IT Kantianism: Can our ethics keep up with new Technologies?

How many times have you seen someone on Twitter telling the people to stand against some other trending topic user? We can see this kind of thing almost every day, there are news that say something about for example, The new Superleague some football clubs are trying to implement. And then a lot of people, famous or not saying that that idea is not good. Do you think this other famous people that says that The Superleague is going to be the end of football think firstly how they influence the fandom behind them? 

Actually it is so easy to manipulate the users to be part of something as a means in order to get an end. If I get a lot of people supporting my idea this idea will become stronger just using their opinion.

But are there any good examples in technology of people treating people as if they were the ultimate end?For example, long distance relationships are focused on the other person in an online way just because of the person itself. You want he or she just because it is he or she, not because  it going to return your love or is it going to bring you happiness, WhatsApp is good example on but of course it depends on the way you use it. At the end it will be up to you to use the technology in an ethical way so you can focus on people. People need to know that behind their screens they can make a lot of damage but also you can make a lot of good things and treat other persons as what they are persons, not just words in a forum or on a YouTube comments section, on Instagram likes you shouldn't post your photos if what you really want is feel good because you have a lot of likes on your post.

In my opinion we must never forget that we are people relating with people.  

 "Behave in such a way that you treat humanity in a particular way. Never treat people as if they were a means to an end, on the contrary, always treat people at the same time as if they were the ultimate end." Immanuel Kant. 

Real-Life Assistive IT

As you can see from this video (Video) on YouTube this boy had some motor body problems because of a motorbike accident and now he can use the computer with his tongue and use every functionality over it. This is actually amazing how humans can develop themselves in order to obtain control over things even though they just can control their brain (in a biomotor way).

There are also some other good examples of this assistive IT, the most famous is Stephen Hawking, ACAT is the program he used in order to select characters and words which also means: assistive context-aware toolkit. It consists on an infrared switch that was attached to Hawking's glasses and would detect movement he made with his cheek that would stop the cursor or mouse from moving on the screen. How good can be the IT development to make someone that apparently cannot speak become a really famous and useful scientific disseminator.

I think there is still not enough investment in this kind of biotechnical engineering because some people still cannot use all this services. Of course each person has different needs and different specifications but we cannot forget about them because as Hawking had also this complicated disease he helped a lot in a scientific way to the society.

Also I wanted just to have in consideration the cyborgs, it is interesting how much the technology has been introduced in our lives and this man called Neil Harbisson has caught my attention so much because of the anthem he has on his head in order to "listen to the colours" check it here! Video 2.

2 Interesting Linux distributions: Endless OS & Parrot OS

 Endless OS is a Linux based operating system and has a hardware platform linked to it. It was developed in order to solve the problem of limited Internet in some remote places so you could use almost every service without needing connection to the Web. It started being a crowdfunding project that reached $176,538 in one month and after a few months later some computers appeared with this OS inside. It was a good idea and also cheap because you wouldn't need Internet so you will save money. The problem was that between this type of OS and the ones being able to connect to the web were many features that led the first ones to almost disappear. Anyway you still can find them and I think it is a good solution when you go somewhere you don't have access to any network. 

Parrot OS is an ethical hacking distro based on Debian, focused mainly on everything related to computer security. This distro has been designed from the ground up to stand up to other alternatives, such as Kali Linux or BlackArch, focusing on offering its users a complete ecosystem of penetration testing, vulnerability assessment and analysis, as well as forensic analysis of systems, preservation of the anonymity and practice with cryptography and encryption. Basically is the one of the best OS to develop yourself in the field of cryptography and cybersecurity systems due to the amount of services it has and also is a really good way to develop your hacking skills in an ethical way. 

Between this two OS there are a lot of differences such as their origin which was focused one on people having problems to access the Web and the other group wanted to test protocols on the network, and as it is obvious the target of the public are also way different. Endless OS for normal people without any IT formation and Endless OS for people who wants to develop their skills and analyze in more detail the breaking the network skills.   

HACKERS are you one of them?

 Which are the goals of a hacker? How is their life? Is it legal to be a hacker? Is hacking good for our web society? When someone becomes a hacker?

Too many questions and many few answers. Actually I have met some hackers in my life and I need to say that they were really good looking people with good goals in life such as earning money, building a family, acquiring skills, etc. One of them told me that he hacked some security systems from the mediterranean sea such as radars and other control devices just to see if he was capable, but then I asked him: Did you consider yourself as a hacker when you did that stuff? He answered no. So then this makes me think about the ideals of a 'hacker' nowadays.

 At the base he/she is a person who can have good goals or bad goals but actually both are the same. Let me explain because this is so relative. A person can be hacking some systems with good goals as the one I met or not. For the second one which are his/her ideals in life? Earning money? I think it is not a bad idea, just the consequences of it, if you make suffer people then you can be considered as a dangerous person with bad goals in life. In fact this is the most basic difference. It is known that some companies hire hackers to protect themselves from other hackers so we can say the hackers hired can be called anti-hackers and this will be the good way of calling a hacker a real worker with

good ideals.

Online Privacy & Censorship

    As we all know online users are growing fast so the traffic has increased at least 300% in 10 years from 2021. As this is true governments has now focused on establishing new politics in order to cover the privacy of the users and also their rights online. But, there are always some exceptions:  

Webcamgate: Spying Laptops 

A Pennsylvania high school gave its students an Apple laptop so they could use it at home to study and do homework. Cool! But the gift came with a big surprise, and that is the laptop had software that transmitted the images captured by the webcam to a specified address. So high school got over 56,000 photos and screenshots of teenagers in all the situations you can imagine in front of the camera. Invasion of privacy, among other accusations within the case, made the school have to pay more than $ 600,000. Cheap is expensive, especially to your shame.

Hotmail: Changing password is good right?

The number of people affected is what often accounts for the magnitude of a scandal, and the one that Hotmail starred in in October 2009 is an example. 10,000 users woke up to an email from the Hotmail team telling them to change their passwords in the next few days because they had had a security breach and their data was compromised. It turns out that these had been caught (supposedly by phishing), and then shared in a list via the Pastebin.com site. There were no big demands, but that month Gmail had more new users than expected.

    About "censorship" seems to us a thing of the past, or at best, of cou
ntries with totalitarian regimes where their citizens cannot express themselves freely for fear of reprisals. But although it may seem strange and distant to us, the truth is that in something as close and everyday for us as the Internet there is also censorship ... and a lot.

It depends on which countries you connect to, what kind of technology you use (without going any further, a simple VPN) or what activities you carry out, you may find yourself not only with content that has been censored, but also receive the unpleasant surprise that you have to pay an exorbitant fine for the simple fact of having tried to access content blocked in your territory.

I think the most important thing about censorship is controlling the information, we know there exist a lot of fake news which obviously is not good for our economies and our government integrity. But having a lot censorship is good for a country, seems good but let's see which is the country that censors more:

The number one country practicing censorship today is North Korea, not too surprising given the country's closed nature. It is estimated that even only about 4% of the entire population has access to the Internet, with everything controlled by the government. The number of cell phone users is slightly higher, around 7%, but Internet access is still limited. Even only a few of the most powerful and wealthy in government have access to what the free world knows as the web, most citizens can only access a tightly controlled intranet. 

Spain's security state

Have you ever considered your country secure against hacking attacks? How secure is it for real? Honestly as an IT student focused on cybersecurity methods I need to say that my eyes opened widely when I knew how much vulnerable we are. In my country Spain, there has been a lot of accounts hacked and it is common to see some titles in the news such as: 2 million Twitter accounts hacked, Facebook losses control over your information, Real Madrid Twitter account hacked,... 

So in my opinion what should we do for preventing this? And from where can we learn? There are some countries as Estonia used to these kind of cyber attacks because practically everything is online and how they deal with this? Well of course starting from the base, training professionals in the sector in a very conscious way providing them with a large amount of resources at their disposal and investing in it. This is how you get a stronger country in terms of cybersecurity. Of course, there will always be some attacks that pass the security barriers, Kevin Mitnick himself commented in his day: "Anyone can make attacks like those of Anonymus".

What do you think? Should we invest more on cybersecurity profesionals too?

Bad designs vs Good designs

 How many times have you lost time will figuring out how to solve some problem and then you realised it was much easier and simpler as you though? Well, today I will bring some examples of well designed IT programmes and bad designs, let's take a look into it.

Microsoft Word, oh... this program, how much time I lost using this! Word offers you a lot of tools and actually they are quite useful, but sometimes there are way to much stuff that you don't remember where was the header and footer configuration. It took 5 minutes looking for it and well I needed to use google Chrome in order to figure out where was it!! And well also with pasting pics... The text moves when you put the picture then when you manage to put it properly so everything fits then the text above isn't well organised... Well it's a really good tool but it requires time, the same with Excel for example.

But let's say there are some tools which are really useful and simple such as the tool called Snipping Tool, (you can find it in Windows tapping it on the searcher) this one has been the most useful tool and the most used one for me to make partial screenshots to stuff like important for my studies, information from classes, sending one concrete picture to someone in a matter of seconds...