Posts

Week 15 - Ethics: Ethical Egoism

 Ethical Egoism I wanted to talk about the ethical theory of Egoism by brining an example of it in IT and then go a little in-depth to it. Ethical Egoism states that: " The long-term personal benefit should be the sole criterion for the Right; Bartering is a foundational principle in human relationships - while not ruling out helping others, it is only considered reasonable in case of mutual benefit." A prime example of this I would want to talk about are independent vulnerability researchers or more accurately the company's attitude towards people like this. There are multiple examples of someone finding a critical vulnerability in a system which is owned by a company and then the person has ended up getting sued till they are unable to proceed with their passion. To combat this kind of action there were created bug bounty programs. There are multiple bug bounty programs out there that have many companies, where they can define their scope and then what are considered di
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 14 - If a person has control over any function, they can also control the computer

 The Principle with disabilities and controlling computers I wanted to take this opportunity to write about a gamer called " RockyNoHands ". He is a streamer and a gamer in many shooters now, his disability however, is the lack of hands, hence the name. He injured 2 of his vertebrae at a party and lost the ability to control his body. Person who used to do a lot of sports and be hands on in most situations suddenly losing all of that mobility can be very life changing, which it was. Luckily his brother found a quad-stick online, which improves accessibility to the computer by the using a sort of like a joystick which has 3 holes in it. Into the holes you can either blow air or suck air out and you can move around the joystick in general. There are different combinations you could do with the holes, which are the amount of them you use, you could only use 1 of them or 2 at the same time or all 3.  Additionally the joystick also recognizes the strength of your suction or blow,
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 13 - Two Linux Distributions

 Comparing openSUSE to Debian Origin- openSUSE Started August 3, 2005. Enforces/commends the use of free software whenever possible. Debian Started August 1993 by Ian Murdock with the goal of a new distribution which would be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU. Started by a group of Free Software Hackers. Target group- openSUSE The distribution for sysadmins, developers and desktop users. Aimed for beginners and veterans alike, ideally perfect for everybody. Debian    Individuals who would want a stable release of Linux. Organizations, large or small.. Community- openSUSE IRC communication between community on irc.freenode.net (#opensuse-project and #opensuse-community) Public Beta-Testing Open Bug tracker Public Mailing List Open Status Meeting Debian Almost a thousand active volunteer developers, who help the Debian project during their spare time. Communication between the developers is mostly done by IRC or a mailing list. The project has a carefully designed structure: Of
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 12 - New World Hacker Ideals

 The New World Ideals for Hackers The points raised by the post about the new ideals are some good ones and I feel inclined to agree with said points. I see the ideal hackers as people who act out of passion and desire for security rather than a pay check. This is one of the reasons I see bug bounties as a near perfect system for companies, because people who are passionate into finding security concerns are guaranteed to be rewarded, be it that they actually find the vulnerability. But, there is one big concern with bug bounties, which exists for all gig economies, the fact that your monetary income may depend on luck a few too many times and months become unpredictable causing more stress and this might cause a conflict for hackers in terms of integrity. If a hacker who has been on a rough patch hasn't found any vulnerabilities, they might be keen on finding shortcuts and cheats to disclose some vulnerabilities for the sake of surviving the month. It is quite sad that the only wa
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 1 - Rainer Toots - The falling behind of Linux

       It is quite clear to see that to make something successful you have to have a couple of bad ideas, but what is important is the fact that you learn from your mistakes and keep on pushing with better ideas, to perhaps get lucky once, then you have to just, as Microsoft would put it: "Keep riding the bear."     I wanted to write about why Linux has fallen behind to the likes of Apple and Microsoft's operating systems, when there is a lot of good ideas for Linux in its development cycle. Open-source, more access, better control over your system, when Linux offers you these features, why didn't everyone just jump to it over Microsoft's OS.  For a bit of background information : Linux started being developed at 1991 by Linus Torvalds as a hobby project at first but later on it would be additionally developed by other people to form distributions of Linux like: Ubuntu, Mandrake, etc. Hardware compatibility Currently Linux as an OS is very poor for home-use becaus
Post a Comment
Read more