Princeton University |
Computer Science 291 |
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This paper or web page is due April 30, at NOON. A box will be outside of Allison Klein's office (215 in the CS building) for paper drop-off. People choosing the web page option should print out the first page of the web page, CLEARLY write the URL of the web page at the top, and place this in the drop-off box. E-mails will not be accepted.
If you are choosing the web page option, please see the sample topics below and then read more about what's required here.
If you are choosing the paper option, you should defend a position on a particular issue in 6-8 pages. This position should be clearly stated somewhere in your paper's introduction, probably in the first paragraph. Furthermore, we expect high-quality, rigorous papers, which means, among other things, polished prose and full bibliographic references cited as necessary.
Here are some suggestions for paper topics. These topics can also be used as a starting point for your web pages. You can further narrow these topics until you are comfortable with a focus or area of interest. Give the papers a title of your own. As mentioned in class, you may devise a topic of your own choosing.
Should government get involved in providing access to information technology? To whom? In what way? To what extent? Should we care about inequities in access? (Note inequities may emerge from socioeconomic, racial, or physical inequalities.)
For the webpage you can give a balanced account of the viewpoints. Look around for work that has been done on initiatives to provide access: e.g. public access through libraries, schools, to communities. Try names such as Lodis Rhodes, Doug Schuler, etc.
Discuss one or more technologies of privacy/anonymity. If you choose the webpage option you should narrow your focus to some very particular issue -- e.g encryption, anonymity versus the PIII, or the Microsoft GUID.
If you choose a traditional essay: focus on, e.g. John Markoff's opinion piece that weighs anonymity against crime control. Or write a critical analysis of the paper by R. Rivest.
Discuss what you consider to be the most important considerations in the societal response to various forms of computer crime. You may wish to discuss particular cases that you know about in light of articles by Spafford, Stallman, and more recent works.