- Ethical judgement is important despite the existence of rules and regulations

- Generally speaking, whistleblowers suffer greatly as a result of their actions

- "precautionary principle": in cases where we are unsure if an action will end up being harmful, we must act on the assumption that it is harmful, and act accordingly

*** Immanuel Kant (1785) - Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals:
The only thing that is good without qualification is a good will - ie. a will which wills well (does a good job willing). The good lies in the willing, not in the particular thing which was willed.
The above must be the basis of morality - the principle of willing to do something, and then actually carrying out that will, ie. the willing and behaviour is consistent together. Morality shouldn't be a matter of luck, it's not just a matter of the result or consequences.

Inclination (second nature), according to Kant, is a matter of luck, as it's just the person's second nature. In a situation where a person has the choice to save another or not, the person who saves intuitively holds less moral value than the person who is not naturally inclined to save, but decides to do it out of a realisation for duty and principle.

The concept that promise-keeping can be broken in hard cases is a failed concept, in that it would completely render promise-keeping pointless, eventually.

Kant deems promise-keeping as a "perfect duty", in that it doesn't allow any latitude for inclination: when a promise has been made, the duty is to keep it, no exceptions whatsoever.

Duty is the basic moral feature - it's to be understood not simply in terms of effects, but moral autonomy - where willing and consequence are consistent with each other, and hypocrisy is avoided.

*** John Stuart Mill (1861)
Mill theorises that in the most general sense, what people are out to achieve is happiness. There is no principle reason why our own happiness is preferable to anyone else's. Mill accuses Kant's principles to have "failed, almost grotesquely", and believes that consequences are what matters. Utilitarian principle.

*** Thomas Hobbes
Claims that "without society there is continual fear and danger of violent death and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short"

*** John Rawls - A Theory of Justice (1971)
The original position - where people are all free and equal - how can we figure out what these principles would be? Operating from behind a "veil of ignorance", where people are unaware of anyone or their own positions in society. Strategies from game theory:
- minimax: minimising maximum loss. Rawls claims that this is the only rational strategy for accepting a political setup.
- maximax: maximise your maximum gain
- maximin - maximise your minimum gain

VIRTUE ETHICS
Virtues: things that enable humans to function well as humans. eg. The function of a knife is to cut, and a sharp edge enables that functionality well. Thus, a sharp edge is the virtue of a knife.
Human virtues include: courage, wisdom, temperance, justice

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
Perceived/apparent/possible/potential conflicts of interest - the modifiers are irrelevant
A person's HAVING a conflict of interest is not equivalent to a person's being AFFECTED BY a conflict of interest.
There is not only a single appropriate response to all instances where there is a conflict of interest, not one-size-fits-all. Really tough!

HIERARCHY - from most to least pressing
- Don't inflict harm
- Prevent harm
- Remove harm
- Do good

DIRTY HANDS
A situation in which doing something that is right, carries with it something for which you are responsible which is wrong (morally bad), which, itself, does not evaporate simply in virtue of the rightness of your act.


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week 4

- A difference of just 20% in direction between people can result in negative effects on the progression of a project
- Optimal team size is 6-8 people

- Big reasons why startups and companies fail are lack of communication with clients and failure to produce the promised product.
- Strategy: always assume you are building the wrong thing, and test that hypothesis as soon as possible.
- Build MVP (minimum viable product) to validate and test your idea. Use iterative approach - prioritise working software over comprehensive documentation.

- Doesn't matter how clean or effective your code is, if no one ends up using the built solution. Building desirable solutions is very important
- Should focus on the customer, do this through customer interviews, customer journeys, and personas
- Customer interviews: exploration of general usag epatterns, issues, questions customers may have, and things like that. Specific feature validation / topic exploration
- Customer personas: developed keeping in mind that different customers can have vastly differing needs and wants for the product. Used so we can build a solution that caters to a wide range of users.

- Scrum: regular fixed-length sprints, releases at the end of each sprint. Key metric is velocity, and philosophies aren't changed during sprints.
- Kanban: Continuous flow, continuous integration/delivery, key metric is cycle time, and changes can be implemented at any time.


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week 5

Tort/negligence

eg. autonomous cars: 4-point scale, level 4 is fully automatic. Google hinted at level 4, accept all liability.
Big issue is gulf between L3 and L4.
L3 = hand over to driver, if driver is unskilled and worse than before, what can go wrong?
Ethics: choosing between killing the driver / babies / grannies?

Professional liability:
- nature of profession?
- having membership in a professional body
- registration required to work
- self-regulation, insurance, peer attitudes, reputation

For many businesses, brand/reputation is the greatest asset to the business

Anti-trust: Abuse of monopoly
- where one or multiple giants collaborate in order to monopolise a market, to set an agreed-upon price and prevent supply to other companies/parties
- policy of competition
- example: MS vs DoJ re Netscape - Microsoft was found to be using underhanded methods in order to edge out the competition

Intellectual property
- purpose
- Copyright Act: form, not substance. No registration required, digital agenda. just an idea, differs from patents. Not property,
  -- in copyright, you have the exclusive right to control distribution/portrayal/etc. You can distribute licenses for others to use, which have conditions and fees
  -- technological protection: 'Digital Rights Management' tools - code or law? no penalty for false accusations
  -- DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act)
- Patents Act: the idea, not the form. physical manifestation
- Circuit designs
- Free trade agreement

Privacy
- framed as the 'right to be left alone'
- depends on the definition of 'personal information'
- defeat of the Australia Card, was replaced with the Privacy Act. Limited the rights of data subjects
- restricts what technology can do, and requires IT security
- issue: data sovereignty and cloud. Which jurisdiction is your data in? issues with the US NSA surveillance of non-US persons.
- control by location, or control by control of entity?

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week 7

Facebook's motto before 2014 "move fast and break things"
- analogous to "see what you can get away with", "see if you get caught"/"ask forgiveness, not permission" and "we haven't been caught (yet)"
- what works for software doesn't work for personal information - the latter is irrevocable/not disposable

Whistleblowers and leakers:
Role as sysadmin:
Snowden - very selective, via journos
- Serious attacks on journalists and leakers, inc.
- allegations of treason, medals for human rights
- backlash against workers in security agencies: paranoia and suspicion about loyalty

IT security undermined:
- backdoors in software
- NIST standards
- TOR browser
- uncertainty for the IT industry

Big Data
- was built by marketers: Google (MapReduce), Facebook (data centres) for marketing purposes, better ad targeting
- fundamentally hostile towards assumptions for privacy, security and confidentiality
- OECD Privacy Principles permit PI use for a known purpose (for which it was collected), but not one big pool
- reverses the presumption of privacy? encourages passive acceptance of surveillance