basic laws
This 1986 federal law is the primary statute used to prosecute hacking, defined as intentionally accessing a computer without authorization.
What is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)?
This legal doctrine allows you to use snippets of copyrighted material for education, news, or parody without permission.
What is Fair Use?
This term refers to AI-generated videos or images that convincingly replace one person's likeness with another.
These small files stored in your browser track your activity; "Third-party" versions are being phased out by many browsers for privacy reasons.
What are Cookies?
This term describes an employee who reports their own company’s unethical or illegal practices to the public or authorities.
What is a Whistleblower?
Passed in 1998, this Act makes it illegal to bypass Digital Rights Management (DRM) or "crack" software protection.
What is the DMCA?
These "Public" licenses allow creators to keep their copyright while letting the public share or build upon their work for free.
What is Creative Commons?
This occurs when an AI produces skewed results because its training data reflected human prejudices or limited perspectives.
What is Algorithmic Bias?
This controversial technology uses "biometric" data to identify individuals in crowds, often sparking bans in cities like San Francisco.
What is Facial Recognition?
These "Patterns" are UI/UX design choices intended to trick users into doing things they didn't mean to, like signing up for a subscription.
What are Dark Patterns?
This 2024 EU legislation was the first major global framework to categorize AI applications into "Unacceptable," "High," and "Limited" risk.
What is the EU AI Act?
In 2021, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Google in a massive lawsuit against this company regarding the use of Java APIs.
What is Oracle?
This classic ethical thought experiment is often used to discuss how self-driving cars should prioritize lives in an unavoidable crash.
What is the Trolley Problem?
Under GDPR, this specific right allows individuals to demand that search engines remove links to outdated or irrelevant info about them.
What is the Right to be Forgotten?
This professional organization, the ACM, maintains a "Code of Ethics" that begins with the command to "Contribute to society and human well-being."
What is the Association for Computing Machinery?
This term describes a company that buys up vague patents purely to sue other tech companies for "infringement."
What is a Patent Troll?
This "Problem" describes the difficulty in understanding how a complex neural network reached a specific conclusion or decision.
What is the Black Box problem?
This US legal doctrine states that people who voluntarily give info to companies (like banks or ISPs) have "no reasonable expectation of privacy."
What is the Third-Party Doctrine?
This "Divide" refers to the ethical concern regarding the gap between those who have access to modern tech and those who do not.
What is the Digital Divide?
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is codified at Title 18, United States Code, Section
What is 1030?
This type of license (like the GPL) requires that any derivative software also be released as open source.
What is Copyleft (or a "Viral License")?
This 1950 test was designed to see if a machine could exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.
what is the turing test?
This "shadowy" industry consists of companies that collect, aggregate, and sell personal data from thousands of sources without direct user contact.
What are Data Brokers?
This color "Hat" describes a hacker who is hired to find vulnerabilities in a system with the owner's permission to improve security.
What is a White Hat hacker?