ECS 188 - Sample Project Topics

• Ethics of online gambling
• Cover technical and legal aspects: how does online gambling differ from traditional gambling and is this difference ethically significant?
  
• Analyze the legislative responses in terms of one of the ethical systems we have covered.
• Ethics of privacy violating printers
• Ethics of DRM, or trusted computing.
• Of particular topical interest is the Sony DRM debacle.
  
• Wireless Piggybacking
• Is availing yourself of your neighbor's unused bandwidth stealing?
  
• Google Print
• The State of Massachusetts and the OpenDocument standard
• Fantasy Sports at work
• Ethics of RBL
• Also look at Blind Vigilantes and especially The Destiny of Blacklists
  
• Ethics of anonymizers, such as anonymizing remailers/http proxies and TOR.
• Ethics of anonymizing P2P networks, such as Freenet.
  
• Ethics of responses to spamming
• A concensus has emerged that spamming is wrong, so you must find some other ethical aspect of the problem spamming poses to analyze.
  
• Analyze the legislative responses in terms of the ethical systems we have covered.
  
• Cover the history of a major cracker incident, a worm, a virus or a software failure (therac)
  
• As above, cover the technical, legal, and ethical aspects of the incident
• Analyze the current patent regime in the US
• Is it ethical?
• Does it, on balance, benefit society?
• Cover current patent situation in the European Union.
• Who are the stakeholders?
• How does the debate their interact with the patent situation in the US?
• Freedom of Expression and the Internet
• The great firewall of China
• Ethics of responses to Spyware
• A concensus has emerged that Spyware is immoral, so you must find some other angle to analyze.
  
• Overview responses, including legislative
• Electronic Voting Machines