Introduction

I'm Jacob Kassman, and I'm studying Computer Science at the University of Notre Dame. I really, really don't like writing stuff publicly, so this whole blogging thing should be...fantastic. So why am I doing this? Yay CSE 40175, Ethics and Stuff. I know no one will see this outside of class, but they technically could, which feels rather strange to me.

Ok, so I dislike the idea of blogging. What else? My interests. LEGOs, coding projects, and video games are probably the main three. I've been building LEGOs longer than I can remember, playing video games longer than I should, and messing around with code sometime when I'm not doing those.

Why am I studying Computer Science? Great question, writing prompt! It makes logical sense and you can do just about anything with it. Furthermore, it's fun and I can't stop, so might as well major in it.

What do I hope to get out of this class? A blog, apparently. Also, more than just "hacking is bad, don't steal people's data," but more blurred lines than that. I would like some set of guidelines to navigate the blurred lines.

For example, I imagine Facebook and Google can use some fancy algorithms to figure out a lot more about you than what you explicitly tell them (which is already quite a lot). Probably more than people intend those websites to know. Is that ethical, or a form of unethical hacking? Another issue that's always interested me is that software is shipped with known bugs. These bugs are so minor that they would never cause a real issue, and would cause much more time than they're worth to fix. Still, this seems weird to me, selling an explicitly faulty product doesn't seem perfectly ethical.