E-SPEAIT course blog

 In 2004 Pekka Himanen, a Finnish researcher and philosopher, presented a report called "Challenges of the global information society" to the Finnish Parliament's Committee for the Future.  His report listed the challenges that Finland with its current model of welfare state could face in terms of the development of global information society. Himanen attempted to describe what the future may look like by identifying 10 major trends that were already in strong progress. By using those trends he then tried  to model development scenarios and came up with 3 quite different dynamic models: the "Silicon Valley model", the "Singapore model" and the "Finnish model".  The Silicon Valley model comes with high societal price of leaving the weak and vulnerable behind to progress further. That creates a class division, where people at the bottom don't have as many opportunities as people at the top and that leads to even further gap in the next gene...

Availability and widespread of the Internet changed the world by allowing people to connect in new ways and giving everyone a voice. Suddenly you didn't need to have lots of money to share your ideas and you didn't need to be connected with powerful people through [traditional] media in order to have your voice reach millions. There was always a space for you. And it was called MySpace. MySpace was the first social media site to really take hold of the popular imagination. The site went live in 2003 and capitalised on and expanded the Friendster model of social interaction online. While Friendster was more game-centric, MySpace allowed anyone to participate and converse on a wide variety of topics. It didn't take long for this concept to take hold and begin to grow. MySpace was made available to 20 million subscribers of eUniverse and had its backend support which meant that everything from finances to tech support were already in place. Having an interesting and stable s...

  1) Finger protocol - considered obsolete and security issue Created in 1977, Finger was an early way to send status information between two computers. The finger daemon runs on TCP port 79. The client will (in the case of remote hosts) open a connection to port 79. An RUIP (Remote User Information Program) is started on the remote end of the connection to process the request. The local host sends the RUIP one line query based upon the Finger query specification, and waits for the RUIP to respond. The RUIP receives and processes the query, returns an answer, then initiates the close of the connection. The local host receives the answer and the close signal, then proceeds to close its end of the connection. That was an easy enough and effective way to get information about remote computer! And it was almost a predecessor to Twitter if computers could tweet about themselves. Supplying such detailed information as e-mail addresses and full names was considered acceptable and convenie...

1) Boat cars / car boats Boat cars are still around today, but many in the mid-1900s thought that they were going to be the future, and judging by the lack of boat cars on the roads, that doesn't look like it happened. For now, this invention has been relegated back to novelty collectors, or those who just want to spend their extra cash on the floating car. 2) Blackberry Before the iPhone, there was the BlackBerry. These iconic devices were many users’ first smartphones, able to connect to the Internet, send and receive email, and chat with one another over the company’s BlackBerry Messenger, or BBM, service. And they were everywhere: Research in Motion, as BlackBerry was then called, sold more than 50 million of the devices in 2011. But that proved to be the company’s high-water mark. RIM failed to keep up with the times, stubbornly sticking with its trademark physical keyboard rather than adopting an iPhone-like full touchscreen, which quickly became fashionable. By 2016, BlackBe...