anosta E-SPEAIT 2022 Blog

 Part 1: Censorship Actually, no. Really, what I want to talk about is not a case of censorship, despite often being portrayed as such. And this is not a one-off case either, this happens quite often when a public figure loses a platform because of something they did. I want to talk about Trump's Twitter ban. On the face of it, it can look ugly. The President himself being silenced by a multinational corporation? Outrageous! This has to be a violation of the First Amendment, right? Well, no. I am not a lawyer, but it must be said that the First Amendment only protects people and private entities from  the government. So, for example, an American citizen may post (almost) anything online and the government cannot force them to delete the post or punish them for it. Also, the government cannot force a private entity to say something that entity does not believe in. So, let's say if a President (an agent of the government) demands that Twitter (a private company) reinstate his Tw...

 When talking about ergonomics, the mind often conjures images of those old ugly ball-point pens that gave you CTS or chairs that gave you scoliosis. But really it's just a science of how humans interact with their tools and how to make it less painful. The difficulty of speaking about ergonomics stems from the fact that one only thinks about ergonomics when something has gone terribly wrong. But in all seriousness, if we are to speak of an example of good ergonomics that prevented a disaster, then the first place has to go to emergency numbers . Short, easy to remember, easy to dial, saving lives. Also, as far as I can remember, every cell phone has had the ability to dial an emergency number even while locked. Even those old brick phones. As for bad examples, there are possibly too many to count (including the pictures above). But I would like to leave the reader with this video by the satirical news network The Onion:

 Out of the ten commandments of netiquette by Virginia Shea, this one has the most "biblical" vibe. Mistakes are inevitable. Even I make them. Choosing to sound arrogant just now was probably one of them. Trying to break the fourth wall to sound funny was another. The point is, everyone makes them, and there is nothing easier than exploiting the mistakes of other people to make yourself feel intellectually or morally superior. Sadly, it has been in human nature even before the advent of cyberspace for people who are about to lose an argument to latch on to inconsequential mistakes of their opponents to divert the topic of conversation to come out on top. Online this behavior often presents itself in the form of "grammar nazis", when people sometimes literally point out a missing comma to suggest that their opponent is mentally inferior to them. There is more than one reason to avoid doing that. For example, it is you who could be wrong. It is always useful to posses...

 The ideas  proposed by Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engström are fascinating and indeed may solve a lot of problems with copyright that we face today. The system that we have today no longer protects the artist, but the corporations that profit off of their work. I would like to list all of the changes proposed and give a few comments on each of them. Moral rights unchanged - this is what one might call a no-brainer. Personally, I have toyed with the idea of making distribution rights revocable, as in giving the author the right to revoke distribution rights from someone at any moment, though that will undoubtedly create many problems; Free non-commercial sharing - it is unlikely that lobbyists would agree to that, as corporations are increasingly moving towards subscription-based services, in essence making it so that no individual owns any copy of content; 20 years of commercial monopoly - MCU would start entering the public domain in 6 years from the moment of writ...

 If we were to discuss how journalism has changed with the introduction of social media, we would be here all day and we would barely scratch the surface. However, I would like to focus on one particular aspect of web journalism: citation laundering. Most of us were taught to "include citations", "check the sources" and "don't cite Wikipedia". However, as a result all that most of us do when we read an article online is check if it has its sources stated below and we are completely content with that. Bloggers, knowing that, will sometimes link sources that are completely unrelated to the topic or even contradictory to what their own article is saying. The problem has gotten even worse in recent years, especially in the right-wing cyberspaces (although no one is blameless). Someone would post a tweet with an outlandish claim, people will retweet it, someone will report on that in a YouTube video while fabricating some extra evidence to solidify their po...

 Teletype® - or a teleprinter, or a teletypewriter was a device first developed in the 19 century to replace the telegraph. The use of a telegraph was problematic and cumbersome, as it required operators to be trained in the use of Morse code. These machines would be operated with a keyboard like typewriters, sending signals by copper wires across vast distances to be printed out as human-readable text on the other end. The word "teletype" comes from the name of the Teletype Corporation, a company that specialized in teletypewriters. The company was in business until 1974's antitrust lawsuit against its parent company - AT&T.  One of the things of note in teleprinters were control characters (or "format effectors") - characters that did not (and do not) represent written symbols, but are used to control  how written symbols are placed. NUL and DEL were introduced in the Baudot code in 1870, and the modified Murray code of 1901 also added CR and LF. Interesti...

1970-s: Combat drones Unmanned combat aerial vehicles or "combat drones" are a type of military aircraft that have no onboard human pilot. They are most commonly used for intelligence and drone strikes. Usually these vehicles are under real-time human control, though fully autonomous drones are being developed. Unlike the small drones that are sold commercially for recreational purposes, these machines can weigh anywhere from hundreds to thousands of kilograms. Smaller reconnaissance aerial vehicles can weigh as little as 1 kilogram, though these cannot technically be considered "combat drones". One has to use sophisticated detection systems to spot these drones - they are virtually invisible to civilians. Due to mistakes made by operators, people have begun to fear clear skies - the perfect conditions for deployment of combat drones. There is growing concern that this technology is making military conflict politically "cheaper" for major powers, as war is...