Week 15: IT and Ethics

In my last blog post, I will be touching upon an ethical theory and how I see it implemented in IT. For the theory, I chose Social Contract Theory that was first formulated by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. According to the theory, society should strive to develop a set of rules that make sense to everyone (making people follow them voluntarily). For instance, driving on the right (or in some places, left) could be a common example - drivers keep to the right not for fearing the police but to avoid confusion and possible crashes.

I think this pretty much describes how online communication and hacking work. Although there aren't really any rules strictly in place other than netiquette rules on how you should behave online or how, who, and if to hack someone, most people obey a set of rules that just make sense to everyone without really having them written down. Even though there are some netiquette rules, it's merely a recommendation, not a requirement. So everyone can act morally online by their own choice without having someone demanding it from them. For example, online people tend to follow unwritten rules just because they are common sense, like not using capslock and spamming or helping people out when someone has questions about a topic that you might know more about like on StackOverflow or Reddit. No one demands that you should contribute but since we are all in one singular cyberspace that we all use, we try to follow these rules so it would be a more enjoyable experience for everyone.

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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....

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