Review

 I reviewed a Wiki page "The History And Impact Of YouTube" written by Tashi Kamlaldin Rwalshrangpa, Sanan Mammadli, Adeyimika Agboola Adetunji, Alejandro Ballesteros Perez and Louis Alvin.

The overall impression of this article was positive. The article is imposing, and done with  passion and devotion. The topic is tempting as most of us use YouTube on a daily basis and many of us would like to know its history and what impact it leaves on us. This topic will be actual until something happens to YouTube or a new video sharing platform will become popular. Sections of the article are separating different momentous topics concerning YouTube. Each section and each paragraph tells about inalienable part of YouTube history and present state, describing everything substantial about the platform. Those sections are also well structured and can be easily found. The viewing angle of the article is correct from the neutral reviewer position, nevertheless the article remains attractive and appealing. Each chapter combines thoroughness with more generalized view and makes reading process fast and easy to understand. This article has enough sources and referencing to other websites is done quite often. The structure, formatting and language follow the Wikipedia style. Additional quotes and images enrich article with more detail. However I would expect to see more images in the article.

Week 15. Ethical theory exmaple in IT

 

 

Virtue Ethics has a broad spectrum of characteristics and has roots dating back to ancient Greece. But its main concepts are based on acting like a virtuous person would do. That is doing intellectual and moral virtues that other human beings need to make humanity happy and prosperous. This ethical theory is widely used in IT, especially when it comes to the world's dominant web platform named World Wide Web. By using this platform people can access different resources through a web browser and gain knowledge. The mission of the World Wide Web founders was to empower humanity by giving n unlimited access to information about everything to everyone. Those ideas are the same as virtue ethics proposes, because it also stands to achieve human flourishing, and knowledge through different virtue actions. It assumes that the more moral or intellectual virtue will be done the more happiness, well-being, moral and practical wisdom it will bring to people. Those qualities make WWW a good example of virtue ethics theory usage in IT.
However, not only the web platform that is important to achieve virtual ethics. The resources on WWW and their availability to society play a crucial role. Many different websites, forums and social networks give free access to information and its exchange. People's lives have been significantly improved by free information resources like web encyclopedias, and websites about health, sports, or hobbies. People can share knowledge and improve their skills through forums, and Q&A sites. People can entertain themselves with videos and posts on social media. In my opinion, WWW and its availability of resources is one of the best examples of virtue ethics theory in IT

 

Sources:

https://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission 

https://www.w3.org/2005/02/15-w3c-short.pdf

 

 

Week 14. If a person has control over any function, it can also be used to control the computer

 If a person has control over any function, it can also be used to control the computer

 Computer is made for human to interact with it, but some people cannot interact with computers as regular people do. That may be caused due to their visual, physical or mobility impairments. However they still manage to work on computer, thanks to a wide variety of input devices made in alternative ergonomic way. That is where the rule appears: if a person has control over any function, it can also be used to control the computer. It means that if a person has the ability to consciously control any part of his body that means it can be used for interaction with the computer, thus gaining control of the computer.

The best real-life example of that is Stephen Hawking. Because of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) , that he faced in the young age he was not able to move most parts of his body, what limited him from living a normal life and talking. He was also unable to move his hands good enough so he could not interact with trivial computer keyboard. In 1986 Stephen Hawking got his first speech synthesizer computer, however it was not based on keyboard or mouse as Hawking's hands were not able to move. He had control only over his finders, so the input of this computer was made through switches operated by small movements of his fingers. Later his condition worsened, but he was lucky to meet Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, who helped him and built a customized computer with Intel micro-processor. In addition to that a assistive technology of input was required to compensate for mobility and speech difficulties. It was achieved by his only moving thumb that served as a switch and a blink-switch that was attached to his glasses to control his computer. When he blinked an infra-red switch was activated and he was able to scan and select characters on the screen. That allowed him to interact thus gain full control of computer. He was able to compose speeches, surf the Internet, send e-mail and "speak" through a voice synthesizer. 

To conclude I can say that with the developed technology humans can make custom input devices for many cases of human inability whether it is visual, physical or mobility impairment. However a rule of controlling the computer cannot be avoided. A person must be able to control some of his functions to be able to control the computer. It can be clearly seen in Stephen Hawking's case, as his computer and wheelchair were not controlled by "magic", but by the parts of his body that he still was able to control.

 

Week 13. Kali Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions

 

For comparison, I have chosen Kali Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

 

 

RHEL was developed by Red Hat company that functioned as a Linux distributor. It is an operating system that has its development origins in North Carolina in the 1990-s when a businessman Bob Young and distribution creator Marc Ewing started to cooperate by selling Ewing’s distribution on floppy disks and CDs. The popularity of Linux grew and sales were high, so their cooperation turned into a company named Red Hat which now provides open-source software products to companies.

Kali Linux is Debian-based Linux distribution which was Developed by Offensive security. It was released in March 2013, it is much later than RHEL because it was developed in the 90-s and released in 2000. Kali Linux is also free and is promised by developers to be kept free. RHEL on the other side is free only for developer communities, others have to pay for the product by choosing a subscription with different options like server, virtual datacenters, workstations or other additional support. Kali Linux has a graphical interface and in RHEL it is provided by GNOME. 

The purposes of two distros are completely different. Kali Linux is used mostly for the development of security solutions and computer forensics. It has a great number of tools for solving different cybersecurity problems, which makes this Linux distribution suitable for developers to do reverse engineering, penetration tests or security auditing. Latest Kali also consists of the Xfce desktop environment by default. 

RHEL on the other hand is mainly used for server environments and designed for enterprises. It is also one of the most used distros in its field because of the features it proposes. The main one is the availability of commercial support for 10 years and more if needed. RHEL may guarantee stability and regular security patches with long-term support for enterprise users and Fedora as the community distribution.

Because of the different purposes of those operating systems, they have different target groups: one is oriented toward enterprises and the other toward security solution developers. By some resources, Kali Linux is not recommended for beginners, but for users with an intermediate knowledge of Linux.

Communities of those distributions are also different. In the case of RHEL, it does not have an explicit existence as it is a paid enterprise-oriented operating system. Kali Linux on the other hand has an active and supportive community that resides on forums. Digital forensics specialists often need to develop or explore something new so the forum for asking and discussion is vital for them. In addition to that developers may more often hear from the users about issues making the operating system better everyday.

 

Sources:

https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linux

https://www.techotopia.com/index.php/A_Brief_History_of_Red_Hat_Linux

 

https://www.kali.org/features/ 

 

Week 12. Short opinion about the practical applicability of ideals from the text

 

 

Hackers can be referred to as a subculture of people who have a vast majority of knowledge in IT and programming that they can go far beyond the tasks of ordinary IT specialists. Hackers should have lots of different qualities, but what really unites them are their aims, ideals and ethics. Those ideals have been changing through time and yet not everyone may say clearly what are the real hacker’s principles or goals. After reading the text I have found some qualities about hackers applicable to the reality of the third decade of 21-st century nevertheless, some of them may barely be taken into account.

First of all, considering the hacker ethic of the early days, I can point out that hackers have always been promoting mistrust of authorities for a very long time. Decentralisation is one of the most important ideas for hackers which has not changed for a long time and is still applicable to modern hackers. For example, a well known Anonymous group does not have a leader who decides the actions of the group or manages them nevertheless, the members follow ideas that they all know. 

But there is a point in hacker ethics of early days with which I cannot agree. It was said that computers can change your life for the better however, I do not think that reliance only on computers may lead to something good even for the hackers that know much about computers. I think that if there is an invention then there are always people who will misuse it. Misusing can also be understood as inventing something new. After all, someone has come up with an idea to use something the new way, although it is not oriented for good purposes. So the same works for hackers: if a hacker had misused something then there is a big possibility that another guy will come up with a newer idea on how to fix this issue or reveal the hacker's identity. Adding this to the utterly digital world that we are living in right now, we can say that there are so many issues for hackers to worry about. I do not think that abundance of technologies will help hackers to keep acting unnoticed or keep following their ideas. Sometimes restraint may be a good thing to have as an option. 

Considering the values of hacker ethics in the new century I can mostly agree with the statements. Those are the general qualities that describe the ideal of a modern hacker. Hackers indeed must have a passion to keep on doing their job. A real hacker must always know more about something than others know, so there must be a motivation for a hacker to keep on studying the subject, analyzing, finding issues and vulnerabilities. 

I also agree with the quality that hackers promote freedom of word and thought and resist censorship in all its forms. Since most of society browses the internet on a daily basis, governments are trying to gain more control of their people by setting more rules and censorship. Throughout history, such restrictions have not led to something good if they were not resisted by someone. Luckily we have got hackers that became the opposition to the censorship. I am sure that both sides know that they will never win completely but their opposition balances the situation preventing one side from taking over the Internet.

Week 11. Interesting cases about online censorship and privacy

 Censorship and privacy can be hardly maintained reasonable for everyone in the field of internet communication. Some people, especially the ones who provide security may find censorship necessary while others like the ones for whom the censorship was made may find it unnecessary. Both censorship and privacy leave an effect on each other: if you have more privacy then there will be less censorship and if you have more censorship then there will be less privacy. Such divergence often leads to cases of violation of censorship or privacy which I will describe below in two interesting cases.

Anti-censorship organization GreatFire was attacked by Chinese censorship authorities

 

GreatFire is a non-profit organization that makes people of the Western civilization aware of the hard censorship cases in China that keep its citizens away from many information sources on the Internet. The combination of Chinese government actions to filter and censor Internet materials has become known as the Great Firewall. This is the case of bad censorship when people are restricted not from carefully selected materials but from a wider range of things. Such limitations are not made in social favor but to fulfill the needs and ideology of the government which gives this censorship mostly a negative appearance. GreatFire non-profit has been often targeted with DDoS attacks that were made presumably by Chinese hacker groups. In 2015 DDoS attacks coming from China on the websites that were against Chinese policies have become known as the Great Cannon.

Privacy rules were broken when Zoom was displaying data from people’s LinkedIn profiles

 

During a coronavirus, pandemic Zoom took advantage of massive usage of its service by having a secret service called LinkedIn Sales Navigator that was allowing some people to access LinkedIn profile data about other users. This feature was accessible during the meeting to any Zoom user who was subscribed to LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It allowed getting LinkedIn information about users such as location, real name, role on the job and other data. Some findings say that even when a person was joining Zoom meetings under a pseudonym the platform still was able to match this person to his LinkedIn profile. When this security breach was reported, Zoom disabled the LinkedIn Sales Navigator service completely and said that from now on it will take users’ privacy extremely seriously.

Sources:

https://www.techinasia.com/top-10-censorship-china-2015

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31967100

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/a-feature-on-zoom-secretly-displayed-data-from-peoples-linkedin-profiles/

Week 10. The security situation in Estonia according to Mitnick formula

 

 

Estonia is famous for its IT development and expansion of digital technologies in its territories, but t present times it cannot be taken seriously without additional cybersecurity measures and precautions. Estonian cybersecurity improvement had been growing drastically for more than 10 years and now it is at a very good level, that our country can even give help and advice to other countries about computer security related questions. According to Kevin Mitnick's three criteria, I can analyze the overall situation with cybersecurity in our country.

Technology 

The need for security in the governmental IT environment had emerged at the beginning of 21 century and become clear after the 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia. As a reaction to that, in 2008 the government has founded Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre which became part of NATO Centres of Excellence. The main goals of this organisation are to improve the cybersecurity technologies within NATO countries, enhance information security and develop new ways of cyber defence. In addition, the Estonian Defence League’s Cyber Unit has emerged in 2010. It is a unit with mostly volunteer IT specialists whose main goal is to protect private telecommunications infrastructure from outside-derived cyberattacks. The goals of those two organisations are crucial especially when it comes to different forms of communication. For example, during 2007 cyberattacks one of the main problems was the inability of the government and other structures to communicate with each other. Email services didn’t work because of spam, flooding and other network disruptions made by hackers. News sites were not able to post fresh news and thus were not able to communicate with the audience. Right now it would not be so easy to misuse any Estonian governmental site or communication system. Encryption, firewalls, digital signatures, two-factor authentication and other technologies are used for secure communication in our country.

Training

Training of Estonian government and IT companies to be ready to withstand a cyberattack had been increased since 2007. CERT-EE is an organisation that deals with cybersecurity incidents and manages the response to them in the country. Their main task is to regularly monitor the cybersecurity situation in our country and help governmental organisations and companies to stay secure in the network. They give advice on different types of security incidents and help to implement the best security solution. In addition to that, they understand that security does not end there. Citizens are also given advice and control in our country to stay secure in cyberspace. 

Policy

Estonian government understands that any cyberattack may be oriented on absolutely any citizen of our country no matter what office or position it occupies. For example, the 2007 cyber-attacks on Estonia have shown that some cyber-attacks may be sophisticated and oriented on banking systems to suspend accounts or cause major disruptions in the whole banking system but some are simple stupid phishing that may affect thousands of people who were not aware of the attack. Because of that our government security requirements are the same for any citizen. One of the tasks of NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence is to create new standards and security requirements. Any service providers on Estonian territory whose resources are vital for society are required by the government to manage their ICT risks. All government authorities must have a mandatory security baseline.  By such measures, Estonian government controls and keeps the country secured from cyberattacks. 

Analyzing the Estonian cybersecurity situation I can say that our country is indeed a well-secured state, which keeps developing in this field and it is reasonable. Regularly over 300 cyber incidents are recorded by Estonia’s national computer emergency response team which means that the cybersecurity in Estonia should not stop improving.

Sources:

https://e-estonia.com/how-estonia-became-a-global-heavyweight-in-cyber-security/

https://www.bbc.com/news/39655415

Week 9. Opposite examples of HCI

 

An example of bad design

Many inventions were meant to make our lives easier however not all of them succeeded in that because of bad ergonomics and interaction with the user. The same happens in IT where interaction between the user and the machine plays a major part. Some developers do not pay much attention to the design of their finished product or make it sophisticated intentionally which may bring the user experience to a disaster. One such example is the booking system of Irish low-cost airline Ryanair. 

 

Ryanair booking page

 

 

While booking, the user faces a drop-down menu with lots of important options hidden from his sight. Because of that if he would not check all the options, some extra costs will be applied. A bad user experience in such important cases as the booking is inapplicable because it requires planning of a trip and money spending what people find stressful and bad design makes the user experience even worse. I suppose the only reason why people are still using the services of this company is because of extremely low flight costs, otherwise, the bad user design would spoil the whole business for that company. 

Another bad example of the design is the Aliexpress search bar and its large variety of options. In that case, the options are not hidden in additional menus but their abundance worsens the user experience. Also, each product has additional specifications which often cannot be understood by trivial users.  Aliexpress website often presents too much useless information for the user and the important one gets lost. 

 

 Aliexpress laptop description.

 

However, a good example of search page design is Google. For many years Google tried to make its search engine extremely ergonomic, fast and understandable for any user with any experience. It does not offer search settings first place as many other searches do but tries to rely on its own algorithms which determine the most relevant answers to user's search queries. Because of that, the major part of users gets satisfied with the result in about 10 seconds.

 

 Google Advanced search

 

 For the more deep and specific search users always may try the more detailed search provided by Google, which also has a good design and it is easy to understand. In my opinion a good design and accessibility is the reason why Google is still the most popular search engine. Google Chrome web browser is also based on good user design combined with a fast and reliable application what makes it the most popular web browser amongst others.

 

 

 

 Sources:

Oleg B. (Aug 16, 2021). “27 Bad User Experience Examples”. Plerdy. (Access date: 28.03.2022). https://www.plerdy.com/blog/top-website-ux-and-design-mistakes/

JAYE HANNAH. (updated on: JULY 30, 2021). “10 Classic UX Design Fails That Teach Us How Not to Do UX”. CareerFoundry. (Access date: 28.03.2022). https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/10-classic-ux-design-fails/

 

 

 

Week 8. Depiction of an IT professional in Estonia

 

 In Estonia, professional IT specialists must have a wide variety of skills and knowledge to be eligible for working in a quickly developing information technology environment. One of the main qualities that a professional specialist must have is understanding the basics of how a computer works. Throughout 20 years many improvements and changes have been made in computers and other digital devices. Some parts of PC like processors have been changing significantly, some devices like smartphones have been invented and some devices like floppy disks became obsolete. Many less significant things have changed as well and now it is almost impossible to keep up with all the inventions in the IT field, so a good specialist in Estonia must have general knowledge of how devices and their parts work. The same can be said about programming. In those 20 years, Java frameworks and libraries had become immensely big, Python and JavaScript gained more popularity, but some languages became forgotten. Therefore as in Estonia, there are a lot of IT companies a wide general experience in many programming languages is required.
In the previous paragraph, I spoke about the quickly developing IT world and that a specialist must have a good general knowledge of everything, however, this is not enough to achieve great results. The most important in my opinion are problem-solving skills. IT is logic and consistency, those basics have not changed throughout 20 years, because they are the foundation of information technology. While most of the machines still rely on binary numbers those qualities are playing the most important part. IT specialist years of working are a great value for measuring how many problem-solving skills this individual has. Because the skills are a matter of time and passion.
So the third quality is the attitude of a specialist. He must have a passion to solve problems in IT, he must have an objective to improve his skills every day because most of the IT tasks are not easy, and possibly that is the main reason why IT specialists are so valuable in our country. During the last 20 years, more people got involved in IT bringing more competition to the field. So in comparison with IT specialists 20 years ago, you should also be active online to show that you really are a specialist and to not get lost among others who may probably be less experienced. At present, IT specialists must be active in forums and platforms such as Stack Overflow or GitHub to share knowledge and learn from others as well.
And the fourth quality is a profound education in the IT field. It is important because it may give a future specialist all features described above in one place and in a relatively short time. Throughout 20 years, education in the IT field had made considerable changes. Many new programmes are now offered and subjects became more oriented on what IT specialists are doing at their work. Modern subjects in Information Technology universities put a big emphasis on practice and large enterprises try to make education easier and fun by developing programs for learning, writing books and filming videos.
In conclusion, I can say that at present in Estonia, where the IT field is expanding quickly, any of the qualities mentioned above are important to be a professional IT specialist. Any newcomer in IT should be orienting on those qualities to reach proficiency in IT.

Week 7. Ten Commandments of Computer Ethics. Rule 7: Help keep flame wars under control

 

Anger on the Internet is a usual phenomenon when people start swearing at each other for a miserable reason. Such action is called flaming and can be done on purpose when discussing a controversial subject or because of an emotional outburst. Both are caused by anonymity on the Internet, but a good society must try to be sensible with any type of communication. Because of that, Netiquette rules were made in which rule number 7 says to keep the flame wars under control.

 

"An example of flaming"

 

 I think that this rule is correct because of the decision not to prohibit it completely but to keep the flaming under control. People need expression and many of us may find flaming fun and amusing to look at, but when it keeps on going and turns into a war of words, nobody will find it interesting, but rather problematic. For example, 4chan tries to deal with flaming but it often fails to do so. Many people visit imageboards to start flaming or troll someone, thus they got used to visiting such sites only to have fun, but not for constructive talking. The same I can say about controversial groups on Facebook or YouTube. A lot of flaming happens on official pages of platforms because it happens to be that the platform does everything in the teeth of its users. 

 

    "Dogs kill rats YouTube video. Massive flaming in the comment section. Some find it good some find it terrible"

 

 

A very good example is YouTube official site. Before YouTube hid dislike count it was clearly seen by the like/dislike ratio and by hateful comments how many flaming is being made there. By these examples, I want to show that too much flaming will cause only negative outcomes. People will start to massively hate the specified resource, and they will come on this resource just to spread more flaming there.

My personal experience when I was dealing with flaming happened and keeps happening in YouTube, Instagram and Vkontakte social networks. I do not find much flaming on Twitter or Reddit however, maybe because I don’t visit any controversial discussions there.

 

"Instagram flaming"

 

 

Nevertheless, controversial topics in YT and VK are full of hate and flaming and unfortunately, platform managers have not done anything vital so far to stop it. Yes, Instagram and YouTube try to control the words posted in comments but people often bypass these checks. I may highlight that the audience and its manners play a crucial part in the size of flaming. If you would start flaming in a polite community, people will not mention it or notice your bad manners and ask to be polite. In another community with a less sensible audience, the started flaming will be supported by others and will grow in size drastically. It's like lighting a flame in water and in gunpowder. One will not start, the other will explode in a moment. The useless flaming not only create a bad atmosphere but also monopolizes bandwidth for useless swearing. So after all those examples, I can say that it is really important to keep the flame wars under control.

Week 6. What impact does the copyleft have on choosing a software license for one's project?

 

     

        The traditional approach to copyright restricts the freedom to copy works, and in contrast, copyleft seeks to use copyright laws to expand the rights and freedom of people in IT. People use the concept of copyleft so that anyone in the world has the right to use, modify or distribute both the original work and works derived from it, and no one could restrict this right. In general, it can be said that under copyleft, all derivative works should be distributed under the same license as the original work.

The choice of the strong copyleft can be made by developers who want to make an open-source software and allow people to reuse, distribute and remix their work but to keep this development free for everyone. This technique may have a strong effect of making resources and programs free, especially if the software under this license became popular and highly demanded. It may have an effect only if it will be implemented while publishing the first, original program. In another case, for example, when remixing a project, it will not be as successful and probably another license that the project had will not allow doing so. In my opinion, most of the big companies that want to use copyleft will choose this option, because the bigger their project was the more hard work was made. I don't think that developers would want to give their creation to the world knowing that others may resell it and make money, while the developers followed a good manner of copyleft and did not. Therefore they would want others also to follow that idea of free sharing and refusal from sales and implement the strong copyleft.

The weak copyleft choice may be based on the same reasons as the choice of strong copyleft, but with the addition of some exceptions. Especially in the case of creating software libraries. In this case, it more depends on how the product will be used than following the strict rules as in the previous type of copyleft license.

The smaller the project is, the lesser work was made and the easier the developer may let his project go. That means small projects may choose no copyleft at all. This option brings most of the freedom for the users because it allows them to freely use code, remix it and make a profit out of it. This may be the case with enthusiastic people who write small pieces of code, experiment with them or really generous developers who devote their software directly to society.

 

 

 Used materials:

(May 10, 2021). “All About Copyleft Licenses”. Fossa. (Access date: 06.03.2022). https://fossa.com/blog/all-about-copyleft-licenses/

 

(February 09, 2022). “Difference between Copyright and Copyleft in FOSS”. Geeksforgeeks. (Access date: 07.03.2022). https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/difference-between-copyright-and-copyleft-in-foss/

 

Ayala Goldstein. (October 24, 2020). “Open Source Copyleft Licenses: All You Need to Know ”. WhitesourceSoftware. (Access date: 07.03.2022). https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/resources/blog/open-source-copyleft-licenses/

 

 

 

 

 

 

Week 5. Opinion about copyright

 

 

As the World Wide Web was invented in 1989 and web browsers started to appear in the next decade, a new technology of information exchange was introduced to humanity. It gave people access to text resources, films, music that others have uploaded to the Internet, it allowed file exchange or sending of private messages to friends or colleagues. But as copyright holders joined the Internet, the problems have started. It is obvious that businessmen who possess copyrighted material would want to make more profit, especially in such a popular place, so copyright rules started to seize the freedom of the Internet.

In my opinion, copyright rules that exist today have failed to be fair a long time ago. I would like to point out that the ones that make copyright rules tend to protect only large companies - copyright owners, but never mention how fair those rules would be for everybody else. So, copyright rules are now oriented towards making even more profit for the ones who already makes a great deal of money. I absolutely agree with the Swedish Pirate Party members and authors of this book that copyright rules that we have now must be rethought and reconstructed. The use of private message exchange is now at risk as never. Governments and officials are on the side of the large companies and one day they may stop thinking of human privacy in favor of companies. In addition, making messages non-private would even attract governments as they will have a possibility to track criminal activity. I also agree that companies prefer to enlarge their copyright and other capitalist importance even if they do not have a foundation for such actions. And because of that consumers’ rights to use or copy works are becoming even more miserable. 

It would be nice to say that we need to fight with the breaking of human moral rights and make copyright rules more sensible. But I do not think that the idea would gain much support. After I have noticed the increase of copyright rules' importance on the internet in 2019, I started to present facts to the people I used to talk to and listen to their opinion. Unfortunately, most of them agreed with the copyright statements preventing individuals from using content and consumers from sharing it without permission of the owner. I do not blame people, but I think that they have already lost their freedom on the Internet because of the copyright owners and their bad intentions. Companies are not stupid, they study their consumers. And they make everything possible to extract profit and to keep doing the same for a long time. So all their steps are careful, sometimes left unnoticed, but in the longer perspective, their actions bring total destruction to human freedom on the Internet. For example, they study how much people earn and how much people are ready to spend on services. If YouTube would have proposed its premium subscription back in 2010, people would not have accepted it. But with the years, YouTube started to increase the number of advertisements and enforced more and more copyright restrictions so that now it is impossible to watch a video without terrible 30 seconds of ads, download anything from YouTube or use copyrighted materials without spending money first. All other services have also caught up with this trend, some of them are making money out of literally rubbish. The internet becomes a big playground for the capitalists and a jail for any individual endeavor. Therefore I am very pessimistic about any changes in copyright rules for now. I think people have to rethink their usage of the internet, and it will come after some time when people will get tired to pay so much for nothing. People must understand that copyright rules are not rights of justice and equity. They lead us astray and will continue to do so.

 

 

Used materials:

(The book itself) http://falkvinge.net/wp-content/uploads/large/The%20Case%20For%20Copyright%20Reform%20(2012)%20Engstrom-Falkvinge.pdf

Christopher McFadden. (July 03, 2020). “YouTube's History and Its Impact on the Internet”. Interesting Engineering website. (Access date: 27.02.2022). https://interestingengineering.com/youtubes-history-and-its-impact-on-the-internet

“Copyright Timeline: A History of Copyright in the United States”. Association of Research Libraries. (Access date: 27.02.2022). https://www.arl.org/copyright-timeline/