SPEAIT2021K Carlos Rodriguez

 This week I will talk about the different lynux distributions. First question I made myself and I think it is understandable, is why so many distributions are   available ? The answer is simple and it is to better suit your needs because of the applications you are supposed to run. Some distros are geared towards user entertainment and may include all of the programs necessary to reproduce video and audio, in any format (including owners), others are more oriented to games  others to security, some to science, others to education, etc. (Target of the software). Apart from that, that I think is the main reason due to the easiness of the software to create custom distributions, there are other reasons such as the use or not of open code even when it holds copyleft license (I think this is mainly when the distribution  is run through a server). Given the fact that there are a few hundred distributions and many are even to be released, and like each one of these has both advantages and di

 I think Pekka Himmanen when referring to the term hacker he tries to tries to reflect the spirit of  70’s when the enthusiasm, passion, creativity, care, freedom,... was driving all the people on the field. I don’t say it is no longer like that but probably not at that level at least in terms of freedom and passion. In contrast the information nowadays, with the appearance of the WWW, is more available that it was back then and the amount of people with technological awareness or knowledge has exponentially increased and if you really want to get into this field, you have to feel some passion and the necessity to be creative bringing something valuable to the society and yourself. As we saw in the past article creativity and passion is what it makes a community to move on. Without that, we know that everything will remain static and this is prone to collapse at certain point. A good example of the Ethical Hacker Values and the way it has improved the world is the creation of the WWW b

On this week’s blog, I will talk about one curious case about censorship and another concerning privacy when it comes to fight organized crime or terrorist groups.  Regarding censorship I will talk about the Streisand effect. The singer Barbara Streisand gives the name to this social phenomenon that occurs when a censorship intention has the unintended effect of propagating further the event that is trying to hide. The term alluded to Barbra Streisand, who in 2003 sued photographer Kenneth Adelman for distributing aerial pictures of her mansion in Malibu. But Adelman was no paparazzo—he operated the California Coastal Records Project, a resource providing more than 12,000 pictures of the California coast for scientists and researchers to use to study coastal erosion. Of course, news outlets around the world reported on Streisand’s outrage, and before long, the photo on Adelman’s website (below) had received well over a million views. At the end it was a calamity for the artist because

 I will talk this week about the overall cybersecurity state in Spain. As everywhere else, due to the continuous growing of digitalisation, the business sector and the population as a whole is taking note of the consequences of not being prepared against cyberattacks. Many of them, especially companies, have already suffered some economic loss for this reason. The awareness is higher in big companies, since they can be identified as major targets by many cyber criminals and the possibility of bigger investments and counting with better equipment and professionals but the fact that most of the companies in Spain are medium-small size and the lack of enough measures against these attacks make them easy fish catch for criminals. In regards the public sector, there is a strong legislation to avoid disruptions and leaks in the critical infrastructures such as health care facilities, energy centers,… All this legislation has often as origin a European Directive. Nevertheless, the medical hea

This week I will talk about 1 design failure and 1 design that succeeded in the technology field particularly cell phones.  First, as a failure I will talk about the GALAXY NOTE 7. It was released in 2016 and was meant to be a revolution and a direct competitor of iPhone. It had several and gorgeous innovations such as a curved display, a long battery life, and a camera that could rival the iPhone.  For example talking about the screen, It had a 5.7-inch AMOLED display with curved edges that wrap to the side of the phone, and a slightly rounded back, giving it a surprisingly good feel. Some other interesting features were to be water resistant and incorporate iris scanning too. Talking about HCI The icons were softer and more rounded, and a lot of the settings seemed easier to access, and so on.  It is proven that they put a lot of effort in the phone and the expectations of success were at the highest. It was actually for many reviewers the best phone Samsung ever made. There was one

 I will talk about a typical IT professional in Spain and all the things around that has evolved alongside it. First of all, and something remarkable that has not changed over the years is that most of the students and “professionals” are men. In contrast with other areas that have shifted from a predominant male workforce to female as for example medicine. IT remains a male stronghold for some reason even though it may be changing slightly. I have to say that I have never had an insider vision of an IT guy since any of my close family or friends were attached to it, so I have actually had to look for references to know what it was like, 20 years ago. Something is sure, the range of possibilities was narrower than it is today. As I said previously the range of things available to work with, was limited compared to nowadays. For instance, it was not evident that so many languages  will appear 20 or 30 years ago and the object oriented language didn’t exist at all. In the 90s many progra

Firstly I think it is important to point out what is copyleft and why it came out. It appeared as a response to the use of a public domain version of a Lisp interpreter, which is later used by other interest part and improved to serve a particular purpose and then becoming proprietary software for the only interest of the late part involved.  The original creator of this interpreter was Richard Stallman and he was refused the right to access to the new version of the Lisp interpreter he had created. As a pragmatic person, instead of fighting against the copyright laws, he decided to put his efforts to use it in his own benefits, so he pioneered the use of copyleft by creating his own copyright license, the Emacs General Public License, the first copyleft license. This later evolved into the GNU General Public License, which is now one of the most popular free-software licenses.  The copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work free, which doesn’t mean “gratis” (Spani

For this week I will give my opinion about the book  The Case for Copyright Reform . The book and particularly chapter 2 is trying to convince readers that the copyright as it’s been conceived, it is not good for society because if it is going to be applied effectively, it will collide with fundamental rights and they are advocating for a modification. When the author say that this copyright law is endangering fundamental rights, it means that if you really want to avoid people sharing digital files, you need to sniff the communication between them and see what kind of information they are exchanging which of course lead you to know everything else if you want to.   That is a difficult debate. If you think that you are harming an author you admire,  most of the people will be in favour of a tough copyright law. By other side, If you think that this law is attempting against your fundamental rights and that it is not protecting the author but the industry and all the people that was use

This is my review about the paper CHALLENGES OF THE GLOBAL INFORMATION SOCIETY written by Pekka Himanen. I read some comments on page 13 about the problems in countries like Singapore and China in the long run, since they are not democratic and limits the freedom of people. I agree that a creative person needs this freedom of speech and also to develop his mind and skills but in my view they have both. They are very pragmatic, so they allow some of their best talent to move specially to the States so they can develop and some day come back and be a leaders there. By other hand controlling people, you make sure the factories and production centres, they still rely heavily upon to develop at a 10% rate, are running without any strike or quarrel. Also having this proportion of citizens, you generate a high competition between them and also due to that, people is sometimes prone to move abroad which also is beneficial for the state. Also it is worth mention that the benefits that USA can o

This week, I will talk about web searches and how they have influenced the internet therefore the World and in particular Google. Let’s start from the beginning. I think when internet started and some thousands of websites where active, the needed for a web searcher could not be seen so relevant, but at some point, the fact of the exponential growth and endless amount of information online, a filter that can drive us to the answer of our question had become essential. It is important to remark that Google started making the money out of adds. The owners of these adds had to pay for the number of clicks received on their website, a model of business called cost per click (CFC), and in fact patented by goto.com, company bought later by Yahoo. Yahoo and Google had a legal battle between them, finally resolved with an out of court agreement where Google agreed to share some of its share values in exchange for its perpetual licence to use, so they bet hard for this model which is still t

  For the second week task, I will talk about 2 technologies in the history of the Internet such as Aloha that has become obsolete and Ethernet technology that is currently used even though the media used has evolved. First of all, I think it is important to remark that the World Wide Web didn’t come up from nothing but it was the result of multiple steps forward, out of the necessity, to search for solutions to unsolved problems.  Therefore, for instance the ARPANET group wanted to provide remote access to their main computer  system and they were using telephone lines to do so.    By other hand, The system known as Aloha and created by Norman Abramson wanted to do it through shared radio network to overcome the terrain barriers and being able to communicate between the different islands in the Hawaii Archipelago . I took this example as a technology that is no longer used even though it inspired the new wireless technologies that are valid today. The main idea is that terminals can t

Welcome to my blog for the course SPEAIT. My name is Carlos Rodriguez and my first blog entry is dedicated to 3 tech failures that led to a shift in the way the business was doing up to the moment of the release. I will focus in services that particularly shocked me in my early youth. I will start with Napster, an online peer-2-peer file sharing service that endeavoured an incredible success for the time it was operative. The service reached a considerably high amount of users (about 26.4 million users), during a time when the number of internet connections was much smaller, with some estimates topping 80 million. By saying the time it was operative, I mean that it faced legal issues and closed down since it was undoubtedly tearing apart a very profitable music industry. The legal battle between Napster and Metallica heavy metal band was followed worldwide. Even though it ended up as a failure, It opened the way for many other platforms and above all, it made the music industry realize