The title of this year's talk is The Ethics Void. Here's a rough abstract:
Medicine, legal, finance, journalism, scientific research—each of these fields and many others have widely adopted codes of ethics governing the lives of their professionals. Some of these codes may even be enshrined in law. And this is for good reason: these are fields that have enormous consequences.
Software and technology pervade not only through these fields, but through virtually every aspect of our lives. Yet, when compared to other fields, our community leaders and educators have produced an ethics void. Last year, I introduced numerous topics concerning #privacy, #security, and #freedom that raise serious ethical concerns. Join me this year as we consider some of those examples and others in an attempt to derive a code of ethics that compares to each of these other fields, and to consider how leaders and educators should approach ethics within education and guidance.
For this talk, I want to solicit the community at various points. I know what _I_ want to talk about, but what are some of the most important ethical issues to _you_? Unfortunately there's far too much to fit into a 40m talk! Also feel free to e-mail me at mtg@gnu.org.
@mcscx@cypnk I also remember the smell from working on electronics in high school, we often reused a lot of 1970s era surplus components and circuit boards, I think British Telecom donated a lot of them as where I lived we had an unusually advanced (for UK) electronic telephone exchange which was upgraded several times, as a lot of audio from #ColdWar#radiomonitoring and #surveillance went through the region due to the #BBC#Caversham Monitoring service being down the road!
@mcscx Unfortunately my chemistry isn't very good (I'm slightly better at electronics) so I am also probably getting the names of the plastics mixed up.
There was also some stuff called Paxolin (possibly known as Pertinax in other North European countries) which was paper bulked up with similar phenol formaldehyde resin used for a lot of ciircuit boards Its use was discouraged at some point in 1970s(?) and now EU banned/restricted as the dust from that stuff is suspected to give you cancer!