5.3 Computing Bias

Google “What age groups use Facebook” vs “… TikTok”? What does the data say? Is there purposeful exclusion in these platforms? Is it harmful? Should it be corrected? Is it good business? Facebook: 25-34, TikTok: 10-19 I think that there is exclusion between the platforms but that is mostly due to a generation gap. I don’t think it’s very harmful at all because it’s a natural divide. It definitely is good business because each individual company caters to their target audience

Why do virtual assistants have female voices? Amazon, Alexa Google, Apple Siri. Was this purposeful? Is it harmful? Should it be corrected? Is it good business? Virtual assistants have female voices because it’s more pleasing to hear and easier to understand. It may also be connected to the submissive nature of virtual assistants. I think it’s a little harmful because it promotes bias that women are viewed as assistants and can be corrected by assigning a gender neutral voice. It is good business though, because it caters to most humans’s preferences.

Talk about an algorithm that influences your decisions, think about these companies (ie FAANG - Facebook, Amazon, Apple,Netflix, Google) One algorithm that influences a lot of people’s lives is the TikTok algorithm. There are many trends that spread because of it, which influences real world actions. This can be both harmful and beneficial. Companies like Instagram and Facebook will feed you content that will keep you on their site longer, which would make them more ad revenue.

Pair work (Video on HP computers are racist)

Q1: Does the owner of the computer think this was intentional? A1: It’s hard to tell, but he seems to be jokingly upset at the computer for not recognizing him for his skin color.

Q2: How do you think this happened? A2: I think it was because of the bad lighting in the video. Additionally, the face recognition program may have been trained on people with lighter skin.

Q3: Is this harmful? Was it intended to be harmful or exclude? A3: Yes, it is harmful because it excludes a large group of people. I don’t think it was intended to be harmful because that would be bad business.

Q4: Should it be corrected? A4: Yes.

Q5: What would you or should you do to produce a better outcome? A5: Train the facial recognition program with darker skin color.

5.4 Crowd Sourcing

Group work ~10 min Q1: We have all experienced Crowdsourcing by using external data through API’s, namely RapidAPI. This data has influenced how we code and shown possibilities in obtaining and analyzing data. Discuss APIs you have used. A1: I have used an API with symptoms including cough, fever, etc. I used this in my tri1 project. Our crossover team used a Wikipedia API.

Q2: We have all participated in code Crowdsourcing by using GitHub. Many of you have forked from the Teacher repository, or exchanged code with fellow students. Not only can we analyze GitHub code, but we can obtain profiles and history about the persons coding history. What is the biggest discovery you have found in GitHub? A2: he biggest discovery I’ve found on GitHub is GitHub.dev. It allows you to look at peoples code and it’s format through the web.

Q3: Kaggle datasets for code and science exploration. The avenue of data points us youtube or netflix channels. Analyzing crowd data helps us make decisions. Exam top 10 to 20. Did you see anything interesting? A3: here is a lot of medical apis, car apis, covid data, election results, and even arrests in the city of Chicago.

Q4: CompSci has 150 ish principles students. Describe a crowdsourcing idea and how you might initiate it in our environment? A4: I think slack is in a sense apcsps form of crowd sourcing. Important information is sent there and people can ask questions and get answers on the slack as well

Q5: What about Del Norte crowdsourcing? Could your project be better with crowdsourcing? A5: Del Norte definitely needs better crowd sourcing. Currently, a lot of decisions made by the school are done by the staff or ASB, however regular students don’t really have a chance to say much. I think making a board of students could help with this problem. These students could get feedback from classes and then give that input to those who make final decisions.

Q6: What kind of data could you capture at N@tM to make evening interesting? Perhaps use this data to impress Teachers during finals week. A6: I could make a google form, but to make it more csp related, I could set up a SQLite database to collect feedback from every student who stops to see the project. This feedback would all be collected in one place.

5.5 Legal and Ethical Courses

When you create a GitHub repository it requests a license type. Review the license types in relationship to this Tech Talk and make some notes in your personal blog. Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal: The Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain Dedication waives copyright interest in a work you’ve created and dedicates it to the world-wide public domain Open Source GPL License: The GNU GPLv3 also lets people do almost anything they want with your project, except distributing closed source versions. Open Source MIT License: This allows using code freely and making and distributing closed source versions. Typically, the author of software with MIT License want credit. Credit could be as simple as adding the authors name in comments.
In your blog, summarize the discussions and personal analysis on Software Licenses/Options, Digital Rights, and other Legal and Ethical thoughts from this College Board topic. There are open source and closed source licenses. Open source licenses force companies or individuals to have their code be public and closed source allows the code to be kept private. Some of these licenses prevent distribution of closed source versions of their work. Digital rights are software to protect, play, and/or distribute content. An example of digital rights are the terms of service that you often have to agree to before purchasing something. I have subscriptions to things like Netflix and Youtube that allow me to have privileges to view or listen to different content. However, there are some ways to bypass these digital rights such as through illegal websites.In terms of ethics, many people want to bypass digital rights through illegal website but by doing this the artists and owners of the content don’t get paid for their work, instead people can view it for free. This can have a negative impact on the income of those people.
Make a license for your personal (blog) and Team repositories for the CPT project. Be sure to have a license for both Team GitHub repositories (frontend/backend). Document license(s) you picked and why. FYI, frontend, since it is built on GitHub pages may come with a license and restrictions. Document in blog how team made license choice and process of update. The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. The GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program–to make sure it remains free software for all its users, which is why I choose it.

5.6 Safe Computing

Describe PII you have seen on project in CompSci Principles. In our project, we have a user login and sign-up system which requires the users email as well as a password of their choice.
What are your feelings about PII and your personal exposure? I believe that some PII will inevitably be out there for everyone to see but it’s crucial that more risky information like passwords and personal credentials stay to oneself. I have PII that I put on the internet. Specifically, Iuse instagram and linkedin where I have my name, accomplishments, etc. listed.
Describe good and bad passwords? What is another step that is used to assist in authentication? A bad password is one that has no system of authentication. Symmetric encryption is not a good system for passwords as it is a type of encryption where only one key (a secret key) is used to both encrypt and decrypt electronic information. A good password has a system of authentication. They use Multi-factor authentication which often requires you to enter a code that has been texted or emailed to you. Another good method is Asymmetric cryptography. Asymmetric cryptography, aka public-key cryptography, is a process that uses a pair of related keys – one public key and one private key – to encrypt and decrypt a message and protect it from unauthorized access or use.
Try to describe Symmetric and Asymmetric encryption. Symmetric encryption is not a good system for passwords as it is a type of encryption where only one key (a secret key) is used to both encrypt and decrypt electronic information. Asymmetric cryptography, also known as public-key cryptography, is a process that uses a pair of related keys – one public key and one private key – to encrypt and decrypt a message and protect it from unauthorized access or use. We did this for the security of our fastpages site, using a public and private key
Provide an example of encryption we used in AWS deployment.
Describe a phishing scheme you have learned about the hard way. Describe some other phishing techniques. I would occasionaly recieve dms from my friends on discord with a link to “free nitro” but in reality the link gets you to fil out personal information which it then uses to hack your discord account. Unfortunately, Ive had this happen to me due to my lack of knowledge on safe computing. Now that I know this is a way to hack any account, I will not fall into this trap again :).