Week 9

This week we had 4 groups present on the books they read for their book reports. The book "The Dumbest Generation" had alot of statistics suggesting that our generation is lacking in intelligence compared to past generations but offered no real solutions. I think that that kind of defeats the purpose of writing a whole book about a problem if a solution is never offered. Im looking forward to the next presentation as well as our guest speaker next week.

Week 8

This week we had a guest speaker who showed us some very cool ways of encrypting messages. While it was relatively easy to decode as long as we had the key our partner used, I can imagine that it would be very difficult without. The same encryption techniques we learned were used in the civil war and others but at the time a lack of technology probably made even today's somewhat simple codes very difficult to break.

I really enjoyed the speakers presentation and it was quite an entertaining class. I hope that we continue to cover interesting topics like we have the past several weeks.

Week 7

This week we talked about 4chan in class. Although the idea of complete anonymitity is appealing, I can't say that I would ever use this site. I am a user of social networking sites because I like to be able to be in touch with all my friends no matter where they are. I dont normally update status' often but I use the chat feauture frequently. Posting useless information online where tons of people I dont know can anonymously make fun of it is not something I feel is a productive use of my time, although it could possibly be entertaining.

Week 6

This week in dissecting the internet we read "Blown to Bits, Chapter 2" and it was shocking to see how little privacy we actually have. Everything that we post online is trackable as well as everything we have bought, and the sites we have visited. Its really strange to think that someone could find out everything about me just by knowing my name.

The activity we did as homework was proof that you can find so much out about a person with so little information by using the internet. My partner was able to pull up a google view of my house after searching for my name online. Thats a little bit scary to think about.