Summer 2017 MAESTRO Program
CIS 291: Major Assignment 3
Our third major assignment for CIS again has several components, some
directly associated with your website, some a little less so. Here is a
list of what you are expected to do:
- Make a place on your plain HTML website (where you get to when you
just type in your domain name) for your Major Writing Projects for
English/History. This should be a page which describes in general
what is going on (what those papers are, for which courses, in which
program (MAESTRO ... say what that is)) and has links to the three
papers. These should be:
- First paper should be just in PDF form.
- Second paper should be in plain HTML: use a heading for the
title, <p> and </p> for the paragraphs, and other
basic textural formatting (bold and italic, if you
used them anywhere in the paper).
- The third paper should have everything as above in paper 2, but
also do a little bit of extra work to make a particularly good
web version of the paper. Find some terms in the paper which you
should turn into links (e.g., if you mention some public
figure, you could turn the first occurrence of their name into a
link to a Wikipedia page about
them, if one exists; if you mention the White House, you could
turn it into a link
to whitehouse.gov,
etc., etc.) - one link definitely should be to a
electronic version of any scholarly resources to which you refer.
Also find some images - make sure they are ones you have the
right to use! - which would add to the paper, and insert them at
the appropriate point in the paper. (Other enhanced media, such
as video or audio, as appropriate.)
Think of this as practice for, and the beginning of, an academic
portfolio that you can use for other classes, or future jobs or other
things for which you might apply
- Install Mailvelope
on a machine to which you have consistent access (a laptop, or the
lab machines in GCB315). Use it to generate a key pair, and post
your public key in an easy-to-find place on your plain HTML website:
- Make a contact.html page, and a link to that
page on your home page, on your website - this page should then
have your public key posted [along with any other contact info
you want to make public]. (Here is
an example of what that page might look like.)
- Import into your Mailvelope keyring your
instructor's public key.
- Your instructor will send you an email, encrypted
with your public key, to which you should reply in an
email encrypted with your instructor's public key.
Now you know how to (and have proven that you) can send and receive
encrypted emails, at least if the person with whom you are
corresponding knows about PGP public key encryption and uses some
tool (like Mailvelope) as well.
- Get a new
Let's Encrypt
SSL certificate installed on your site.
- Many students did this in class, but others simply watched
the last steps, because they found they already had one
installed. Unfortunately, these certificates expire
relatively quickly, so it is important that we learn how to
install new ones. So, if you already had a certificate issued
with your site, and so you didn't do the installation along
with the class, please delete that one now and install a new
one. This should be quite easy, but you can look at
this web page for help if you need it (or ask your
instructor). [Your instructor will check that you did
this, by seeing if the certificate on your site was issued
AFTER July 11th.]
- Make sure your site automatically switches everyone who comes to
your site to the secure https:// version, even if they
used a URL with only the insecure http:// version. Most
students did this in class, but if you missed that,
this page gives help (or ask your instructor). [Your
instructor will check that you did this, by going to your
site with http:// and seeing if it automagically
redirected to https://.]
- Finally, write a journal entry in your blog, in the form of a
letter to an imaginary starting CSUP student who wants to do the
usual things millennials do on the Internet — social media,
email, surfing the web, buying things on the web, etc.
— and in fact also is thinking of perhaps starting a business
on the side, selling cute GIFs of Pueblo tarantulas with funny
sayings on them. In this letter (=journal entry), explain to this
imaginary student
- what of the things they do online might be observed by other
people (whom the student wasn't thinking of as an audience)
- what might be negative consequeces of this observation
— give several examples things this hypothetical student
might do in different contexts that they would be very unhappy
about being made public, and why
- how the student could protect themself against this observation
while surfing the web, sending and receiving email, and using
social media
- what else the student needs to do to protect users of their
tarantula-GIF commercial website, and why.
[If you need help crafting your explanations, try searching the web
with some related keywords or questions, read these slides from a presentation
on encryption and security given 1.5 years ago by your instructor,
(and this is a little less technical than those slides)
this article from The Washington Post in
2015 which gives a gentle discussion of some important ideas related
to encryption, and/or talk to your instructor.]
This assignment is due at 9am on Thursday, August 3rd
As with past CIS major assignments, your professor is happy to give you
feedback on a rough draft of this assignment if you have a fairly
complete version done by some time Wednesday.
