CSCI 10

Untangling the Web:

A Social Analysis of the Internet

Home | Calendar | CS@Williams

Paper & Project Guidelines

The guidelines for projects from MIT course 6.805 and Duke course 082S/182S loosely apply to our course. To summarize, they state (see their web pages for more information):

Your research paper or project should be a substantial piece of work. I expect to see high-quality work with good writing, thoughtful commentary, and clear themes.

I am certainly interested in your opinions and ideas. But you should treat this paper as research and analysis, not just venting or making unsubstantiated assertions. On the other hand, I do expect you to have opinions and a point of view on your topic -- not to just write a book report or a summary of what other people have said.

Your paper should have a thesis, i.e., an idea, claim, or argument that you are putting forward and defending in the paper. I expect that your paper will start out by stating the thesis in the first one or two paragraphs, and that you will proceed to support the thesis in a focused and coherent way.

Important Dates

Paper and project proposals (just a paragraph or two stating your intended topic) are due on Friday, January 11th at 4pm. Final papers are due Friday, January 25th at 4pm. Failure to submit the final paper will result in failure in the course. Late work will not be accepted.

Potential Topics

These topics are not at all definitive, they are meant to provide a guide to interesting topics we may not have addressed in depth at this point. (Many of these topics came from the CS 082S/182S course that was taught last spring at Duke University.) Any topic can be proposed. Be creative!

  1. Privacy and Facebook
    In the MIT course 6.805 students wrote a paper called Facebook: Threats to Privacy. Other aspects of Facebook and privacy could be examined, or you could use the MIT paper as a starting point and develop a new avenue of research.
  2. Globalization and the Internet
    You could look at the issues surrounding the recent kerfuffle about Google and censorship in China. Other aspects of Globalization are possible.
  3. Digital Watermarking and Anonymity
    Survey digital watermarking, web-based copyright-infringment protection based on watermarking. Survey anonymity tools. Perhaps using Infranet as a starting point, analyze censorship, anonymity tools, and steganography. Deploy Infranet and/or analyze it's strengths and weaknesses.
  4. TOR: Onion Routing for Anonymity
    See the TOR site for details. TOR is based on onion routing and allows for anonymous Internet communication. There's also an effort to make TOR usable, e.g., by developing front-ends for it.
  5. Anonymity and Anonymity tools.
    For example, see the project from 2001, MIT 6.805.
    The MIT paper is a good overview and survey paper, but the authors didn't use (or build) the tools they discuss. It's also certainly dated at this point.
  6. P2P, Bittorrent, Copyright, Internet, Performance, ...
    Peer-to-Peer systems are everywhere, and Bittorrent and related systems account for a large percentage of all Internet-traffic (according to some). How easy is Bittorrent to use? Can you envision a Why Johnny Can't Download paper? Are p2p systems worth analyzing or discussing?
  7. Phishing and other Social Attacks
    Think about those emails from your long lost uncle in Nigeria...
  8. SPAM, SPAM and more SPAM
    What is it, what's the cost, how do we fix it?