Week 12: hacking in the modern world

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, it's important to weigh out whether getting a small financial gain is worth all of the cons at the ned. I love the example with Linux, if Torvalds wouldn't have chosen a free license of Linux the entire field of hacking would have been different.

Hacker network ethic or nethic - hackers tend to resist censorship in all its forms and I am also a firm believer of it, if we leave out censorship of harmful content for children and minors.

Caring - I agree with this, having seen it myself, people sometimes tend to forget to look at the bigger picture. Reminding yourself of what really matters from time to time is important.

Creativity - I think this aspect is getting more and more important as the field is growing so fast so creativity and innovation is essential to stand out and be successful at what you are doing.

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Week 9: Examples of bad and good HCI

With technology developing rapidly, we find all sorts of new ways to improve our lives and how we interact with technology. With technological innovation, we might witness the creation of something life-changing and spectacular or something that just no one even asked for. I'll try to bring examples of both worlds. Firstly I'd like to bring a good example of HCI - eye-tracking. I recently watched either a video on YouTube or a documentary on Netflix (can't really member which) that showed how eye-tracking technologies have changed the lives of people suffering from illnesses like locked-in syndrome. Locked-in syndrome is a condition where people have full cognitive ability but they are unable to move or speak due to paralysis of voluntary muscles. So usually they can only move their eyes, and that's about it, although some can't even do that. They are literally locked in their bodies unable to move and communicate with others. But thanks to eye-tracking, people that

Wiki Review: The Chinese Social Credit System

For my Wiki review I chose a paper by Bálint Adám, Dominik Kovács, Benedek Matveev, Luca Mizzi and Carlos Rodriguez on The Chinese Social Credit System. I think the topic chosen is really interesting, hence why I chose this article to review, and important at the same time. As the Chinese government is really invading people's privacy, at least in my opinion, by tracking its citizens and companies. It's important to know about the problem so we could avoid this also happening in the western world. All in all, I think the most important aspects of the topic got covered, at least what I was hoping to learn from it while reading the article, and it was presented in a good manner so it was interesting to read. The structure of the article was good, it was organized in a logical way and was divided into subcategories, although they could have been tied a bit better. The viewpoint or angle of the article was for the most part pretty neutral as it should be. Maybe it was a bit to the

Week 6: Copyleft

Continuing on the topic of copyright issues, this week's post will be about Copyleft and what impact it has on choosing a software license for one's project. So first of all, what even is Copyleft? Some of you might have heard of this term before in association with open-source software. Well, it's a license for free content/software that determines whether or not the derived works are influenced by the license or not. In contrast to copyright, copyleft ensures that the code/content is freely available for use and modification, whereas copyright more restricts uses. There are three different grades of copyleft: Strong copyleft - one of the most famous examples is definitely GNU GPL, which was also the first copyleft license. This basically means that the license applies to all derived works and you are obligated to publish the source code if you distribute code that was derived from theirs. Weak copyleft - an example of this would be GNU Lesser General Public License. T

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