COM 1450 - Fall 2019

It seems like for the past couple of years privacy and companies selling your information to third parties has been a topic that has never left the news. And understandably so, it’s scary to think about all the people that have my personal information and  all of  the things they could possibly do with it. This has been going on for a while now, but it is only in the past couple of years that companies have started being more transparent with people about how they are gathering, storing, and using your information. Now when you go to a new website, most of the time a pop-up will come up telling you that the site collects cookies. These pop-ups are only to notify you and if you don’t want cookies being collected then your only option really is to not use the site. In a recent iOS update, iOS 13, Apple implemented a system where Siri would record and collect the interaction you have with her  as a way to  help improve Siri’s accuracy. After installing the updat...

Last week, a very well-known and successful game company, Activision Blizzard, disqualified professional Hearthstone player  Ng “ Blitzchung ” Wai Chung because of comments he made supporting the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Ng was originally suspended for a year and Blizzard took his prize money because it was a violation of competition rules. Anything that offends the public or tarnishes Blizzard’s image would result in a ban and loss of prize money.   Of course, everyone in the gaming community was mad about the actions that Blizzard took because they thought it was censorship (This is becoming a trend now). Players aren't allowed to say what they want because of this corporate entity that is governing over them and people think it is unfair, myself included. I get the business side of things but at some  point,  people  have to  realize that the players’ opinions don’t represent the opinions of the company.     After...

Last week there was rather innocent tweet sent out by the Houston Rocket general manager, Daryl Morey showing his support for the pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong. It was soon met with some backlash from the Chinese government. The owner of the Rockets,  Tilman Fertitta,   tried to ease things over by distancing Morey from the team by basically saying that the tweet were the beliefs of Morey and were in no way the beliefs of the entire organization. It seemed as it was a little too late because although  Morey wasn’t punished by the NBA ,  China, who is one of the league’s biggest supporter s  stopped airing Rockets games and cancelled events. Click here for a video recap . Then this morning at an NBA press conference ,CNN reporter, Christina Macfarlane, asked James Harden and Russel Westbrook of the Houston Rockets if they would refrain from speaking out on social justice issues after the whole ordeal with China. Macfarlane couldn't even get the qu...

There is this New York Times article that I came across yesterday and it’s titled “ Supreme Court Considers Whether Civil Rights Act Protects L.G.B.T. Workers .” The article covers two cases; both of which  dealing with workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation. The Supreme Court is trying to decide  whether or not  Title VII of the Civil Rights Act applies to LGBT employees.   T he reason it got my attention was because I couldn’t tell whether this was supposed to be some sort of clickbait or if it was an actual thing. Had you asked me before I read the article, I would have told you that I don’t even know why this case made it all the way to the Supreme Court because I couldn’t see a way how sexual orientation and gender identity could be a basis for termination. Those two things have nothing to do with a person’s ability to do their job.    I went into the article with that mindset, hard-pressed to believe that wasn’t the be...

For this blog post I want to talk about the Mad World video . Immediately after starting the video, there were a couple thing that spoke to me. The first thing being that the video is in black and white and the main character of the video is a lot smaller than everyone else around him. In the video you can see everyone is  g lued to their phones, completely oblivious to the world around them. There is even a scene of a line of people walking and falling into a manhole because they are only paying attention to their phones. And the manhole is uncovered because the construction worker that is supposed to be working on it is on his phone. A f ter you watch the video for a while you can start to realize that the only excitement people get is through their phones. The only time color is s hown in the video is when the camera is looking through a phone or a tv.    I took this video as saying that we are becoming more and more obsessed with our phones and it is sucking t...

Cloud computing, according to Wikipedia is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. In simpler terms it means to handle computing over the internet rather than via your computer’s hard drive which would be considered local computing. For it to be considered cloud computing, you need to access your data or your programs over the internet, or at the very least, have that data synced with other information over the internet. The creation and introduction of cloud computing to the world revolutionized the way people could communicate and share information.    “The Cloud” can have different meanings for regular consumers and businesses, for consumers, regular people like me and you, we have services like Google Drive and iCloud. These are services that allow the user to store and access data on an online server and that information is there and can be accessed anytime,...