E-SPEAIT

Book cover In this week’s assignment we’re reading Chapter 2 from the book “The Case for Copyright Reform” by Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engström. I’m going to write some thoughts about Chapter 2 and its ideas. The Chapter 2 “A Constructive Proposal for Copyright Reform” suggests some ideas for a copyright reform. It states that a big problem is the privacy. It is near impossible to enforce limited file sharing without surveilling everybody’s private communication. But that can’t be the solution: “The right to privacy is more important than the right of big media companies to continue to make money in the same way as before, because the latter right does not even exist.”   The text goes on with the proposals of the political party. I strongly agree with the first proposal called “Moral rights unchanged”. It says that the moral right of the author should always stay with the author. It shouldn’t be possible so sell the moral right. I actually learned about that in my home ...

Source: Pixabay.com This week’s topic it the report from Pekka Himanen “Challenges of the Global Information Society” from 2004. In this report, Himanen makes predictions for the future in regard to the business world and social developments. I am going to talk about some interesting aspects in that report and discuss, whether some of his predictions became true or not. Right at the start the authors identifies some global trends, that he thinks will definitely continue (or even get bigger) in the next few years (page 2). Some of these assumptions were spot on, for example the global division of labor. He says that routine productions will move to China and India. The most developed countries won’t rely on routine jobs anymore and will dive more in the creative fields. “The most developed countries cannot rely on routine jobs in the future, so they must specialize in creative work that is based on higher expertise and work to improve productivity both through increased added value ...

Source: Dav, 2018, https://eastsidegamers.net/2018/a-brief-history-of-the-mmorpgs/ The blogging task for this week is to write about a short blog analysis about a new media component and how it has influenced its area. I am going to write about the Gaming Industry, in particular, how MMOs have influecned the gaming industry. MMO stands for massive multiplayer online games. The earliest version of a MMO started decades ago in form of text based Multiplayer User Dungeons (MUDs). A popular game was Colossal Cave Adventure, which was released in 1975 [1].  It was highly influenced by the tabletop fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) [2].  Even though MMOs have been around for a long time, they didn’t gain that much popularity until the internet has risen to fame. But games in general have been around for very long time! Did you know, that the very first board game was invented 3500 before Christ? This game was invented in predynastic and first dynast burials in Egypt [3]...

The blogging task for this week is to write about two technologies from the earlier history of the Internet (before the Web, aka pre 1991 period) – one which has become obsolete and been replaced by more modern things, and another which survives to this day. I am going to combine these two technologies and present and old one, which has been replaced by a more modern one. But let’s start chronological: source: pixabay.com (free images) The Network-Control-Program (NCP) NCP was the Arpanets main protocol. If you don’t know what Arpanet is, I’ll give you a short introduction to that. Otherwise, you can just skip the next paragraph. Arpanet stood as a foundation of the new Internet. The idea was “to build a network that established communication links between multiple resource-sharing mainframe supercomputers that were miles apart”. [1] By the end of 1969 a connection had been established between four nodes. Initially, the information shared was using circuit-switching, but its ef...