DistOS-2011W Justice

Members

• Matthew Chou
• Mike Preston
• Thomas McMahon

Meetings

Mar 01:

Early discussions on how we would define justice:

• what are the components of justice?
• should justice involve preventative measure or should it be strictly reactive?

How would evidence be collected and logged?

Discussions on what "punishment" means when referring to computers:

• What can we do to punish or penalize computers?
• Does it make sense to punish computers?

Discussions on how human penal systems work:

• do we want computer justice to be used to dissuade deviant behaviour or should it be used to punish those who have committed "bad" acts?
• should we implement a system that catches/punishes all bad acts or just punish reported acts?
• how will we classify deviant behaviour?
  • by the act itself
  • by the results of the act

Discussed how there would need to be some sort of hierarchical justice system with figure heads who manage justice activities for their specific region:

• collective internet justice: Justice Web or JLA (Justice Link Assessment)
• each region patrolled by a justice managing unit:
  • Internet Batman (Gotham), Internet Superman (Metropolis), etc.

Divided the task of finding research papers into 3 sections:

• current ways to "punish" computers (Matthew)
• ways to collect, log, categorize evidence of inappropriate behaviour (Thomas)
• human methods of justice, various penal systems in our current and historical societies (Mike)

Mar 03

Initial discussions focused on how we were having difficulty finding papers related to the concept of justice in computers, so we focused on trying to determine exactly what justice should be in the realm of distributed computing:

• punishing computers is difficult as computers do not care what task they are given, they just complete computations.
• punishing people is not really the focus we need as that is what human laws are for.
• if there is some way to punish a computer, does it make sense to punish computers that are being used for "bad" actions if the owner of the computer is unaware of this activity.
  • does this punishment really have a greater effect on the owner of the computer than the computer itself?

Our new focus is to try and narrow down if the concept of justice actually has a place in distributed computing:

• determine what purpose justice would serve...why would we have it?
  • if we decide justice is a necessary concept, the focus will become what is a "fair" way to apply punishment for "bad" actions.
  • if justice does not have a useful purpose then we must detail the reason that it is not beneficial.

Resources

[1]Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition, Harvard University Press, 2003. PDF

• This book provides a view of Justice that may serve the purpose of distributed computing. Rawls describes justice as serving two primary functions;

      1. Assign rights and duties for the basic institutions of society.
      2. Describe the best way to distribute the benefits and burdens of society.

If we take this view of justice, as opposed to a penalty-centric view, then justice may have a place in distributed computing. For our purposes, justice could be the basic guidelines to which all members of a distributed society must conform in order for the system to be stable and efficient. Obviously this view is an "all-in" type approach and may be more difficult to describe in terms of being incrementally deployable.

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[2]Foucault, Michel, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Random House, New York, 1995. PDF

• Foucault's book focuses on how punishment evolved from medevil methods "draw and quarter" to modern prison methods. These two methods of justiceare differentiated by the way in which punishment is carried out. For medevil, or "Monarchical Punishment", the population is discouraged from doing bad acts by the public, and brutal, way that punishment is exacted. The punishments included torture and executions. On the other hand, Foucault discusses "Disciplinary Punishment" where there are people deemed as experts who have power over the perpetrator of a "bad" act and handle the punishment of the individual. An example of this is a prison guard who determines how long a prisoner stays in jail.