A Better Auth Experience; The Rise and Power of Social Media Censorship 364 views

Introduction I want to start off by disclaiming that my technical topic has no direct relationship to my STS topic. My technical project examines my summer internship at Amazon. I give a detailed analysis of my thinking process and my contributions during my time there. I worked by myself and with my mentor to create a dashboard that helped AWS IAM aggregate and disseminate IAM findings to assist in the auditing and monitoring of progress. My STS paper on the other hand dives deep into the evils of social media that many people today are not talking about. Technical Topic Millions of people use AWS services and billions of APIs for services are used daily. As each API for a service is called, the user must be verified first and be assigned sufficient permissions to call the API. Most users can adjust permissions once and move on with their life worrying about bigger problems. This is made possible because of the AWS IAM team. Making authentication and authorization seamless to the user. It's one of the things that you don’t notice unless something is wrong. Then it becomes very noticeable and frustrating. My role as a part of the AWS IAM Auth team was to create a dashboard to display and identify these calls that were not working properly. Our team tested every possible call every day to identify which services were not working as expected. Creating this dashboard expedited the process of finding failures and helped management identify the progress that my team was making towards our goal of 100% consistent auth experience for the user. STS Topic All good things must come to an end. As technology has advanced and made leaps and jumps in the past decade it has left behind many regulations and ethical practices. In particular, social media as a technology has been on a rising surge of user activity and influence. This influence has gone unchecked and can cause many problems in the future if nothing is done. My research looks into previous incidents of social media going un-checked and the consequences that a country and population could face. There are many hidden agendas that social media giants hold that are private, my research tries to identify these. Along with this, I also identify a couple of solutions to this social media pandemic. Conclusion Although my technical topic and STS research topic are vastly different, they both involve the newest and most innovative technology. As technology evolves so does the world. It is important that we as a society are able to keep up with this fast pace environment.

BS (Bachelor of Science)

actor network theory; Censorship; Social Media; Auth; Internship; Capstone

School of Engineering and Applied Science Bachelor of Science in Computer Science Technical Advisor: Rosanne Vrugtman STS Advisor: Richard Jacques

English

All rights reserved (no additional license for public reuse)

2021-12-12