E-SPEAIT 2021 - Jan Markus Üprus

Hacking, the art of identifying weaknesses in a computer system or network to exploit the security to gain access to personal or business data. Every hacker has their own ideals and motivations why they do the things that they do, whether it be ethically or unethically. Sometimes even the smallest ideals can be the difference between making a hacker a wanted criminal and an ethical penetration tester. In this blog I am going to talk about the common ideals of hackers and their practical applicability in the modern world, meaning the 2020s. So here is a list of the common ideals of hackers: Passion Freedom Work ethic Passion If you have ever worked on a project that involves coding something then you should know the rewarding feeling of finishing the project. You get to look at your code and see how hours upon hours of work finally all led to something great. This is what passion is all about. That feeling of joy after working on something and in my opinion it is one of the most importa

When the Internet was first created censorship and privacy were not that big of a deal, since hackers and other malicious users who wanted to get access to private information didn't really exist back then. But a couple of years later the US created acts to censorship the Internet and more organizations started to secure their networks better to create more private communication networks. In this post I am going to talk about two examples of Internet censorship and privacy and a little about the consequences of what happened. Censorship A former Google Engineer, James Damore wrote an internal document for Google employees that openly discussed Google's diversity policies, citing research on average gender differences between men and women. Before it got spread around the Internet the responses were varied. Some agreed and some disagreed, but there really wasn't any serious backlash. But right after it got released to the wide world rational discussion became impossible abou

 In 2007 the first ever widely acknowledged cyber war took place in Estonia and at the peak of these attacks 58 government, newspaper and bank websites were down at the same time. Prior to this incident cyber security had not been taken as a serious threat to a country and it's citizens. There was not common code of conduct against such attacks and nobody knew if a cyber attack against a NATO nation would activate collective defense under Article 5. It wasn't even clear if a state could legitimately respond to cyber-attacks. Now let's jump 10 years into the future and Estonia is known around the world as a cyber security heavy-weight and advises a lot of nations around the world about cyber security related matters. The NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre of Excellence (CCD COE) is also located in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia and it focuses on research, development, training and education in both the technical and non-technical aspects of cyber-defense. Let's take

 Ergonomics can make or break a product, especially in IT. All producers and manufacturers should strive to make their product user-friendly and enable the user to easily and logically use their device. In this blog I am going talk about one example of bad ergonomics that lead to innocent people dying and a good one that saves millions of lives every time it detects something. Towards the end of Iran-Iraq war in 1988, the United States and Iran were in an undeclared war and the USS Vincennes was in the middle of a confrontation with Iranian gunboats in the Persian Gulf when it accidentally shot down a civilian aircraft mistaking it for an enemy aircraft. So why didn't the US ship's radar system have some kind of method to separate hostile and civilian planes? In fact it did, but it was really bad... So you know in RTS or MOBA games where you click on a unit and it shows information about the specific unit and it's statistics. Well, the USS Vincennes had a similar system, bu

 So in this blog I am going to talk about how I would describe an IT professional in Estonia. The depiction may not portray real life to the best extent, because it is from my point of view, but I hope at least that I won't totally give IT professionals a false depiction. So without further ado I'll start with the qualities of an IT professional in Estonia. Qualities So the major qualities an IT professional in any country has to have are adaptability, the ability to work in a team, the ability to communicate very well and the desire to learn more about your field every day and be interested in IT in general. In Estonia all of these also apply in the depiction of an IT professional, except maybe the communication part for some personnel. This also makes working in a team harder and therefore decreases the overall productivity of the workplace. That is also why TalTech has communication courses for everyone, so that people who are not that good at communicating would develop tha

When you are online you want to make a good impression of yourself to other people. This is especially important since everything you do online will stay there permanently. Social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc.) have also set unrealistic beauty and fitness standards that make ordinary people believe that the people on the internet portray how they should look. But since usually you can't see the other person who you are either chatting with or otherwise communicating with, how do first impressions take shape in the online world? The first thing everyone notices about someone on the internet is their writing, in particular their grammar and spelling. Let's say that you are in an online game lobby and you have paired up with a total stranger. If the only way to communicate is to use text chat, then usually the first impressions are made when you say hello, good luck, have fun, etc. If your team mate does not respond or uses langua