Due: Monday, February 25, 2013.

Preliminaries

One of your major tasks for the second half of the semester is to investigate in some detail an interesting and significant Internet application area, application, technology or issue. You will create a website describing your investigation, explaining the technical details of the application, preferably with links to on-line materials, demos, etc. The nature of your presentation should be appropriate to the topic you choose. For the purposes of this assignment you may work with one other person in the class, or you can work alone, though I strongly encourage you to team up. During the second half of the semester, you will give a brief presentation to the class describing your findings and demonstrating your website. No two individuals or groups may investigate the same topic.

The Assignment

By Friday, February 22, you should do the following:
  1. Identify your project partner, if any.
  2. Begin researching project topics that you might like to investigate. A list of possible topics is at the bottom of this page. When you settle on one, email it to me and I'll decide if it's appropriate and not already taken and, if it's OK I'll reserve it for you.
  3. Begin compiling on-line resources that inform you about this technology, its history, and impact.
  4. Create an HTML page in your webspace for your project and link it from your "home page" (page from Assignment 2). If two of you are working together, both of you should link the page. Your project page should contain:

    1. a short but informative description (a few paragraphs) describing your project topic, explaining why it is interesting to you, and why it is relevant to this class; and

    2. at least four resourses you have found (on-line or otherwise) that you will use as sources for your project research. List them with descriptions in the form of an annotated bibliography. If the resources are on-line resources, be sure that you include live links to them. Use good citation style.
The page you create here should be nicely formatted. There are no specific formatting requirements, but make it visually pleasing and readible.

Take care in choosing your topic because you are expected to become the class expert on that topic. Don't pick something that won't be of any interest to you, or is either too narrow or too expansive.

Deliverable: Submit to the TA via email the URL of your page. The page must be world readible; that is, anyone should be able to access the page directly from their browser without you having to send it to them or to login.

Possible Topics

Some possibilities are listed below. Don't feel constrained by this list. But please try to pick something of interest to you. Notice that some of these are specific programs (e.g., SSL and Telnet), others are issues (e.g., Spam, Phishing), and others are application areas (e.g., Instant messaging). If someone has already taken the topic you're interested in, see if you can team with them.

  1. Internet Ethics (Taken: Christiaan Cleary, Sloane Bain)
  2. Game-ification of society (Taken: Melanie Kong and Michelle Milberger)
  3. Anonymous Hacker Group (Taken: Deborah Kwarta)
  4. Taking the offensive on hackers (Taken: Daniel Aguilera and Catherine Freeman)
  5. China vs. Google (Taken: Joe Hays)
  6. Virtual Worlds (Taken: Pablo Alvarez, Si (Johnny) Nguyen)
  7. Virtual Worlds (Taken: Stephanie Lawson, Yu (Donald) Chan, Landon Gaus)
  8. Stuxnet (Taken: Scott Lauger)
  9. Crowd-sourcing (Taken: Forrest Lam)
  10. The Internet "kill switch" controversy (Taken: Cang Le Pham)
  11. Multiplayer games (Taken: Carlos Balderas and Ariel Williams)
  12. Online gaming (Taken: Casey Dees and Jerry Vettemthadathil)
  13. Twitter as a political force (Taken: Brianna Findley, Kristen Moor)
  14. SOPA, PIPA, CISPA (Taken: Ben Weatherl)
  15. Single Sign-on (Taken:Shirley Li, Amtul Batool)
  16. Online courses (Taken: Katherine Thayer)
  17. Chinese search engines (Taken: William Gunn and Xiaoyu Cui)
  18. Government Internet censorship (Taken: Courtney Sweebe)
  19. Internet censorship in Cuba (Taken: Juan P Barraza)
  20. Internet censorship in China (Taken: Timothy Zhou)
  21. Keeping kids safe on the Internet (Taken: Maurice Beck and Ana Luz Ortega)
  22. Passwords and User Authentication (Taken: Jesse Vo)
  23. Compression algorithms (Taken: Surabhi Tyagi and Ryan Cassidy)
  24. Cloud based music services (Taken: Phuong-Dung Nguyen and Nelson Chen)
  25. Mobile Internet (Taken: Ethan Neff)
  26. Cell phone networks (Taken: Abeer Kanafani and Aaron Hellman)
  27. 4Chan.org (Taken: James Newhouse, Andres Di Croce)
  28. Augmented Reality (Taken: Brian Chenault)
  29. BitTorrent and Peer to Peer Sharing (Taken: Hector Manriquez, Paden Karnes, Savannah Raymond)
  30. The history of social networking (Taken: Rebecca Lemma, Judy Zhang)
  31. Captcha (Taken: Vivian Nguyen)
  32. Net neutrality controversy (Taken: Timothy Bula)
  33. Cyberwarfare (Taken: Harris Motiwala and Martin Valenzuela)
  34. Symmetric (shared key) cryptography
  35. Internet gambling
  36. Instant messaging
  37. Voice over IP
  38. Firewalls
  39. Mobile Internet
  40. SSL and TLS
  41. Technology and Music
  42. Peer-to-peer sharing
  43. iTunes Store
  44. RFID tags and their security
  45. XML
  46. Information theory
  47. AJAX scripting
  48. Electronic voting
  49. Are embeddable RFID tags "the mark of the beast"
  50. Open source hardware
  51. Digital rights management
  52. Phreaking
  53. The pagerank algorithm
  54. Spamdexing
  55. Cybergeddon: Is it Possible?
  56. The national ID card controversy
  57. Bluetooth
  58. Javascript or other scripting language
  59. Phishing and Pharming
  60. Podcasting
  61. Virtual Private Networks
  62. RSS
  63. Spam
  64. Censorship in some specific country
  65. Full Disclosure and Hacker Ethics
  66. Electronic Currency
  67. Anti-virus software
  68. Finding efficient encodings
  69. Public key crypto
  70. High frequency stock trading
  71. Analog to digital signal processing
  72. Software as a Service
  73. Semantic Web
  74. Internet Forums
  75. Comet
  76. Serial interfaces (RS232, USB, Firewire)
  77. Sex online
  78. Podcasting
  79. Making real money from virtual communities
  80. Quirky.com
  81. Others as they occur to me