Other than chatroulette what is something that is being used differently from it's intended use?
The site itself, from the company that made it, was essentially a text-based chat program. We launched it with the goal of just being a simple chat program that people could click a button to start having simple conversations with other people. The idea was that any young kid could have a conversation with anyone else in the world in about five minutes. We ended up releasing it, a few months into its life, into the wild and found quite the opposite to be true: the children immediately recognizable as pedophiles, as well as any number of other interesting findings. So we released it into the wild, and found that it was being widely abused, and basically every child on the planet was being abused immediately by this app. It was pretty clear that something was fundamentally broken with the basic idea of what they were selling.
They released a patch, a fixed thing that they could find within the next couple of weeks to make it work again. But the damage was already done.
The product ended up not working at all in the US, because the software that ran the chat program was sold to a competitor, and the key differences in the copy that were sold to the different sellers of the software ended up giving the police different copies of the software to crack, which ended up giving the police different copies of the chat program, which ended up giving different copies of the pedophiles information about who was really in control of the chat program, which ended up giving different copies of the site different options for the different browsers that people were being sold.
So we found that even with the patch, which ended up helping a little bit, because eventually some of the key people responsible for the site would end up getting arrested and pressed to admit to their crimes, but until that day came, we found that the product was causing real harm.
We've spent the last 20 years of human experience trying to build effective defenses against people who might try to harm us digitally. And we've come up with a series of laws, rules of engagement, protocols for how we should be interacting with one another on the job. But we've got no clear rules for interacting with a product that you're building. And so we came up with the idea of the Cyber Newbery Research Fellow Program, to ask ourselves three really important questions. First, what is the intended audience of this research? Second, what is the most vulnerable audience for this research? And, third, what are the basic rights we should and should not give to a computer? Here's what we found. The intended audience for new media research is high school and college students. And by high school and college, I mean anything between high school and college and beyond. So we went around the country, asking high school students what websites they were interested in researching when they graduated this summer. Third, we went around the country, asking junior college juniors what websites they were interested in researching when they
