Marion Martin SPEAIT blog

This week's blog is about different Linux distributions. I'm still quite new to Linux and have experience with pretty much only one distro which is ubuntu, so apologies if I'm not the most accurate. But I have chosen to compare two extremely popular yet almost uncomparably different distributions - Arch and Ubuntu .  Ubuntu was first released in October of 2004 and it's built on Debian's architecture. The target users for ubuntu are mainly people that are new to Linux or just aren't too interested in the ins and outs of their OS, although it is also used by experts. It is really easy to set up as it comes with a proper installer, unlike Arch, and you don't have to configure every aspect of the system when setting it up. Ubuntu comes with the GNOME desktop environment and a lot of preinstalled applications which make it easy to use and ready to go right after you install it. Although this makes it a lot more bloated compared to a fresh install of Arch. Ubunt...

 Pekka Himanen, a Finnish philosopher, has proposed seven different values that would shape the information age. In this week's blog, I'm going to go over these points one by one. Passion - I think this aspect applies to pretty much every field, if you want to be good at something and be satisfied with yourself, you should do it with passion. And if possible you should always strive to make that passion and hobby into your career. Freedom or playful cleverness - I agree with this aspect and I really think that freedom is essential as promotes innovative thinking and develops us further. And at least from my experience, rigid rules really hinder passion and creativity. Hacker work ethic - this aspect states that rules should be born from debates rather than blindly following the given rules. The coin of "blindly not following rules" of course has two sides and a lot of people misinterpret it sadly. Hacker money ethic - in a world where we are extremely materialistic...

This week's topic was censorship, privacy and the Internet and I'd like to talk about examples of both censorship and privacy. The first thing that pops into my head regarding censorship is the famous Chinese app TikTok. Amongst TikTok already having tons of privacy issues and security risks, TikTok has also been caught censoring its content that would be okay in the Western world and Europe but wouldn't be in China. As TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, it cooperates with the Chinese government and they have said this openly before, although they don't really specify exactly how. But TikTok users have noticed how some content that is being posted is heavily censored. Examples of this are the BLM and ACAB movements and Hongkong protests. The app has only one main feed that you can't filter yourself, it just feeds you content based on your watch time, likes, and personal data. So when these movements were at their peak people started noticing how all o...

In this week’s blog I am going to talk about cybersecurity in Estonia based on the Kevin Mitnick formula. The formula describes security by three aspects: technology, training and policies. The first aspect - technology - covers encryption, firewalls, antivirus software, etc. Training, in my opinion, one of the most important parts, covers security awareness in general amongst people. And finally, policies, which is more of the bureaucratic part, having rules on who can do what. In general, when it comes to technology , I would say that Estonia is well ahead of most countries, as pretty much all of our public services have been available online for quite some time now. We have an e-voting system, e-residency, and pretty much everyone owns an ID card which allows you to use banks, healthcare systems all online. So for that to be reliable, Estonia had to and has to contribute quite a lot to the security aspect of it. When it comes to training , after the 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia,...