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Group Project Proposals

Hacking is everywhere in the news, but mostly for the wrong reasons. We can certainly find positive examples of hacking in our academic and professional lives, as well as in our digital infrastructures and tools, but the mainstream media tends to favor the depiction of wrongdoing and computer-mediated crime.

As we advance in the semester, you will learn to avoid the simplification of the ethical and technical aspects of hacking. You will know much better. By the end of the course, you will be able to situate the tools and practices of hacking in their historical context. You will also be able to clearly identify the genealogy from which a particular hacker group and technique comes from. And this will be the main goal of your group’s final project: to pick a recent event related to hacking from the news to examine.

You do not need to stick with big newspapers or TV reports, you can pick other media channels where hacking is depicted differently (such as “Hacker News,” “Hackaday,” or “Slashdot”). You can pick examples of hardware hacking, videogame hacking, information security, “ethical hacking,” social engineering, or any other hacking topic that fits the theme of this class.
 

Instructions

Here are the instructions for preparing your group project:

  1. Pick a contemporary event of hacking in the news;
  2. Describe the event in detail;
  3. Examine the historical connection between the event your group picked and the history of hacking;
  4. Identify the digital artifact and the hacking techniques that have been used and describe them in detail.

Your description must be based on the methodological orientation we provided in the third and fourth lectures (respectively, the anthropological and computational methods for studying digital artifacts).

We do not have a final essay or exam, just a final project presentation. Here is what is needed:

  1. You will record the presentation of your final project and submit it to Ellen
  2. Your research team can prepare a video presentation, a podcast, or any other multimedia format that you prefer (as long as your final project contains all the elements above (items 1-4)
  3. Be creative and exercise your academic freedom!

You must demonstrate a good understanding of the history of hacking in the presentation of your case. For example, if you decided to pick an event of “information leaking” and “exfiltration,” you may discuss the “hacker ethic” and the “cypherpunk manifesto” as fundamental aspects of the practice of information sharing and protection respectively. Or, when discussing Free and Open Source software or hardware hacking, you may want to discuss the history of this community in terms of their roots in the early UNIX community and the hacker orientation toward technological excellence and community-building around. You get the idea: every contemporary example is necessarily informed by the past: you need to demonstrate that you understand the past to analyze the present, simple enough, right?
 

Important Dates

There are three deliverables associated with this project:

  • Project Proposal: Due 2/6 at 5pm
  • Interim Project Report: Due 3/26 at 5pm
  • Final Project Report: Due 5/6 at 5pm

 

Preparing your proposal

For the first deliverable, you need to prepare a two page project proposal summarizing your group’s plan for this class project. The proposal should be a Google Doc that is two pages in length. It may include figures as needed.  Make sure to include the following information:

  1. Your choice of hacking case and a link / reference to it
  2. Identification of the associated digital artifact and hack that you will explore
  3. A realistic plan for conducting original research on the chosen case, including group members assignments so that the course staff will know who is working on what
  4. A description of what your final deliverable summarizing your research will be (e.g., video, podcast, etc.)

Assign one person in your group to be a Scribe. The role of the scribe is to manage the assembly and delivery of each project deliverable. To turn in a deliverable, the scribe needs to place it in their Google Drive folder for this class. For this first deliverable, the Scribe should contact Ellen (ejoyce3@nd.edu) to let her know which Google Drive folder to look at to collect your group’s deliverables.

May the source be with you all!