This past Saturday, seventeen out of the twenty students took Online and Computer Essentials Exam (covering Chapters 1 & 2, worth 5% of IS101 total grade, one-attempt only). Manny C., who goes by Manny, earned the highest score.
After the first exam of the semester, I gave my first lecture: Hardware, Troubleshoot, End-User Cyber Security, Rationale in Choosing a Computing Device which contributes heavily to the upcoming Bonus Quiz 4 and Bonus Quiz 5. Hmm, I wonder how many students would explore http://poorrichard.atwebpages.com/Slide01.htm to see the homepage I made for my fictitious student, Benjamin Franklin?
Many students are keeping up with coursework, some are playing catch up, but Manuel W., Mannasiya, Anisley (Ani), are proactively working ahead of schedule and emerging as the face of IS101-3003, Fall 2023 at the time of this blog post :-)
Speaking of face, as a follow-up to the video in my previous week's blog post, please watch this video: Facial Recognition: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO). The video may be from June 2020 and the topic is at least a several years old but the implications are just beginning to be vetted and addressed.
Note 1: Viewer discretion is advised as the 21-min video contains strong languages and John Oliver's brand of humor. If you are under the age of 18 and cannot obtain your parent's permission, let me know and I will give you an alternate assignment in place of watching this video.
Note 2: When I tried to search for this video through Blogger's YouTube video search/insert function, Blogger (owned by Google) would not return it -- along with almost all of John Oliver's videos -- as a search result. Hence, I inserted a screen capture of his video and pointed you to the URL. If that doesn't work, visit https://youtube.com and search for this video.
The five statements that stood out for me are:
(1) Driver license photos from residents of these states (including Nevada)
(2) 'Skynet but good'
(3) Only 8 out of 42 matches were verifiably correct
(4) "...argues that it has a First Amendment right to harvest data from social media."
(5) "...'unconventional databases' for 'extreme opposition research'..."
These funny lines stood out for me as well: 'loser fish', 'your brain autocompleted the rest', and 'accidentally made tennis interesting for a day'.
Students, please share your professional thoughts on what you learned from his video in your comment to this blog post :-)
Facial recognition systems are another one of those double edged sword technology. It can be quite helpful in catching criminals, but it could really be an invasion of privacy. I think we all knows that the government is tracking everything you're doing, but to that level is insane! It's such a fascinating system. When one of the Clearview's interviewer asked if they would sell their system to countries that thinks being gay is wrong, and they avoided the question completely...yikes!
ReplyDeleteI adore John Oliver; his wit and often accurate observations are one of the reason he is one of my favorite commentators/comedians. The magistral funny ways in which he can spin controversial issues and make them seem lighter and even ridiculous always puts a smile in my face. This video is so interesting, to think how technology has advanced in just a few decades. To think about facial recognition at the levels we are seeing it now, the way it's used and how unrestricted access to this technology really is makes you wonder: where are we headed as a society?
ReplyDeleteAs a productive member of society who wishes for a crime-free community, I am all for facial recognition technology used on a federal level. Way too much crime goes unpunished, and I see the added technology as a great way to solve this problem. I was totally against facial recognition technology when smart phones first got the feature for face unlock, thinking it was too intrusive. My turning point was when I got an alert from Facebook one day that someone may have just posted a photo of me. I opened the app and saw that my aunt (whom I am not friends with on the application) had posted an untagged photo of me and her during my visit. At that point I realized we as a society were already too deep into the availability of facial recognition technology, so there's no point in caring about trying to stop it; "They" have been watching us for years.
ReplyDeleteWow! Interesting that this video is already 3 years old and I can only imagine what we're capable of now. I used to watch a show called Person of Interest and in every episode, they used facial recognition to track and follow people they were looking for.
ReplyDeleteI believe that there is good and bad to facial recognition. John Oliver explained that facial recognition comes with many privacy and civil issues. An example of this was the app "Find Face" which was presented in the video. This app can find someone's social media and personal information. These apps are what make me afraid of what our future will look like with facial recognition and the fear of no privacy is what I think about in the near future. The good thing about facial recognition is that it can eventually more accurately find missing persons more often. Kidnapping and human trafficking is a very serious problem in the world. If this system is developed for this cause it can potentially save a lot of lives.
ReplyDeleteThe one thing that stood out to me is that although facial recognition is a good thing to have, but the flaw in system is that it can only identify white persons easily but not persons of color reliably which worries me.
ReplyDeleteI found the comment about law enforcement using facial recognition to scan public spaces to look for individuals who have active warrants shocking! For me, it begs the question, should we tolerate being under constant surveillance? A theme that seems to present itself in many different ways in our daily lives with today's technology.
ReplyDeleteFacial recognition is a very interesting technology that comes from our modern era. There are always people weary of new innovations, and for good reason, but it is amazing how facial recognition has been put to use. John Oliver is quite the character. In the YouTube video, he mentions Clearview AI. One of the largest databases for our faces that is publicly available? This sparked my interest and raised concerns about the future implications. Technology will only improve and so will facial recognition and the amount of things one is able to do with it through loopholes.
ReplyDeleteFacial recognition in its basic form sounds interesting but it would still seem unethical in some regards because I believe that no one wants their face to be tracked anytime they go outside. We already deal with that anytime we carry our phone around. Technology in this regard is great in finding criminals that are on the run but stopping you and forcibly getting a picture of you is just not right.
ReplyDeleteOne part of the video that really stood out to me was the FindFace app that was used in Russia. It worries me that this sort of technology can get into the wrong hands and be used for human trafficking. Even the government using it is scary because the more control the government has over the population in this regard, the less privacy people have, and this goes against the American way of life. I do think that local jurisdictions enforcing some sort of ban or barrier to adoption on facial recognition in the United States is a good thing, such as what San Fransisco and Illinois put into place.
ReplyDelete