because I am ok with others taking our frontend and using how they want with credit to us. It doesn’t matter much if they are copying our project as the code we are putting on frontend isn’t really too valuable. On the other hand, the Backend code should be under the Open Source GPL License, because I think our backend code has more value and I don’t really want people to copy and redistribute our backend code.

5.6 Safe Computing questions

1. Describe PII you have seen on project in CompSci Principles.

In our project, user usernames and emails used to sign up would be PII that would be known by everyone, and not to secretive. On the other hand, password would be PII that we would need to keep absolutely secret, as other people should not be able to log into another person’s account.

1. What are your feelings about PII and your personal exposure?

I feel like PII should be handled carefully online and that you should keep as little PII on the internet as possible. the more PII you have on the internet shared with others, the easier it is for people to use that information for malicious stuff. You could be targeted by scams or spam if you have thrown out too much PII online.

1. Describe good and bad passwords? What is another step that is used to assist in authentication.

A good password would be something with variety and is hard for the average person to determine. Something like I8#FoUrL0ive would be very hard for someone to just type in and hope to work. technology used to crack passwords would also struggle with this. Something like 12345 or abcde would be a stupid password as it has no variety and any AI could solve for this password in a few seconds. A step that is used to assist in authenticaton is 2-factor Authentication, which ensures that even if someone cracked the password, it will still be hard to log in.

1. Try to describe Symmetric and Asymmetric encryption.

Symmetric encryption is a form of encryption where only a single key would be used for encryption and decryption of data like passwords.

With Asymmetric encryption, there are 2 keys used for encryption of decryption. Theres a public key, probably for other people to use, and private key that would need to be used in combination with the public key probably for access to the account. (Not to sure about this)

1. Provide an example of encryption we used in AWS deployment.

If I remember, our teams had some kind of encryption key included in our AWS deployment. Our security keys and important things in our AWS deployment were kept encrpyted, and I think that we got a key that we would use to decrpyt the data. so we had a key for encryption and decryption.

1. Describe a phishing scheme you have learned about the hard way. Describe some other phishing techniques.

I have never been scammed out of money/information by Phishing scams, but I may have come close. I saw an offer on offerup that was clearly too good to be true, but I kind of fell for it and entered a chat with them in texts where I was asked for a paypal payment. I instantly knew it was a scam afterwards and blocked all contact with them. I also know that I have seen scams like “you have won a phone” or something, but I am smarter now and know that if it is too good to be true, it is.