Computer Science | Grinnell College

NOTE: This Tuesday we will meet in the CS Commons at noon. Please bring your own lunch; we'll try to have some drinks and snacks, too.

This week in CS Table, we will consider some applications of machine learning that show both potential benefit and great risks: The use of ML algorithms in decisions related to bail, sentencing, and parole. We have two readings:

• Simonite, Tom (2017). How to upgrade judges with machine learning. MIT Technology Review.
• Angwin, Julia, Larson, Jeff, Mattu Surya, and Kirchner, Lauren. Machine bias. Pro Publica.

Most CS Tables for the spring semester will meet in JRC 224B, though a small number will be in an alternate dining room, so watch each week for the location.

This week we will return to a classic: Ken Thompson’s Turing Award lecture, “Reflections on Trusting Trust.” In this lecture, Thompson reveals a security vulnerability he implemented for UNIX. This thought-provoking lecture raises questions about what it takes to build secure software. We’ll follow that reading up with Bruce Schneier’s summary of Thompson’s work and one attempt to counter this type of attack. You can find both readings below, or in the clear folder on the door to room 3827.

• Ken Thompson. Reflections on Trusting Trust. Communications of the ACM (August 1984).
• Bruce Schneier. Countering “Trusting Trust”. Schneier on Security (January 2006).

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00–12:50pm inside the Marketplace. Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department (sign in at the Marketplace front desk).

In one of the early spring CS Tables, we will have a (hopefully) fun discussion focused on software failures. As an example, consider this particular famous Windows blue screen. Regardless of whether or not you are able to attend, please send suggestions to me by email before noon on Monday, December 17th. We will have a projector, so please share relevant images or videos if you find any.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00–12:50pm in JRC 224C (inside the Marketplace). Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department (sign in at the Marketplace front desk).

This week's discussion topic was suggested by an alumna, who writes:

Recently an NPM package author handed over control of his open source project to a stranger who promised to maintain the package for future users. The stranger added malicious code to the package, which was then downloaded by millions of users. This raises questions about responsibility in the open source world. What responsibilities does the owner of an open source project hold? What responsibilities are up to the user? What can developers do to utilize open source projects in a safe and secure manner?

There are two recommended readings for the CS Table discussion; the first is an account of the recent event we’ll discuss, and the second is a perspective on security and open source from Bruce Schneier, written in 1999.

• Check your repos... Crypto-coin-stealing code sneaks into fairly popular NPM lib. Thomas Claburn. The Register. 26 Nov 2018.
• Open Source and Security. Bruce Schneier. Counterplane Security and schneier.com. 15 Sept 1999.

You may also find these resources helpful or informative as you prepare for our discussion:

• Core Infrastructure Initiative. The Linux Foundation.
• What is NPM and why do I need it? Stack Overflow thread.
• The GitHub issue for the exploit that was discovered.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00–12:50pm in JRC 224C (inside the Marketplace). Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department (sign in at the Marketplace front desk).

This week we’ll look at an interesting article that compares the situations for janitors at two tech companies in two different eras: Kodak in the 1980s, and Apple in 2017. The article paints an interesting picture of how employment at tech companies has changed over the last four decades. In addition to the specifics in the article, I hope we’ll have an opportunity to discuss the role that tech companies (or any employer) might play in economic inequality, the availability of blue-collar jobs, and the changing landscape of career opportunities.

To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider the Janitors at Two Top Companies, Then and Now. Neil Irwin. The New York Times. 3 Sept 2017.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00–12:50pm in JRC 224C (inside the Marketplace). Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department (sign in at the Marketplace front desk).

In light of the upcoming midterm elections we’ll look at some of the challenges in conducting a secure and verifiable elections with electronic voting systems.

• The Crisis of Election Security. Kim Zetter. New York Times Magazine. 26 Sept 2018.
• For the Next Election, Don’t Recount the Vote. Encrypt it. Andy Greenberg. Wired. 27 Jan 2017.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00–12:50pm in JRC 224C (inside the Marketplace). Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department (sign in at the Marketplace front desk).

We will discuss two articles that describe the experiences of two blind software engineers. My hope is that our discussion will wander into a broader consideration of accessibility, the challenges that people with disabilities face when they work in the computing industry, and the responsibilities of all software developers to consider accessibility.

• Software Development at 450 Words per Minute. Tuukka Ojala. Vincit Blog. 28 Aug 2017.
• What It’s Like to be a Blind Software Engineer at Amazon. Lydia Dishman. Fast Company. 11 April 2018.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00–12:50pm in JRC 224C (inside the Marketplace). Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department (sign in at the Marketplace front desk).

We will discuss a recent report from Bloomberg about a security breach in the hardware supply chain for servers used by almost 30 major US-based companies. Bloomberg’s reporting suggests that a group within the Chinese government’s intelligence agency were able to add a small chip to motherboards manufactured for SuperMicro, a major server hardware supplier in the US. These chips apparently inject malicious code into the server’s operating system, allowing hackers to remotely access compromised servers and bypass security controls within the operating system. We will discuss the mechanisms used to carry out these attacks, the differences between hardware- and software-based exploits, consider the impacts of such an attack, and discuss possible ways to mitigate attacks like this one in the future.

Readings include Bloomberg's original reporting (The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies, J. Robertson and M. Riley, Bloomberg Businessweek, 4 Oct 2018) and two articles providing some additional perspective on this story, which has not yet been independently confirmed (The China SuperMicro Hack: About That Bloomberg Report, N. Weaver, Lawfare, 4 Oct 2018, and Decoding the Chinese SuperMicro super spy-chip scandal: What do we know – and who is telling the truth? K. McCarthy, The Register, 4 Oct 2018.)

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00–12:45pm in JRC 224C (inside the Marketplace). Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department (sign in at the Marketplace front desk).

For our first CS Table discussion of the semester, we’ll be looking at some of the findings and recommendations from ProPublica’s investigation of political advertising on Facebook. ProPublica began by offering a series of proposals for Facebook to reduce the potential for abuse of its advertising system in April, followed by an analysis of Facebook’s first attempt at revising their ad-tracking system. ProPublica then launched their own initiative to collect political ads shown to users who were willing to install a browser plugin. We’ll discuss the challenge Facebook faces with its advertising system, evaluate their work so far, and discuss the broader issues of ad targeting and content moderation online.

Here are the readings for this week:

• Four Ways to Fix Facebook. Julia Angwin. April 5, 2018. ProPublica.
• What Facebook’s New Political Ad System Misses. Jeremy B. Merrill, Ariana Tobin, and Madeleine Varner. May 24, 2018. ProPublica.
• If you are interested in seeing more political ads ProPublica has tracked on Facebook, you can see this more recent article: Why Am I Seeing This? Interesting Facebook Ads From Our Political Ad Collector. Jeremy B. Merrill. September 5, 2018. ProPublica.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00–12:45pm in JRC 224C (inside the Marketplace). Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department (sign in at the Marketplace front desk).

For CS table next week we will spend time looking at some of the unusual hardware and software from previous eras in computing. There is no reading for next week’s discussion; instead, please send your recommendations to Prof. Curtsinger by email. If you’ve heard of anything particularly funny, odd, creative, or just different from current computing technology, please send it along. It could include examples like gaming consoles, calculators, mechanical computers, and anything else you think is relevant. We will have a projector available at CS Table pictures or videos are welcome, too. Please send suggestions by 5pm on Monday, May 7, so Prof. Curtsinger has time to organize them.

Here are a few examples to inspire you:

• The Cray 1 is a $10 million supercomputer designed to look like a victorian-era sofa.
• Mercury delay memory uses sound waves traveling through a tube of mercury to store data for a short time.
• When punching cards was the final step in writing your software, many programmers started out by designing their programs on paper with a flowcharting template. Oddly enough, nobody seems to bring this up as a contender during programming text editor debates.
• The Compaq Portable is an iconic example of a “luggable.” It weighed almost 30 pounds and had to be plugged in, but it was technically portable.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00–12:45pm in JRC 224A (inside the Marketplace). Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department (sign in at the Marketplace front desk).