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...

IT professional, The evolution of work

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is equivalent to magic." Arthur C. Clarke.

    Technology is what we mean for new things that seemed like magical about 20 years ago and so the technology people had around those years where stuff like a Game Boy (Released by Nintendo in 1989), DVD in order to replace the old vhs and add more fiability and efficiency, Windows 95,98 (Released by Microsoft) which established the base of the next softwares incoming, the World Wide Web or Internet as we all know it, this all are examples of which type of technologies we had and it is so interesting to think on how much things has changed.  Our way of relating between us has changed a lot, by now the social medias as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, apps that has changed a lot our way of facing life and relationships/behaviour. 

    But I would like to focus a little on how the profile of an IT professional has developed in my country(Spain) and what it implies today. As I have previously told in the paragraph above there has been a lot of new technologies that has affected our way of finding jobs our teaching and learning technics, so what about the IT professional, has there been also any difference in their preparation/learning? 

As the development in industry were starting to grow sharply, there was a need to start developing new learning skills for the professional and this happened in the universities. They focused to teach engineers the basics of this new techs, such as basic programming such as Java. It was needed for the new apps that will appear later and so they needed also help from companies. Let's say that the universities gave the base and the companies gave the rest. It was a race of who had the best professionals that could help the company to release any product that could revolute the industry and society, so for that the training that needed to have a professional was really big but also limited. There wasn't a lot of information as now due to the Internet, but as it started growing up the information sharing also grew up helping to develop more and more IT professionals. 

Nowadays, as an IT student willing to become an IT professional I can say that they are teaching me the most basics as 20 years ago but also the creativity incorporated. And for me I see it as almost the same process but of course not with the obsolete technologies, with the new ones. Even with the pandemic the education as changed and I can say that I feel more of a worker prepared to face whatever happens next. I feel motivated and willing to find a job where I can even develop more myself in the technical skills. 

One last thing I spotted out, is that now it is more easy for new IT professionals to create their own business so this helps a lot to find new technologies due to the creativity young workers are having thanks to their learning during their studies. It is easier to become a startup and focus on research of new ways of relating between us such as Tinder or even WhatsApp. 

Let's see what happens in the next 20 years! 

Do you behave the same way online as you do in real life?

 Hello! Today I would like to discuss about how we behave online. I found it interesting in the way Virginia Shea describes it in her "The core rules of Netiquette". It is one of the ten rules you should follow in order to be a "healthy" online user. 

The behaviour online has took my attention due to its complexity. You can be whoever you want and behave however you want on the web but is that good? I mean not being as you are in real life is good for our human relationships? Well actually in my experience I found out that our way of relating with friends/people online varies a lot from what we really are. Instagram for example, most of the people there doesn't behave as real life, and why? Well there are many reasons: money, followers, visibility, social status, trendies... 

I think this cannot be good for us, I mean yes in the way of connectivity with other people but bad for our personality. Even in young people we find out that is more normal to find kids focusing on being like a footballer or as an Instagramer selling clothes or dancing instead of focusing on themselves. I don't want to be pessimistic about this because I am sure that there are other people who really use the social media properly but we are having personality losses in our society and this isn't good. 

Now, do you feel like being yourself while you post something on Instagram/Facebook/whichever social media? Do you feel free online or there is  something that prevents you from being yourself? 

No matter what and no matter who, defend your personality online!! It will be good for you and for everyone, be yourself!! :) 

COPYLEFT what is that?

Today I am going to focus on the term Copyleft andwhy is it important to consider this in your works or proects as an author. Let's check it out:

First of all , what is Copyleft?

Copyleft is a creation license that consists on releasing a computer program, a work of art or any other type of document for its copying, modification and redistribution. Which means leave it for public use without restrictions (this is the strong definition). It is a legal practice that is carried out in the exercise of copyright. 

Since copyleft is the opposite of copyright, the terms 'left' and 'right' are used to demonstrate the  opposite meaning. Even the representation of it is diferent: Copyright appears represented as a C in a normal way and copyleft reversed.

But are there types of coypleft or categories maybe? The answer is yes of course, there are two main categories: Strong and weak. 

    -If we focus on strong copyleft we find out that is when for example an author of a software makes the code open source so anyone can use it or at least without many problems over restrictions. An easy example is General Public License (GNU) which you can use this software on your computer for free.

    -The other part of copyleft as we said is weak copyleft and of course it is also permissive on the users but it results on a free part of a licensed software or project. So this means that you can use the whole program without changing the source of the part which

has weak copyleft. Basically you can use it but not change it. For example the Mozilla Public License (MPL)

So now I wanted to ask you something, if you create a new software and it gets "trendy" would you make copyright about it? Or you would leave for free use?

What do you think about Copyright?

    Recently I have read a proposal of changes about copyright in our society (Chapter 2: "A Constructive Proposal For Copyright Reform" in the review: "The Case for Copyright Reform" by Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engström) and I found it really interesting in they proposal to reform the way Copyright is being performed.

    I agree so much with the idea that copyright is preventing creativity to grow and I think this is one of the worst things that can happen to humanity in terms of progress, we can see that this has happened too in history specifically in the Middle Ages where the progress of science was punished even with death and innovations were seen as a complete heresy.

And in terms of economy and money there is a sentence they said "No business model is worth more than the right to private communication and freedom of information" and well it is interesting to relate copyright with one of the greatest human rights, does it constrains freedom?