This assignment has two parts. It is due by Thursday, February 14, at 11:59 PM. To submit your homework, please follow the guidelines posted on the syllabus under the grading section.
There will be a late penalty of 5% off per day late! Submissions received more than 3 days late will receive a 0!
Create a GitHub account and fork, clone, and set up your repositories to submit your homework assignments. Follow the guidelines on the syllabus and our HW submission/git Instructions.
Once you've forked our class repository into your GitHub account, submit the URL of your GitHub repository via the assignment on ELMS.
You should also download VirtualBox (free) or VMWare (through terpware) and Kali Linux and setup a VM. If you need help, we have a guide for how to do this.
If you need help with any portion of this, please reach out to us on Piazza!
Consider the following situation:
You are a junior developer at a large automotive manufacturer, working in the ECU (Engine control unit) division.
Your job is to audit the ECU's firmware for security issues. After six months, you conclude: the current ECU firmware has several complex security problems which, if made public, could be exploited to both damage the car and endanger its occupants. You estimate that fixing these problems will take another six months and a team of twenty developers.
Consider the ethical dimensions of this situation. For example:
- Who should you tell, if anybody?
- Your boss, a consumer watchdog, the public? In what order?
- How far should you go, if at all?
- What if your company is unwilling to postpone the ECU's release?
- If you do nothing, are you responsible for any harm that results? Why or why not?
Submit a well thought-out ethical argument that answers these questions and discusses any other thoughts you have considering this scenario. It should be at least 200 words.
In the "assignments/1_Ethics/writeup" directory of our repository for this week there is a README.md file for you to use as a template and submit your homework in. Push it up to your personal GitHub when your done.
You may have to check out a brief overview of MarkDown language, it's quite easy!
Full grammatical sentences should be used, and your response to Part 2 must be at least 250 words. There is no penalty for going over these numbers, but there is a penalty for padding your work to meet the minimums. Remember to acknowledge more than just your own argument!
Part 1 is worth 25 points, and part 2 is worth 75.
Reference the slides from lecture 1 on how to make a good ethical argument.
Good luck!