Hello, and welcome to the Technology and Ethics class. I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science, teaching both in the software engineering and information technology fields. During my career, I’ve worked with new and emerging technologies regularly, including search, virtual reality, privacy, and now artificial technology. I’ve even worked with new technologies, which have…
There are several approaches to ethics that can help people be in a better position to make a sound ethical decision. Three common approaches to ethics include virtue ethics, consequentialist ethics, and deontological or duty-based ethics. We’re going to focus on Consequential ethics, i.e. is the end result good, and duty-based ethics, i.e. is this action right? Consequentialism Consequentialism…
The difference between ethical and legal is that legal concerns are based on formal, enforceable rules, while ethical concerns involve moral principles that may not have legal consequences3. Legal issues are those that are defined by law, while ethical issues are those that are based on personal values2. Something can be legal but not ethical5,…
A project can easily go off the rails in a lot of different ways, often without people being able to see it because they are so close to the project. Therefore, it is important to find ways to stay on track. Here are some things to look out for to ensure your project doesn’t go…
One approach to dealing with deadlocks is to allow deadlocks to occur and to provide means for detection and recovery. Recovery from a deadlock can be accomplished by destroying one or more of the processes involved in the deadlock, or by removing some of the resources held by the deadlocked processes. The banker’s algorithm emulates…
A computer system consists of a set of hardware and software objects. The protection domain is a set of pairs of objects and rights needed to access those objects. An access matrix is a representation of protection domains. (It is more conceptual than actual however.) Each row specified the object, and a right that can be performed as…
User authentication is the act of verifying the identity of a person who wishes to connect to a computer or a network. This can be done in several ways, but most commonly is through a user name and password. For more complex, or sensitive systems, you may be asked to use two (or more) factor authentication….
Computer security is the freedom from theft of or damage to hardware, software, or information, and from disruption or misdirection of services. Protection is the set of mechanisms and policies that guarantee computer security, including the confidentiality, integrity, availability, and authenticity of all data and services. Common types of compromised computer security Information disclosure Information modification Information…
