School - I026: VII - Write a Small Description of the IT Professional In The Year 2017

This weeks topic was talking about IT professionals and who them may be . How to act like a professional and get the respect from the community.

Necessary Prerequisites

IT proffecional is a person who loves what she does. She has thought herself the area and preferably also finished some degree in IT. She must be willing to keep learning and get up to date about brand new technologies and aquire new skills all the time.

She must be a peoples person and get to understanding what is expected from her. People outside of IT most likely don't know what they are talking about. For example - server is a website.

Necessary Features

• Excellent in communications
• Willing to learn
• Being up to speed with latest technologies
• Also have to know items from the past
• See items from the positive side
• Not to write anything premature into emails or code commit comments
• You should get along with different types of people. For example, if you hate that people are chewing food with open mouth, you choose to ignore the fact that he is doing it and try to cope. Unless you need to work with that person in later faces as well, then you need to make a remark so he wouldn't feel bad.
• Understanding must be taken, that there are no stupid persons, only people in general are stupid

Necessary Skills

There is actually no specific necessary skills what professional person should have. It is combination of many skills, but mostly the politeness and willing to learn new things are the key factors. For example, try to start your e-mails:

Dear Sir/Madam,

<some body>

Yours Sincerely,

<your name> 

<title> 

<phone number>

Also subject, try to describe the topic in few words in subject. I, myself, personally am taking e-mails with subject Hey, how are you, later than topics with "Help needed - cannot reach destination IP of this server".

Conclusion

This assignment was one of the most complex ones, you really can say if person is professional or not after you have communicated with him. Totally subjective topic and you cannot really take objective approach here.

School - I026: VI - Give assessment of solutions in Chapter 2 of "The Case for Copywrite Reform" by Christian Engelström MEP & Rick Falkvinge

The Case Copywrite Reform was published by Swedish Pirate Party members. Our session at school covered a topic called in rough translation: Computers and paragraphs: law/legal in computer world.

We had to read a chapter 2 from that book, which I mentioned above and write an assessment of the proposed solutions which were written in that chapter.

There where total of 6 points:

• Moral Rights Unchanged
• Free Non-Commercial Sharing
• 20 Years Of Commercial Monopoly
• Registration After 5 Years
• Free Sampling
• A Ban on DRM (Digital Rights Management)

Moral Rights Unchanged

This is one of the strongest points in their case and they are totally correct. No matter what, author of any publication, idea or any sort of creative work. Give credit where credit is due. Today even this point is quite often compromised, ideas stolen and sold as their own. All what actually matters is who will be the first one shouting and talking about the idea itself. Of course with a strong court case it can be overruled. The closest example, which I can recall, was in a TV series called "Californication". Show where a stepdaughter stole a work written by a lead male actor, in which case it was David Duchovny, and she sold it to publicist.


Free Non-Commercial Sharing

It is illegal for coping a CD or a song, movie, e-book after you have bought it and then to share it with a friend. I am actually surprised that the media you have bough isn't  yet encrypted in a way that only you can see it, with some chip in the brain or artificial eyes. At least yet I haven't seen a case where you will get fined if you copy the music from one of your media devices and make a "mixtape" to your car, which composes songs from different artists. Artist may claim that whole album is one single piece and if you take one song from there you are destroying their art and stealing from them.

It is even illegal to download a song which you have on a media you have sitting in the shelf of your living room. 

If there would only be a way to see how much of the authors creation has been shared and used, then why not let the government to pay them. If I like it or not, but the world is moving forwards to socialism and this would be strong case in this kind of world.

20 Years Of Commercial Monopoly

Even 20 years of time is too long to have a benefit for society from protecting the copyrighted work, but still better than lifetime+70 years. At least it would give hope to somebody. 

Registration After 5 Years

Perfect point, this should be standard in modern world. You have to claim that you still are backing up your work after 5 years, not just some random idea which you shout out and leave it hanging so nobody else could use that. Most of the people even don't care after that.

Free Sampling

I believe that this one is a stretch. I want to take Mona Lisa and color her hair to blonde and call it Blond Mona Lisa. Nobody prevents to do that, as long as you refer to initial author and if needed give him some of the revenue you earn from this stunt. This is done in music industry today and it is done quite often. You cover somebody, they get a piece of pie as well.

A Ban on DRM (Digital Rights Management)

True, technology shouldn't prevent people to do stuff, peoples moral and ethical compass should be the one. Education is the key here.

Conclusion

Swedish Pirate Party is on the right track, I hope that some of their points will be pushed through. At least, we, in Europe are quite fortunate. We don't have many blocks to accessibility of the digital media, but imagine if you live in China. Even your phone cannot open applications which are not designed in China.

School - I026: V - Choose One of the 10 Commandments by Virginia Shea and Write an Example of Your Own Experience

This week's session is about specificities of social networking.

We were asked to pick one of the 10 commandments created by Virginia Shea and write an example of our own based on it. Those are as follows:

1. Remember the Human
2. Adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life
3. Know where you are in cyberspace
4. Respect other people's time and bandwidth
5. Make yourself look good online
6. Share expert knowledge
7. Help keep flame wars under control
8. Respect other people's privacy
9. Don't abuse your power
10. Be forgiving of other people's mistakes

Those were written down 10 years ago and most of the people don't follow any of them and if they do then in a very limited manner. It is very difficult to choose from those just one, because most of them apply at the same time in the same place, therefor I am bit widening the topic and focus one of core powers in the society - the press, especially the online press.

#1 Remember the Human

I see that most of the modern media is either without context or the context is shifted in a very focused way. The very good example here is the media war which is going around Ukraine and Russia. Perfect example how the context can be shifted to your own side and actual truth is hidden in some other location. At some point of time I've stop believing the stories which were written and started just following feeds from LiveLeak, but drawing the line between reality and fiction got blurrier every day and it still is blurry. I want to believe, but what can I? 

Even Today one example of context. Texas lawmaker ridicules anti-abortion measures by filing anti-masturbation bill. Referred one can be found here and original one here. Just leave out a part where the women was sarcastically saying that in order to stress the problem about abortion and you have all another story.

#4 Respect other people's time and bandwidth

Taking the last example which I gave on the chapter above, it directly indicates that to find out the truth I needed to start looking the source of the news myself. I read one information from one source, second one from another source. Wasted my time, my bandwidth. I am lucky that I have AdBlock installed.

This is recurring pattern all through online media. See this, can you believe that he just did it. Click to learn more, and then, 2 lines of meaningless  story. I just got click-baited. Basically everybody are aiming for your clicks. More clicks, more adds can be displayed, more money can be cashed in. All falls on the amount of adds which somebody can present to you. Basically the title of the article is mostly not correspondent of the story and you have fallen to easiest con what is available in the web.

#6 Share expert knowledge

How, today, it is possible to trust any information which is available, I am not only talking about online information, also offline information. There is so much noise, so much false information present, who tells that the information is validated. Do you have to look it up yourself from different sources and then determine which source to use. Again we can take the first example here. Was the referred article expert knowledge? I would say no.

Data manipulation to get what you want is actually quite common. You just need to have enough followers and any knowledge can become expert knowledge. There are forums out here where people blindly believe that world is flat. 

Or this illustration:

#8 Respect other people's privacy

It all starts from some article, which gives you limited information, which I mentioned with #1. It goes on to point #4 where the article is covered with adds and every request has got special tracking ID attached to it. You are now marked, cookies are set, referrals in URLs are set. Where ever you go, that information can be reused to understand what you have watched, where you have been. There is no privacy if you take it out of box. You need to add additional measurements to gain back your privacy. Online media has got you stripped.

#9 Don't abuse your power

Taking all this into account, I believe that all who ever work with media and has followers will abuse the power. 

# Conclusion

There are some commandments of netiquette, but they don't stick today. I want to believe that people are having some moral compass, but I just cannot. To protect yourself, you need to be skeptical about everything you read, you see. Don't let your trust blind-sight you. Take preventive measures when you read something from the media. 

The truth is out there:

School - I026: IV - Write a review to a CHALLENGES OF THE GLOBAL INFORMATION SOCIETY by Pekka Himanen

In this session we were asked to write an review to 2004 document which was ordered by Committee for the Future, PARLIAMENT OF FINLAND. Document was written by Pekka Himanen.

Review to CHALLENGES OF THE GLOBAL INFORMATION SOCIETY by Pekka Himanen

The document was targeting to see future problems of IT society and how to adopt and prevent the damage for the people of Finland and it was designed in a manner that the analysis can be adopted to rest of the World or at least to the Europe.

It is divided  into 4 major chapters:

• A creative economy
• A creative welfare society
• Humanly meaningful development
• A global culture

Also it includes background where the analysis comes from.

Information Society

Page 10 in PDF (-1- in the document header) "This review comes to the conclusion that the most critical aspect in the development of the information society is the development of the deep-set structures of society, to which we must now pay close attention"

The author gives overview that the society is becoming more creative and we need to have a plan how to mitigate the risks when the society becomes creative welfare society.

On the next page there are global trends which indicates and leads to the information society:

1. Increasing international tax competition
   Countries compete for investments and skilled labor by reducing tax rates.
2. The new global division of labor
   The most developed countries cannot rely on routine jobs in the future, so they must specialize in creative work that is based on higher expertise and work to improve productivity both through increased added value and the development of production processes.
3. Population ageing
4. Increasing pressures on the welfare society
5. The second phase of the information society
6. The rise of cultural industries
7. The rise of bio-industries
8. Regional concentration
9. A deepening global divide
10. The spread of a “culture of emergency”

All this indicates that people are getting lazier and and leaning more and more to the social welfare and are getting used that everything is handled on the plate. I believe that our society has taken wrong direction. People are keen to want country which has it's focus on socialism and think that this is correct way, but based on those points, socialism requires high taxes, but it contradicts to the first point of those ten. Actually the first point also doesn't get along with rest of the points. Seems that those trends will never exist fully in some society, but they will have compromises and overlaps.

Value-based Management

Page 14 in PDF (-6- in the document header)
The following list describes the values which could serve as the basis for the continued combination of the welfare state and the information  society. The listed values are updated versions of the values underlying the original European welfare state and innovative entrepreneurial. A successful reform requires from politicians value-based management.

1. Caring
2. Confidence
3. Communality
4. Encouragement
5. Freedom
6. Creativity
7. Courage
8. Visionariness
9. Balance
10. Meaningfulness

This makes me even more worrying. It has been described that creativity can come only when people are free and they get confidence that somebody cares from them and their life means something. It basically is capitalism and socialism together. 

Page 16 in PDF (-8- in the document header) 
In practice, if we are to meet global competition by implementing the above-mentioned development scenario and adopting the values described above for this scenario, we must take into account the following key concepts related to social development:

1. A creative economy
2. A creative welfare society
3. Humanly meaningful development
4. A global culture

We, as a species, haven't got this far by getting things on the plate. Humans are lazy, laziness is the power which has got us so far. If we have items on the plate, who wants to think how to do things better? What motivates them? Even now there is generation who has graduated high school, sitting home with parents, depending on social welfare, parents and they have one meaning. Maybe I come up with some project which sets me in infinite loop of income. When that happens, what they will do next? Nothing, spend life away. No real value to the overall World.

We need to get back to capitalism and start putting people in competition. This is what brings new ideas, innovation. Let's go back being animals as we have been designed to be.

Conclusion

Page 23 in PDF (-15- in the document header)
The success of the information society and the provision of equal opportunities in the welfare society are, eventually, based on an inclusive and high-quality education and training system.

This actually is not working, I believe that it was a vision in 2004, but in 2017 there i a trend not to work, not to get outside your box. Do as less as possible to get paycheck and nothing more. Pay taxes, get some nicer roads to commute on, get your kids to kindergarten. Assume that teachers are responsible of your child well-being. Socialism is not a way how we can create innovation. This is the way how we destroy our community and maybe even our species. Not now, not tomorrow, but what about in a century? 

School - I026: III - Analyze one "New Media" tool - how it has changed some area

The actual wording was that how it has changed this area, but it is a bit too wide.

I have seen it a lot how people trust Google to find matches to words what they really don't know, how to spell the words, how to write properly.

There is one YouTube video which quite accuracy describes this situation:

Google as replacement of the dictionary

You are doubtful how some word is spelled, you just write how you hear it and press "Go" in Google, See highest matches and trust it automatically. How do you know if this is write? It is widely used between people whom are in argument how to spell something. Google even has got functionality called Google Fight. You enter two keywords and see which one has higher match. Higher match wins.

This information is actually purely subjective, can you trust people who write articles to Google and which end up in top of search results? They might be wrong or maybe are they right?

This kind of new media has got strong effects on people culture and dictionaries may become extinct. Google also has got Google Translate which is today implementing machine learning and has ability to translate between different languages without much human algorithms involved.

Of course there is a question, can you buy your words to be on the top of search? can you add your product to the translation result example? Like: "Johnny went to store to buy Milla milk".

We are being productized and there is nothing what we can do, unless we go Open Source. Where do we end up? Do we get more ignorant by day regarding to words and spelling or is this the future which we have to take in account and live with it?

School - I026: II - 2 examples of IT history which started before 1990 - one still existing, one dead.

This time the school session focuses on the internet history, where it started and where it has ended up to by now. We need to gather two examples of the internet history before 1990 and describe which one lives also today and which one has gone extinct.

Internet in early days

In the 1970 there where at many of different internet networks available: ARPANet, PRNET, Ethernet, AlohaNET, and according to name, my favorite, SatNET. Most of them where started and controlled by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), agency which was created after Soviets launched Sputnik.

There was a successful TCP protocol test over those networks on 1977.

ARPANet

As you know then ARPANet is basically today's internet forefather. All what we are using now for World Wide Web has evolved from this. There is not much to talk about it or speculate around it. It is constantly improving and evolving. Besides of traditional visible internet we have a lot of invisible internet and black internet.

Visible is all what we see when we enter some URL on the address bar. Web browser renders us a page and there we have it, some media, some text, some links, all for information. Invisible is the rest of it, all what you cannot see and it contains most of it. That is also not interesting, this can be read upon Wikipedia and rest of places. The interesting part which came from ARPANet is actually DarkWeb (dark net, deep web). A place where the actual life begins. Trades with crypto currency and kind of illegal services has made a perfect combination for criminals and people with shady deals. 

Anonymous Web

I believe that this is what is real future for ARPANet, moving to deep web. Future where we can claim back  anonymity of our identities, trade goods with people you don't know, have currency which is not under any government control, be a single nation in this world, not just people in some country. I am counting on that future.

SkyNet SatNet

Coming back to SatNet, then actually I kind of hope that it was bases of the Terminator and SkyNet story. Sounds about similar. Communication network which uses satellites to translate data between computers. The Terminator, movie from the 1984, where there was a self conscious neural network which found out that humanity is the greatest threat for the existence and  started to produce terminators to wipe out whom ever was left over from the nuclear attack. Awesome movie franchise. 

But talking about SatNet, it really didn't get the attention it could have got, I believe that there were a lot of technical issues to provide it word wide, starting from the maintenance fees of the satellites ending from latency issues which it would take to broadcast a signal to the space and back to the server and round tripping the data back. Unfortunately there isn't a lot of data available about it, at least I didn't find it in the future ARPANet, but if you have something, please post some links into comments.

Summary

Ah, yes, regarding to topic, summary: ARPANet -> Internet; SatNet ->Didn't end up being SkyNet, so for me, it is dead (although it can be operational for very limited brand of people).

School - I026: I - 3 unsuccessful projects in the history of IT

It's been a while when I posted here, didn't have any good challenges to write about, but I guess I've taken up one of the major one now - started school again. Target - get into Tallinn University of Technology masters program and learn cyber security. Before this I need to finalize my bachelors degree.

We have one topic called I026 which translates into Social, Ethical and Professional Issues in IT. In here we need to publish posts every week about different topics. Today's topic is to write down, in my opinion, 3 unsuccessful projects in the history of IT.

#1 Downfall of Nokia N9

I think that the major failure was discontinuing Nokia N9 mobile phone. This phone had everything what a proper smartphone needs: Slim design, custom built operating system (MeeGo OS, v1.2 Harmattan), OLED display which reduced power consumption, quite open platform with big online forum support. The team behind it started their own company called Jolla and the operating system Sailfish. This company hasn't really kicked off in the scale as I have hoped, but that is another topic.

Coming back to Nokia N9 and MeeGo OS then it was truly good achievement, the platform was quite open and perfect tool to play around. People even hacked Debian to be ran there in virtual machine. I also made it to work in my N9. After that things got really interesting when, following many tutorials, I installed 6 different operating systems. My phone had hexaboot. Nokia made a big mistake for killing this project. I really hope that they are coming back to senses and reboot the efforts. World needs another good mobile operating system, which can also handle natively different mobile platform applications. Sailfish is trying but they don't have hardware to support the efforts.

#2 Nasa Challenger Disaster

What can be worse - exploding space shuttle with astronauts on live TV. The reasons why it happened is actually not very IT related, rather than mathematics and physics, but I believe that with proper analysis tools and computing power, it could have been prevented. Namely, nobody thought that weather on that day is colder than in the days when they did test runs. I even don't know if people today calculate weather factors in complex mathematical and physical models. I mean, we have the power to calculate, we have computers linked in to major GRID system we have the possibility to harvest community and get the calculations done, but why not? It is costly and somebody needs to drive it.

Imagine if we could give to community that please review our materials, review our mathematical models, we pay you when you find out what can be wrong, what may fail and prove it. Simple as that. I bet if they could have done it in 1986 then most likely somebody had come to that that O-rings  may fail due misuse of the materials. What prevented them? I could think only the cold war. Fear of sharing knowledge to the world. FEAR costed 7 lives, impacted thousands, or even millions. Why are we scared to share secrets?

#3 Car tax policies

Governments are looking different ways how to get more taxes from people and they have implemented in many places car taxes, either from emitted carbon dioxide or what is worse - power of the car. If you have more KW that some X amount, you need to pay higher tax to the government. Reason is simple - you use more fuel, you pollute the environment more, you pay for the luxury.

What actually happens is that car producers will not limit the KW with engine build, but they are doing it via programming car chip to give less fuel to the pistons. Engine is the same, pollution levels are higher. Is the environment really cleaner? I don't think so, we only fake it to cut down the costs of making cars and still sell it. Car tax policy in the name of cleaner environment has failed big time, since we have smarter cars than few decades ago and we can use programmatic way to show the numbers which are required to avoid unnecessary taxes.