Personal Ethics

Everyone has their own personal code of ethics.  Rarely do two people have the same code, the same ideas about morality.  That's fine - indeed, it's a good thing for diversity in our communities.  The problem comes when people judge others because their code of ethics is different.  Just because someone believes something you don't, or has different ideas about morality, doesn't make them a bad person.  As I read somewhere, "Don't judge me because I sin differently than you."

Online Gaming

Online gaming is not bad in and of itself.  The social interactions that take place can be very beneficial for some people.  As in the gaming article by Knutson and Oswald, they mention that a teenage boy who may be socially awkward at school can find acceptance and importance in an online community.  However, MMORPGs do lend themselves to addiction and overplaying.  The key is to know yourself, and avoid activities that you would become addicted to.  I have never played, and will never play, an MMORPG for this very reason.

Social Media

Social media is pervasive in our current culture.  Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc are all examples of ways people have to communicate with thousands of others asynchronously.  Rare is the person today who doesn't have some kind of social media account.

Social media has the power to change the world.  The first chapter in Here Comes Everybody shows the influence that social media and networks can have to affect things outside of the social sphere.  The LDS church uses social media to connect investigators with members, to help people understand their goals, and to correct misconceptions and misinformation about the church.  There are many great things that this kind of interaction can bring about in the world.

Unfortunately, these days most of the information that passes through social networks is worthless.  Posts about what someone ate for breakfast or a not-funny joke their boyfriend told that day simply dilute the power and effectiveness of social media.  Perhaps this information is important to the person that posted it, and it has become so pervasive that others accept these kinds of posts, but in truth most of the audience simply doesn't care.

A few years ago I started a twitter account because I was told that it was "necessary in this field" about programming.  I followed several high-profile accounts of professional, well-known programmers, hoping that this would provide me with good insight on programming topics and expose me to opinions I might not have been able to find on my own.  While this did occasionally occur, the majority of the posts were something akin to "went to the dentist today".  Because of the mass of unrelated, unimportant posts, I quickly stopped following twitter and abandoned it altogether.

Social media is a useful, important tool in our society.  Unfortunately, as with many things, it has been misused the point where it is largely ineffective and useless.  Many people talk about the power of social media, and I can see the potential, but until people use it for real communication rather than pointless fluff, it will be an exercise in futility to attempt to find any real meaning in it.

Meeting a Mormon

One of the best ways to overcome misconceptions about the church is to meet a Mormon.  When I was in Basic Training, people thought weird things about the church that they reconsidered when they got to know me.  It is much easier to understand a religion when it's viewed through the lens of someone's life.

Bazaar Development

Open-source products are usually very good.  Developers are excited, committed, and skilled.  Unfortunately, commercial products often can't be open-source because their code is proprietary.  We can leverage good aspects of open-source programming - developers proud of contributions, many eyes looking at a problem, quick releases, customer feedback - in our companies if managers are willing to try.

Family History

I have never felt that family history work is very important.  Some people very much enjoy learning about their ancestors and their history, and I say leave the work to them.  The LDS church has a tendency to make anyone not doing family history work feel guilty, but I say, if God's a loving God, why is there some ridiculous requirement for us to be together with our families?

Government Lobbyists

For many years, many of our laws have been made to serve the lobbyist with the most money, not to serve the people.  A good example of this is copyright laws and how willing politicians have been to condemn people that share music over the internet.  Normal people, and usually even the musicians that write and perform the music, generally don't care about music being shared - but because it will hurt the profits of huge companies that have lots of money to spend, it is suddenly a national priority.

Alternate Communcation

Technology has greatly changed the ways we communicate. First phones, then text messages and email have moved people away from face-to-face communication to impersonal text-based communication. Most of the time, this is fine. The problem is that people are forgetting how to communicate in person, and often forgetting that they should. Although I love asynchronous text-based communication, it is vital that we remember that face-to-face communication has its place still in our communities. 

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/19/tech/social-media/police-facebook-son-death/index.html

Computer Security

Computer Security is a growing problem in our society. Right when computer networking began, there were no malicious users, and no one really cared about security. Soon afterward, however, people began exploiting computer networks for their own profit. Computer security is not something that all users and administrators have to keep in mind at all times. Like in The Cuckoo's Egg, even systems that don't themselves contain sensitive information can be used to attack other systems that do.

Despite the use of a bug in a third-party program in The Cuckoo's Egg to get into the system, most security flaws today come from people rather than system vulnerabilities. Different systems are obviously protected by different levels of security, but systems that do contain sensitive information are usually protected by security that is very difficult to crack. While it's true that a given system may contain a security vulnerability, this is usually recognized and corrected the first time it is used.

People making mistakes, however, is not something you can patch as easily as a software hole. When the activist group Anonymous hacked into some secure government systems, the government hired an outside security firm to find the identities of the members of Anonymous. One of the leaders of the investigative group bragged online that he was close to discovering them.

In retaliation, Anonymous hacked into the firm's servers. First they hacked into the email system, which was protected by a less secure system than their other systems. Rather than use brute force or a clever loophole in the software to access more systems, Anonymous merely sent an email supposedly from the company CEO to the company's IT group, saying that he had forgotten his password. Dutifully, IT responded with his password, which Anonymous used to access personnel information and change the passwords for access. Then they posted the boaster's information, such as his Social Security Number, online.

I do not agree with what Anonymous did in this situation, but the way they did it highlights the biggest security threat we face on a day-to-day basis. Phishing attacks get bank information, Social Security Numbers, passwords, and other sensitive information from uninformed, careless people every day.

Computer security is definitely something we need to focus on and work to improve and technology goes forward. However, we also need to commit significant resources to education people and preparing them for the kinds of attacks that depend on their weaknesses rather than those of the computer.

Women in Computing

The fact that there are many fewer women than men in computer science is, in my opinion, much less of a problem than many people think. In recent years it seems to me that people have started interpreting gender equality as gender sameness. I believe strongly in equality for women, but that does not make them just like men. It seems to me that the most likely reason there are so few women in computer science is because few women like it compared to men. We're not keeping women out of computer science, they just don't want to be there.

Good and Evil

Nearly everything in the world can be used for both good and evil. Satan is very good at taking things that benefit mankind and twisting them to his own uses. The pornography industry is a very good example of this. Porn companies have huge user bases and lots of money to spend figuring out how to make money off new technology. Each time a new technology has been created or announced, the porn industry immediately begins to research how to use it to further their own ends. It is important to keep this in mind when using technology - Nothing is purely for the good. 

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/23/porn.technology/index.html

Online Stupidity

I once read a quote on the internet that read "You can be anything you choose to be on the internet. It's amazing to me that so many people choose to be stupid." I have no idea who said this, but it's true. For some reason people don't act like the things they do on the internet have real consequences and can actually matter. For example, CCN had an article about people being blackmailed because they got naked on webcam with a stranger. Very few people would do that in person - it sounds stupid. On the internet, however, people decide that it's ok. Use your brain when you interact with the internet. 

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/18/tech/web/naked-webcam-blackmail/index.html

TechnoCulture

Technology changes culture. I think this is a fact that very few people would ever dispute. The question is, is this good or bad? Many people, including Neil Postman in his article, feel that technology changing culture is a bad thing that we need to control. Neil references corporations watching us, ads being targeted, etc, as ways in which technology is ruining our culture. The question I put before you, however, is: is this bad? Why do changes to our culture have to be negative? Many people, especially historians, tend to glorify the past and traditions. The fact that it is old does not mean it is great. Humanity, culture, society, and even language are things that are changed by technology, and have been especially changed by computers, but I hold that these things are living organisms that must evolve and change. Change is often to the better overall, even when it comes because of technology.