E-ITSPEA Blog

  "Human is the weakest link in the information security chain" © almost every IT security specialist In the digital age, one of the most important as well as the most difficult task is protecting personal data. M ost often, the first thing you will see as a new user is the advice "do not show your username and password to anyone!".  N evertheless, the personal data is the main purpose of protection, there is, in addition to personal information,  exists other important information. It may be your project / dissertation / archive of the accounting report, which for some reason you have not yet sent to your boss. This information can be targeted by malefactors. They may use malware, that encrypts the contents of the hard drive and then demanding a ransom. This type of malware also known as ransomware. However, although this scenario is terrible, there are a number of procedures that will avoid such a disastrous outcome. 1.Сopy the information to another storage med...

 The essence of technology has always been to simplify the life of an ordinary person. This is especially noticeable now, in the age of information technology. But I would like to talk about a technology that allows a person with disabilities to use most of gadgets almost as effectively as an ordinary person. Speech recognition technology Speech recognition technology is a blessing for people who do not have the ability to work normally with a computer / phone / TV, etc. Special software is used to convert received voice commands into text or specific actions. For this reason, no keyboard / mouse / touch screen needed, which allows people with physical disabilities to work with electronics. This technology is complex, because it requires the so-called "units of the phonetic alphabet". For each sound, a complex statistical model is initially built that describes the pronunciation of this sound in speech. The more phonetic units, the more accurate the system can be. Further...

In 2000-s only functionality of product was important. But today design is no less important aspect of any IT product. Today's rule of good design is "A product should be so easy to learn that even children can use it without problems" . Therefore, we can say that a product is good if it is intuitive and easy to use, and the design does not obstacles its use. Today, by these criteria, I will evaluate two different sites. Positive exmaple - YouTube The design of YouTube is very "wide", it occupies the entire screen of a computer (or any other device), which is a significant plus, since every centimeter of the page tries to provide maximum information. although the text is small and poorly readable on the sidebar, the icons responsible for the functionality carry all the necessary information. A huge plus is that neither the logo nor third-party features take up unnecessary visual space. The interface is small enough not to distract the user, but large enough to...

 Kenshi: the cowboy coding. Kenshi is a survival-sandbox-RPG game in a post-apocalyptic,  "sword-punk"  setting. This game has a large community due to its well-developed world, interesting mechanics, and also because of charismatic characters like "Beep".  First five-six years it was developed by one person. To get by , he had to work minimum wage security guard job in the nights. However, then, when the game gained its first fans, the development group grew significantly. The developers do not have a specific plan of action, they are just trying to bring the game to the state of " the dream game ". For this reason, we can say that due to the lack of almost any plans, Kenshi is an example of cowboy coding. Youtube - Advertising model + freemium  YouTube is one example of a collection of several business models. This company uses the "carrot and stick" trick. Before the video, the user must watch one (or several, damn you YouTube) commercials. Fo...

 I found the description of the "hacker" community very interesting. It looks not like a group of people with a same interest, but with same lifestyle. I confess that I have never heard of such a name as "cracker" before. However (most likely) I will think about the differences and similarities between hackers and crackers for a long time.  However, it is not entirely clear where that fine line begins when a hacker becomes a cracker and a cracker becomes a hacker. Is a person a cracker if (or a group of people, for example "CODEX" or "P2P GROUPS") hacks into games and distributes them for free? it would be interesting to clarify such "subtle" moments, since although their actions can be censured, however, people's intentions can be more noble than it seems at first glance I was glad to know that most "hackers" are the type of people I imagined. All tips from the " Points For Style " section. They seem very geeky ...

 Every large company has its own "leader", who moves the company forward, allowing it to achieve more and more success. Today I would like to consider two famous people whom, and also try to analyze their personality on the example of such a large company as "Apple " . Steve Jobs Steve Jobs is the man who founded Apple, he introduced many innovations and unique technical solutions into our life. He popularized personal computers, music streaming services, and smartphones. However, it cannot be said that everything was smooth. Employees said that Steve Jobs had a strict disposition, and forced employees to work hard. People could have lost their jobs even because of one mistake. That was the price for progress For these reasons I can say that Steve jobs had the qualities of "leader" and "change agent". Steve Jobs knew exactly what he wanted to see from the product, thanks to this skill, progress did not just "moved with the times", he pu...

 Estonia is a small country with a well-developed IT industry, which means that competition in this area is also very tough. Nowadays, you will not surprise anyone with a higher education and knowledge of Python (or JavaScript), so programmers, in order to be able to break into high positions, often try to know the widest possible range of languages. Now you can often see a programmer who knows at least 3-4 languages ​​besides Python well. The the requirements  all over the world    for programmers are the same everywhere, but due to the fact that Estonia is a relatively small country, programmers are in constant competition. On the one hand, this limits the total number of "workforce", but it also means that the skills and competence of programmers in Estonia can be significantly higher than in other countries, where the population can be significantly larger. The most important skills for a programmer right now is adaptability. The ability to work in pairs / small ...

Copyright and copyleft Copyright exist to protect authors of intellectual property from unauthorized copying and/or selling of their work. Copyleft makes it possible to modify and distribute software or documentation to the community, but only on the condition that modified software remains Libre*.  *This means that the product is free and cannot be commercialized. There are several types of copyleft licenses that vary in strength. We will give an example of Strong, Medium, Weak and Free license. • One of the strongest licenses is GNU APGL . The product can be redistributed for free, it can be used an unlimited number of times, the product must be open source, and this license must be extended to all derivative modifications of the product.  This license is used by programs such as MediaGoblin  and  CKAN • When it comes to licenses of "medium" strength, the license first comes to mind is GNU GPL . This license is very similar to the GNU AGPL, but if the program ...

Nowadays most of the business is based on the concept of "intellectual property", so the book "The case for Copyright Reform" is now more relevant than ever. Some solutions are good, some are bad, but I want to highlight the two most interesting points. • Free Non-Commercial Sharing I think this is one of the most controversial points in the second chapter.  This rule can indirectly bring significant losses to both large companies and relatively small ones. For example, If you want to share a disc of a game / music / movie with a friend so that he / she also downloads a copy, it will be a potential loss for the company that created this game, because she will lose one potential buyer.  This case is controlled by current rules, but if this rule is abolished, then this can lead to uncontrolled "multiplication" of copies of one object.  So it's worth saying that even non-commercial distribution of games / movies / music / books etc. on a non-commercial b...

 5. Näe võrgus hea välja. I spend a lot of time in games, so I can say, that rule number 5 is very important. For example, I would like to tell about my experience of Internet communication in many online games. After a long time communicating with people, I noticed that regardless of the game, whether it is competitive (CS: GO, Dota2, League of Legends, Rainbow Six) or not (World of Warcraft, Minecraft, Sea of ​​Thieves) many players prefer to play with a polite player, rather than with a "skilled" player. This may seem odd at first glance, especially for competitive games, since usually the goal of any game is to reach the peak of skills or progress. But at such moments people forget the main goal of games - to have fun.  A similar situation happened with me and my friends in game "Rainbow six siege".  We all played for about the same time, but some played well, and some played badly. I was the player, who had lower skill than others. I thought that ...

 Competent government always trying to not only influence the present, but also predict the future. This was done by the Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications in 2013, when the forecast of "tech society in 2020" was made. Due to their nature, forecasts may be inaccurate, because of this reason I want to highlight the most accurate prediction, and prediction that did not happen. This topic "inimeste parem elu" was the most accurate, because any Estonian citizen have freedom of speech on the Internet, and the Internet is not limited in any legal terms. Every Estonian citizen have guaranteed the privacy of their personal data.  Also, people have become "smart consumers", furthermore, Estonia have the highest increase of online shopping for the last 10 years among European countries. You can even make an appointment with a doctor or book a time to apply for a passport using the internet ! We also have a great example of an Estonian applicat...

Until the 21st century, people got most of the information from other people or text sources, for example encyclopedias. But everything has changed after invention of Wikipedia in 2001. Hard to imagine modern life without using Wikipedia, because it is most easy way to find information. Originally, Wikipedia was created as supplement to the free Nupedia encyclopedia, written by experts as an additional source of draft articles and ideas. But Wikipedia quickly bypassed Nupedia, becoming a big international project. Today the English Wikipedia contains over 6,000,000 articles , it is also one of the most popular websites in the world. The main advantage and at the same time biggest drawback of Wikipedia, is the fact that anyone can edit any article. Wikipedia can be free because of it, because you don't have to spend a lot of money to hire editors, who would check articles. Also thanks to the large number of editors, information about anything appears very quickly. But that means, th...

 Second Week Task. Technology of the past that has come down to our days ( and one that is not ) 1. Email Email is one of the communication methods that appeared almost 50 years ago and remains relevant to this day. We can say that email was invented in 1965, when   when the staff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Noel Morris and Tom Van Vleck wrote a mail program for the CTSS. But modern electronic mail was invented in 1971. The first email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, who was working on ARPNET (which is the prototype of the modern internet). The letter was very similar to modern one, using the @ symbol to denote the recipient's address. Today almost everyone has an e-mail ( sometimes a person has more than one mail ). Mail has become not only a method of communication, but also a confirmation of a digital identity. This became a necessity, since in order to create an account on almost any site, you will need an email to confirm your registration. It s...

1.  Cicret Bracelet   In 2014, Cicret announced a device that used a projector to display an image on the inside of the arm. This invention seemed so innovative that it swept the Internet with a huge noise. Many news sites were releasing news that Cicret would “turn your hand into a full-fledged tablet.” After all this hype, it was no surprise that Cicret raised massive amounts of money through its crowdfunding company  Go Fund Me. After the initial excitement passed, people starts to asking questions. How does this bracelet work? When will it go on sale? Is it even possible to make such gadget? Cicret was silent for a long time, until the famous debunker Captain Disillusion released a video on his channel about the fact that at the moment it is impossible to make a Cicret Bracelet.   After the revealing video came out, Cicret released a video with a prototype that obviously wasn't look like what they had originally promised, which caused massive discontent among ...