Social Implications

Full notes coming soon — here's what the syllabus covers for now:

• Social issues applicable to term 1 content, e.g. reducing the environmental impact of the use of computers
• Discuss various ways to stay informed about computer technology
• Getting latest product upgrades, viruses and other threads, upgrading
• Computer criminals
• Hackers, crackers, cyber gangs, virus authors
• Types of cyber crimes
• Effect of cyber crimes
• Computer crimes such as hardware, software, information, identity theft, bandwidth theft, theft of time and services
• Internet-related fraud scams
• Internet attacks (worms, virus, denial of service, back doors)
• Phishing
• Unauthorised remote control and administration, e.g. botnets, zombies
• Right to access vs right to privacy, misuse of personal information
• Safeguards against computer crimes, threats and criminals
• Social issues applicable to term 3 content
• Explain how computers provide solutions to issues of national and international importance such as:
• Distributed computing power
• Decision making
• Describe the evolution of social networking and the effect on society:
• Information overload
• Availability of personal information
• Consequences of search engines and group communications
• Social, political, environmental
• Global community - cultural effects
• Social websites and social engineering
• Wikis
• List and discuss issues regarding privacy and information sharing
• Cookies, anonymity, Global Unique Identifiers, file sharing - movies, music