Week 12 : Electronic civil liberties

Lecture:
This lecture focused on a number of organizations, most especially the EFF Electronic Frontier Foundation which takes it upon itself to protect people's civil liberties online. As people were originally easily taken advantage of, with no one to defend their rights the EFF took it upon itself to fulfill this role. Apparently they have been doing a good job as well. Also freeware, and shareware were discussed, as well as their origins. When programmers began keeping their source code secret, during the commercialization of software, many developers who enjoyed the environment of free exchange of programming code, were incensed by this new development, and took it upon themselve to keep writing software by the old standards of sharing their source code, and allowing others to copy, redistribute, and change it as they saw fit. We also watched a presentation by Lawrence Lessig about the need for the laws to change something I found very poignant, and true. Unfortunately I get the feeling lawmakers will never understand this vision.

Tutorial:
Worked on getting references, for essay , and read study guide for exam prep.

Readings:
Reading 3 things at this point is ridiculous, therefore I shall abstain.