CS 347U: The Internet Age

Course coordinates:
Tuesday/Thursday 2pm-3:50pm
University Technology Services (UTS) 205
Class e-mail/WWW:
cs347u at lists dot pdx dot edu
http://thefengs.com/wuchang/work/courses/cs347u

Instructor:
Wu-chang Feng
wuchang at cs pdx edu

Office hours:
10:30am-11:30am Wednesdays
By Appointment
FAB 120-14 (4th Ave Bldg.)

Course overview and objectives:

This course examines the Internet and contemporary issues related to it. The course will start with an overview of the Internet's design philosophy and architecture, along with some of its essential protocols. Then, students will research give presentations on contemporary technical, social, political and legal issues the Internet now faces including:

User privacy and security (privacy, anonymity, authentication, secrecy, non-repudiation)
Internet governance (TLD control, IP address allocation, international cooperation)
Conflicts with the law (net neutrality, intellectual property, freedom of speech)
Disruptive influence on traditional businesses (media delivery, telephony)
Evolution as a social medium (netnews, bulletin boards, IRC, social networks
Evolution as a publishing medium (blogs, Wikis, RSS, Mashups)
Design flaws and vulnerabilities (spam, malware, DNS/route hijacking)

Class Mail List

All students are required to join the class mail list. All communications will be done over this list.

Tentative schedule

Week #1	1/10	Course information
	1/12	Internet History and Design Slides Homework #1 due
Week #2	1/17	Walkthrough of how it works Slides Homework #2 due
	1/19	Web/E-mail/DNS Slides
Week #3	1/24	TCP Slides Homework #3 due
	1/26	IP/Routing Slides
Week #4	1/31	Social, Ethical, and Legal issues with the Internet Slides
	2/2	Societal changes A1. Newspapers (Kayla Berge) A2. Book publishing (Andy Moser) A5. Wikileaks (Gase Mulitalo) A4. References (James Tiet)
Week #5	2/7	A3. Social communication (Nicholas Kula) A6. Viral campaigns (Jacob Schultz) A7. Internet and linguistics (Ceara Chewning)
	2/9	Privacy and censorship B2. Cookies (Torn Saelee) B3. Do Not Track (Alma McLean) B15. Geolocation data collection (Nate Myers)
Week #6	2/14	B6. Facebook tracking (Jaycob Cooper) B10. Google Buzz (Patrick Stanley) B7. Intellectual property and social networks (Linh Nguyen) B13. Personal information trading (Uyen Phan)
	2/16	B11. Nation-based censorship (Rebekah Machado) B1. Anonymizing networks (Nelson Gonzalez-Arango) B9. Google and China (Michael Liddy) B16. Federally-mandated backdoors (Leighanna Eickhorst)
Week #7	2/21	Intellectual property C3. File-sharing networks (Matt Seror) C4. Pirate Bay (Derek Muller) C2. SOPA/PIPA (Khanh Nguyen)
	2/23	C6. Open-source software (Justin Cate) B18. CIPA (Mark Greear) Internet administration D3. IP address allocation (Souad El Fane)
Week #8	2/28	D4. DNS name squatting (John Kelley) D5. Net Neutrality (Stephen Schmidt) Taxation, gambling, crime E2. Internet gambling (Justin Meyers) E4. Computer fraud (Ranjan Shakya)
	3/1	Technology F1. PageRank (Adam Guy) F2. Internet advertising and marketing (Tyler Wallace) F5. Cloud computing (Randy Veen) F6. HTML5 (Brandon Christensen)
Week #9	3/6	Security G12. Scareware and software downloads (Kevin Trieu) B12. Spyware (Steven Carter) G21. Car security (Artem Snitsar) G17. Sign-in seals (Sharlene Fielder)
	3/8	G3. Phishing (Daniel Mansour) G10. CAPTCHAs (Israel Doering) G20. Stuxnet (Brandon Engen)
Week #10	3/13	Extra presentations
	3/15	Final quiz (covering student presentation topics) Open notes

Attendance

Attendance and class participation are required.

Homeworks

Homework #1

Join the class mailing list.

Homework #2

Topic Selection
Go through the topic list here and identify topics you would like to cover. E-mail me with a subject line "CS 347U: Homework #2", a priority ranking of 3 topics you would like to cover so I can reserve one for you. If there is a topic you wish to cover that is not on the list, e-mail me this instead.

Homework #3

Create a template presentation using PowerPoint, PDF, OpenOffice, or Google Docs
E-mail me this presentation or an accessible link to it with a subject line "CS 347U: Homework #3. This will be the method in which you will deliver your slides the day before your presentation

Presentations

You are to become the class expert on a topic related to the Internet. The topic can range from technical (i.e. making the Internet's naming system scalable), social (i.e. the role of the Internet in elections), commercial (i.e. how the Internet has impacted print media), or legal (i.e. what laws govern the transmission of unsolicited e-mail). The topics are listed at the links above. After gathering sufficient information on your topic, you will create and give a 15-20 minute slide presentation on your topic in class that concisely presents the information you have acquired on your topic. The day *before* the class period that you are scheduled to present, you will e-mail the presentation slides you will use for your presentation. The presentation must address the main questions related to your topic and contain a list of references from which the material was taken from. Your presentation must answer the questions associated with the topic. These questions will be used in the final quiz. If questions are not answered properly in the presentation, you will be asked to answer them during Q&A.

Final quiz

There will be an open-note final quiz covering the presentation topics given in class.

Grading

Homeworks	10%
Presentation slides	25%
Presentation	25%
Attendance and participation	20%
Final quiz	20%