Hacker News Reader

Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

So in an ethics discussion the professor simply asked "is X bad?" That doesn't seem like a very enlightened ethics discussion.

How certain are you he said "bad"? If he has instead asked "is encryption problematic?", the outcome can be interpreted much differently because there are problems with encryption. Especially in an ethics discussion, there are definitely pros and cons to encryption. (FWIW, the pros outweigh the cons by far, IMHO.)

I'm not trying to say your memory is wrong, I'm just asking how certain you are about what was asked exactly. Changing one synonym for another can make a big difference.

View on HN

Asking if it's 'bad' is an excellent starting point for an ethics discussion. It reveals pre-existing biases and emotional responses to a topic, which must be taken into account as a pre-requisite to any rational discussion. You cannot get dispassionate without first examining the passions.

Asking about a nuanced subject in broad and blunt terms can be pedagogically useful because you hear what people really think, unfiltered ... and maybe they hear it too, priming them to realize that they've been underthinking the topic. From there you can get into nuance, which is easier when you know where you currently stand.

I have no idea what tack this prof took with the question, but I think you've drawn a hasty conclusion here.

I didn't intend to conclude anything. I was just asking if he remembers exactly what the professor asked, and saying that the exact phrasing of the question changes my interpretation of the results. I do not expect him to remember, nor do I think there is anything wrong with his comment, but I wanted to ask.

Per GP this was in a business class likely taught by a business professor, not an ethicist or someone similarly specializing in such discussions. It's not surprising that they'd pose the question to the group in such a blunt fashion. As a CS major, I had to take an engineering and a CS ethics course and it was similarly problematic. The courses were taught by an engineering or CS professor (respectively) and ethics discussions were not their specialty.

>That doesn't seem like a very enlightened ethics discussion.

That is an apt summary of my college ethics discussions. Even in cases where the professor was doing their best to encourage discussion, the majority of the class couldn't think beyond first order effects and hypotheticals would quickly get emotional and devolve into character attacks.

Yeah. I was shocked at how many -CS MAJORS- were pro-DRM.

What does being a CS major having to do with being pro-DRM? Isn't it mainly an economic/philosophical standpoint on copyright?

I believe it's something more to do with the OP's (mistaken) idea that CS majors are somehow more likely to be "hackers" or people who exchange pirated software or wares -- when really there's only a handful of people who know how to crack the DRM in the first place (which requires some degree of technical know-how) and then those people distribute the pirated goods to others (whose technical literacy may be far less, even if it's still enough to distribute the pirated material on down the line).

It's a bit like thinking all painters are in favor of graffiti, or all musicians are okay with "sampling" and remix culture.

Actually, it comes from the author's belief that CS majors should know that, A. DRM at best delays cracking, never prevents it, and B. That it ends up hurting the legitimate users, not the pirates, and C. That the more efficient it is at A, the more likely it will cause B. As even when I was in college, that was the case (I asked some of the students to give me an instance where a piece of desirable software was not available illegally within a week of release date. They were unable to provide one (in fairness, since then there have been a few cases of less desirable releases that went longer; nothing that had the attention of all the major cracking groups). I also asked if they were aware of some of the issues at the time (such as securom's huge issues, the installation of rootkits by some, the inability to use when moving computers, etc), they were not, despite having explicitly chosen the topic to do research on for the class. They went into the topic with the expectation that DRM is just a good thing, and even when researching it, only sought out sources that enforced that bias. Which shocked me, given they should be technically literate enough to know the issues, and the greater nuances involved.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com