Social, Professional and Ethical Aspects of IT (ICS0006) Blog

The bad design Probably the most infamous bad design that I can think of is that of the Hawaii alert system and the 2018 disaster it led to. There are two conflicting accounts of how everything went down, but the common denominator in both is that the software being used was of very low quality and didn’t have any type of double verification, sadly there are no actual screenshots of available online, but buy looking at the examples provided by the official sources it isn’t hard to understand why such a mistake could have been made. The first version is that an employee went rouge, some say due to an un-diagnosed mental illness, and turned a unplanned drill into an actual alert, resulting in 38 minutes of absolute horror for the citizens, I have read multiple harrowing accounts from the people there: A mother who didn’t wake her children, deciding to let them perish peacefully in their sleep A family who just sat down on the beach to enjoy their last moments together Large ...

Before having to write this blog post I haven't really thought about what would make an IT professional, what would be some common defining characteristic in successful IT professionals that someone could point at. I had to spend a while really thinking about it and I believe that one of, if not the most, important characteristic that an IT professional must have is adaptability. You might ask why would I decide that adaptability is truly the ultimate characteristic for an IT professional, well it is because the field of IT is the most rapidly advancing field  and if the IT profession in question doesn’t keep up or can’t keep up then they would be left behind, and eventually their skill would stop being relevant. With the adaptability of an IT professional it is only natural that not only would they have a field of specialty, but they would also at the very least dabble in other fields and specialties. I do not really have much knowledge of how an average IT professional looked bef...

 The 10 rules:     1. Remember the human     2. Adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life     3. Know where you are in cyberspace     4. Respect other people's time and bandwidth     5. Make yourself look good online     6. Share expert knowledge     7. Help keep flame wars under control     8. Respect other people's privacy     9. Don't abuse your power     10. Be forgiving of other people's mistakes I had originally planned to write about #2, adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life, and how if it is taken at face value it can cause a person to miss a lot of subtlety and misunderstand the culture of different online forums and chat-rooms. But after some thought I have decided that #9, don’t abuse your power, is the more important of them and that I would rather w...

Copyleft is something that I had not heard of before having to write about it for this blog post, and had always just assumed that what I know now as copyleft had fallen under one of the many different copyright licenses, but in reality copyleft is actually its own branch that covers a surprisingly large amount of software that I interact with! Copyright is mainly used as protection for the creator of work, so that someone doesn’t simply steal it, while copyleft is intended to protect the general public from projects abusing free and open source code for their own profits, in general it allows projects and companies to use free and open source code as long as their project also ends up being open source. Copyleft is primarily divided into three parts: Strong copyleft, as described in the name, that if you were to take some software that is covered by strong copyleft and used it in your project, then you would be responsible for publishing what you had created to the public, as now your...

 I do agree with the sentiments expressed in the chapter, especially about it being urgent. I am kind of surprised by how accurate the prediction was, the prediction was published in 2012 and barely 6 years later the whole EU article 13 meme fiasco went down, so I think they were and still are right. I haven't yet seen of websites and chat services scanning user chat/comments to block and remove any copyrighted materials, but it isn’t that hard to imagine, maybe it will already be a thing in 10 to 20 years if corporations and companies keep putting pressure on the governments to pass laws and regulations in that direction. I have actually seen YouTube channels with small subscriber amounts get killed by copyright abuse even if they compiled with the laws and regulations. I have even seen a law or a regulation get changed and a channel get more then half their videos taken down because of that. So I believe that the current copyright system does need to be either completely changed ...