Nicholas Pifer CS 4100 Senior Seminar

       I'm not really sure what the most important things I learned over this semester for senior seminar. I suppose it would have something to do with learning about the extent of the things the NSA was doing in country. I previously thought it wasn't that serious but the NSAs ability to get pretty much any data an individual sends without any real difficulty seems pretty excessive. On top of that, them working with five eyes makes it seem even sketchier as any of those countries probably now have the ability to do this to other countries citizens.  The one piece of advice is easily go to class. Half the assignments are just follow ups on class and the class isn't bad, you'd probably enjoy it. Going to class is probably the hardest part of the class and that's not a difficult task to begin with. 

 I suppose I'm most interested in what the NSA has been doing after the whole Snowden incident. Overall, I think I'm mostly interested in it as it has immediate real world affects that is happening right now. Did they actually do anything to alleviate the public outrage? Is what they did just a cop-out solution that doesn't actually do anything? Is there anything being done to get them to actually stop doing stuff like this? Is that an actual solution or is it just another cop-out?

 So I live up a road that has quite a bit of tree coverage that is right next to all the power lines. Due to this, when the wind started knocking down trees, those trees started to fall on the power lines. The power didn't come back till just under 3 weeks later so any technology using electricity pretty much played no role in my experience(other than the lack of it making me extremely bored). The only technology that really had an impact was the gas stove(if you can call it technology, it's kind of just setting gas on fire) as it was used quite frequently to make food and boil water. Other than that, technology didn't really do much till the trees were cleared a week later and then it was just to say I'm not dead and stuck under a tree when I went into Boone for cell service. 

 Ultimately, none of the information we looked at regarding data privacy came as a surprise to me. I already knew that companies would get a lot of data from individuals who are using their applications and the extent(for some companies) of the amount of different data that they collect. There was at least one case where I wasn't aware of just how much data a company would collect. TikTok, while not something I use, was one of the companies that really ramped up how much data they collected. It was said in class some of the things they get, which for the most part was standard, but then it got to how they would take all of the contact info from you phone and collect that(phone numbers, emails, names.) In some ways it's not that crazy as it is a way they can connect you to people on your contacts that use Tiktok, but I really doubt that's all they use it for. Then on the other side of the spectrum is Steam(Valve). Pretty much all they get from you is data so they can identif...

 While I had already known about Snowden whistleblowing that the NSA is spying on people, I was unaware as to how widespread it was and how much information they were tracking. My assumption was that it took them a little more effort to get this information but the fact that it is so easy to access anything someone is doing came as a surprise. The general response from the government essentially saying "We'll fix this with this fix" and the fix not actually doing anything is on par with what I'd assume they would do. Overall, I'm not really surprised by any of it, I just didn't think it was as advanced as it is.

 Overall I feel like everyone had ethics that you would expect to see. Most people fell along the line of if something helped the most people and hurt the least it was probably the best route to take. There was a few that were different from that such as one persons who seems to be more of a neutral to things(at least in the sense of he would rather have no involvement if it involved people dying on both decisions) or how someone based it off of whatever was likely to apply the most good karma (I don't know if they meant this as in they want good karma or they're just saying an action that would result in good karma to people who believe in it is probably a good choice.)