Saturday, September 22, 2012

17-23 September 2012


                This week marked the conclusion of our Conspiracy Theory project.  The solution to the identity theft case was surprisingly identical across the groups.  Was it really that easy a project, or was there a trick to all the information we could use?  I’m left with a strong feeling that something about the project’s straightforward nature was suspicious.  Still, it’s a school project, so perhaps it’s not worth thinking too much about.

                Fittingly, our group- like all the others- decided that the culprit in the theft was a conspiracy of five students.  It all seemed very neat, with every suspect being guilty and a lot of information- such as a series of poems- seeming out of place.

                Besides finishing and presenting the project, we studied mobile devices and personalization technologies- cell phones and cookies/privacy violations.  The former was mostly a repetition of matters I already knew, but the latter impressed on me the difference between first-party and third-party cookies.  Basically, one has cookies, which are small files downloaded from a site onto a computer.  First-party cookies are the useful cookies; they are downloaded directly from the site being browsed, keeping track of such things as preferences and whether you’re logged on.  Third-party cookies, meanwhile, are downloaded from some other site, usually advertisers, and track a user’s motion throughout the Internet.  The former fulfill almost all of the useful functions of cookies, and the latter the vast majority of their negative functions.

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