6.805/STS085 Short paper #1 for MIT students

This assignment is for MIT students only. There will be two short papers required this semester. The first is due before Tuesday, October 20.

Scope

This paper is primarily a writing assignment. We will be grading this based on the quality of your writing and your arguments. This is not a research paper, so don't feel you have to break new ground or provide extensive references -- your team white paper will provide plenty of opportunity for that. For this paper, it's fine to synthesize ideas from the class discussions and readings and your own opinions, so long as things are clearly stated and logically argued.

The paper should be a minimum of 1500 words and a maximum of 2500 words.

Topic

Identify a particular area or application involving identity, privacy, or content control, where there are at least two clear alternative technical architectures one might implement to deal with these. Each architecture will act as a "regime of code" that constrains or encourages certain behaviors on the Internet.

Briefly describe the alternative architectures and compare them, both in terms of their technology and their legal and social implications. Based on your comparison, can you argue for adopting one rather than the other?

Mechanics

It is embarrassing to turn in something with spelling or grammatical errors. Please use a spelling corrector and proofread your paper carefully. As a first step in grading, we will pass the paper through a spelling corrector, and return as unread any paper with multiple errors.

Do not spend effort formatting your paper. Send us plain ASCII text. Do not send us Microsoft Word documents, PDF files, Latex source, etc., etc. -- just plain ASCII text. Do not worry about italics, underlining, fonts, and so on.

Turn in you paper by sending it via email to

Hal Abelson (hal@mit.edu)
Joanne Costello (joanne@mit.edu)
Mike Fischer (mfischer@mit.edu)
Please send your paper as ordinary Email, not as an attached document.

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Hal Abelson (hal@mit.edu)
Joanne Costello (joanne@mit.edu)
Mike Fischer (mfischer@mit.edu)
Larry Lessig (lessig@law.harvard.edu)
Jonathan Zittrain (zittrain@law.harvard.edu)

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Last modified: October 6 1998, 11:48 AM