E-SPEAIT course blog

 Similar to real-life's etiquette, netiquette is a (somewhat unspoken) set of rules that exist in order to make people's online lives happier and easier. A book with the same name was published in 1995 by Virginia Shea where she outlines "Ten Commandments". The one that I believe to be the most important is "Remember the human". Speaking mostly from my experience as MMO and MOBA gamer, people seem to forget every possible set of spoken or unspoken rules when there is victory on the line. I've known some 30-40 years olds whose [baby] rage is far worse than one of a ten years old who didn't get the toy that he wanted and the toxicity of vocabulary is on par with world's deadliest snakes. And this is the age when people that are considered the backbone of society in terms of their knowledge and judgement. Obviously, people who are way younger can be toxic online as well but they can be excused as they might even not know any better. However to my mi...

Referring to “The Case for Copyright Reform” by Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engström, I think that some concepts of their proposal for copyright reform simply got outdated and outsmarted by the industry, both existing and emerging. By removing the need to purchase the content, streaming services like Netflix and Spotify now act as a middle-man, and simply make file-sharing overly unnecessary and time-consuming. A general media consumer will gladly pay a monthly fee and never worry about finding a tv show, movie or music album ever again. Even being a veteran p2p user (starting with BitComet), I now find it much easier to pay Spotify and Netflix fees (shoutout to student discount) and get everything I need in one or two places.  While consumers greatly benefit from such streaming services, the authors suffer. Average royalty for 1 song played is around 0.0038$ and 0.0074$ for major platforms so to make a living by simply uploading their works to a streaming platform, author would h...

 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...