# Xinran's Reading Responses
- Checklist for a [good reading response](https://reagle.org/joseph/zwiki/Teaching/Best_Practices/Learning/Writing_Responses.html) of 250-350 words
- [ ] Begin with a punchy start.
- [ ] Mention specific ideas, details, and examples from the text and earlier classes.
- [ ] Offer something novel that you can offer towards class participation.
- [ ] Check for writing for clarity, concision, cohesion, and coherence.
- [ ] Send to professor with “hackmd” in the subject, with URL of this page and markdown of today’s response.

## Reading responses 5 out of 5

### Jan 19 Fri - How the Web Works

An HTTPS-protected connection is like a lock that can be opened by separate keys. In *How the Web Works*, I learned that the process of accessing a web site is as follows:
1. client enters the web address whom wants to access in a browser
2. the browser understands the http address entered to find the server's real address and asks for a copy of the web site
3. the server approves the request and transmits the data packet
4. the client assembles the packet to form the visualization of the web site

Sinc Internet is a public environment, but people need to transmit information that they don't want to be known by uninvolved people to specific people, Diffie- Hellman has become the most common way to maintain security. Hartley Brody explains how information is secured in *How HTTPS Secures Connections: What Every Web Dev Should Know*: The information encrypted by the public key will be openly placed on the network, but only the person who owns the private key can decode the information, the private key can not be shared with each other, even if two people want to decode the same public key information. By developing a special calculation method, the two people holding the private key can obtain a shared key by passing the coded key through an encrypted method. But in this process people needs to make sure that the person who is receiving the message is the right person. The ip address of the machine is associated with the public key through a digital signature, which is called a certificate. Clients can only access certain information if they have a certificate. But since I know that ip addresses can be faked, why can't people fake digital signatures or certificates for the purpose of viewing encrypted messages?

### Jan 26 Fri - Science of Learning

"Can I be excused? My brain is full!"(p.5)In *Make it Stick*, the author provide this example of a result of mechanical repetition learning.

Research has demonstrated that repeated reading exposure is no more effective in long-term memory than reading only once, because repeated reading creates a sense of fluency, which is seen as a sign of mastery.

On the contrary, summarizing knowledge into structures that relate concepts to each other and to what you know can help memorizing. At the same time, the process of encountering problems and solving them can enhance understanding and memorization. As in the example in the text, it is difficult for people to tell if the pattern on a coin is correct, but when people are continually quizzed on the problem, they begin to pay attention to the pattern on the coin. This is the point of regular self-testing. Regular self-testing can help retrieve whether knowledge has been mastered through the illusion of repeated exposure, and it can also strengthen the memory of unfamiliar knowledge by making mistakes and then correcting them.

It is also important to diversify our learning, which refers to the ability to switch and interleave between the different skills we need. I understand this as linking knowledge from different subjects to understand each other. For example, marketing is not only about creating promotional programs, but also about communication in order to reach the target group more accurately and widely.

In high school, I was very sure that I wouldn't study anything related to physics, chemistry, or biology in college, so I was very confused as to why the school was forcing us to study "unnecessary content". But now I understand that it is because these subjects are difficult enough to help with summarizing and generalization skills. Studying these subjects forces students to explore ways of learning that are effective for them. In my psychology class, I also learned some tips to help me memorize. For example, when studying add some special stimuli, when wanting to recall this knowledge, the replay stimuli can help better remembering. I'm curious if there are any other ways to help with learning to memorize.

### Feb 6 Tue - Social Networks

People can decide whether they are part of the "diamond" or part of the "graphite" by choosing to be part of a differently structured group. Social networking, as a way for people to socialize, transforms people from traditional short-path group-centered socialization to long-path network-centered socialization.

Through networks, people are able to connect with people who are unrelated to them in their daily lives. This social structure is known as the small world structure and by sending letters and studying the big data of Twitter users, different researchers have come together to prove that "everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people"(p.192). This structure gives rise to three laws of information dissemination and network value: Sarnoff's law, where the value of communication grows exponentially; Metcalfe's law, where the value of communication grows exponentially with each additional node's reach; and Reed's law, where multiple nodes can form a platform where the value grows exponentially not only with the addition of one node's reach, but also multiplied by the number of other nodes it has. Reed's law, which holds that social groups bring more value and spread it faster than individual multilines, is confirmed in the article by Amazon and Netflix by selling and renting cold books and movies, and by ebay by allowing people to form communities of interest to promote consumption.

At the same time online socialization will have multiple relationships of varying intensity and density. Online socialization can help people maintain the strong connection and high density group socialization in daily life, and also establish the weak connection and low density online socialization with the same interest group at a distance. This kind of multi-relationship socialization leads people to individualism. People join different groups by labeling themselves with different interests, and get a different sense of belonging in different groups. I think it will make it hard for people to deeply integrate into a group because people need to balance their roles among different groups.

But at the same time, this mode of networking brings benefits to society. People with different cultural backgrounds interacting with each other makes people more accepting of diversity and supportive of it. I think the advancement of feminism and the fight for rights such as LGBTQ depends a lot on social networks bringing people together. But it also makes me wonder if the dominance of Western cultural discourse on social media, which has gradually silenced many neglected cultures, is a form of cultural invasion due to online socialization? How should people avoid this cultural invasion?

### Feb 13 Tue - Haters

People's moral standards are lower in anonymity, this characteristic makes communication on the Internet more hateful and flaming than everyday communication. Trolls appear in internet communities as a type of person who sends ostensibly sincere messages that actually lead to large-scale arguments. This behavior brings a bad environment to the internet community and makes people more xenophobic.

The trolls started their own community, Mean Kids, in which abusers use all kinds of language to express malice toward their victims. One of the female victims, Sierra, canceled workshops and keynotes because of misogynistic threats. She received a series of death threats, image threats, and in-person threats. In an effort to put an end to this incident, Sierra and the founder of Mean Kids released a joint statement claiming that she did not hold members of the community responsible for these threats. Goodreads is another example, which started out as a book recommendation social networking site hoping to help people find books they were interested in. But as more and more people joined, some malicious comments took over the site. People would post bad reviews of books they hadn't read, and the relationship between authors and readers deteriorated, plunging the site into endless bickering and retaliation against each other. The site began to consider banishing some of its readers.Facebook and Instagram have also faced problems with harmful content, and their strategy for this has been to remove some of the content and disclose how often users see harmful information.

The nature of the Internet is that everyone can express their opinions and these opinions are very easy to disseminate. This makes harmful content spread much more quickly and widely than in the past. Controlling the spread of this content is a very important issue that needs to be addressed right now, but is Meta's decision to remove user uploads and Goodreads' decision to expel users a violation of the free speech portion of the human rights in the U.S. Constitution. People are born with the right to free speech, but what are the boundaries of that freedom. Should free speech still be protected when people violate other people's rights, or even lives？

### Feb 15 Fri - The dark net

The dark net is well known as a harbor for criminal transactions, but it was originally created to protect the sovereignty of the individual.

The Dark Web as a trading platform has introduced Tor software and virtual currencies to ensure the anonymity of its users. The most well-known virtual currency is called Bitcoin.The Tor software has 3 relays between the sending and receiving devices, and each relay has its own unique way of solving the puzzle in order to ensure that the content of the transmitted message and the customer's information will not be leaked. The client transmits the multi-layer encrypted message to the first relay - Guard relay, then the message is decrypted by it and transmitted to Middle relay for secondary decryption, and finally transmitted to Exit relay for complete decryption. The fully decrypted message is then sent by the Exit relay to the final destination. In this mode, the content of the message is separated from the identity of the customer, and the closer the customer is, the more encrypted the content of the message is, which can effectively protect privacy. Since the information transmitted is virtual, the content can be not only contractual documents, but also virtual currencies such as Bitcoin. Bitcoin as virtual information in order to prevent private copying, each transaction amount will be recorded separately on the transaction individual, equivalent to all people together to form a large ledger. When someone makes a private copy of a bitcoin, it is considered invalid because it does not match up with anyone else's ledger. However, this makes the cryptocurrency easy to track, as large transactions cannot appear out of thin air, and only large transactions need to be tracked to find out who committed the crime.

So when wishing to protect the privacy of the transaction, why not separate the information from the money and only transmit the information on the dark web and then create a common pool of money from which the money for the transaction is transferred to a private account, which ensures that there is no way of tracing who the money was sent from.