HCI – difference between a disaster and a miracle?

Human-Computer interaction

The user experience of a system or a program is something that everyday users might take for granted, depending on their needs. Today's mainstream applications and devices usually feature carefully thought out designs to make the interaction between man and machine as seamless as possible (with a few exceptions). However, in some applications, HCI can quickly turn into a life-or-death matter.

When it goes wrong

In aviation, a lot can happen during a brief period of confusion. Air Inter flight ITF148, an Airbus A320, was on approach to Strasbourg Airport when the pilots forgot to switch the autopilot mode from Vertical Speed Mode to Flight Angle Path mode for landing. The pilots then intended to set the aircraft's autopilot to a normal 3.3-degree descent angle and input the number "33" to the system. However, in the Vertical Speed Mode, this 33 translated to a descent of 3300 feet (or around 1000 meters) per minute. This happened in the mountains at night, and there were low, fairly dense clouds, so the pilots had no visual cue of how fast they were descending. Shortly after that, the aircraft crashed into the mountains, and no survivors were found. In response, Airbus changed the way their system displays descent speed, which is now displayed as a four-digit number instead of just two to prevent confusion.

ITF148. Wikipedia

There have been other similar incidents over the years, most of which were met with aerospace companies improving their designs to what they are today. Hopefully, by now, they've gotten it right, or at least right enough.

When it goes right

Generally, good HCI is achieved when the user, its needs, capabilities and limits are considered in the system's design. Staying on the topic of aviation, the General Dynamics F-16 fighter jet is completely fly-by-wire (meaning that the pilot input is given to a computer, which then controls the aircraft based on how it interprets the input). This feature allowed the designers to incorporate something called the Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System, which, as the name suggests, avoids colliding with the ground. This is especially important in fighter jets, where the pilots could potentially pass out mid-maneuver due to extreme G-forces. To date, it has reportedly saved 10 pilots and 9 aircraft in total.

The USAF released footage of this system in action a few years ago:

Conclusion

HCI can potentially make or break a bad situation, especially in crucial applications such as aviation. The human aspect of a system is a very important thing to consider.

References

https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19920120-0

https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/autogcas.html

Last 20 years of the IT sector in Estonia briefly

IT professionals and Estonia

For as long as I remember, IT people have been highly valued in the Estonian economy. While tech-savvy people looking for work in line with their interests have generally been a fairly common occurrence here, some events in our country's history have deepened the need for truly skilled IT specialists.

Today, Estonia has made itself somewhat known in the world (at least among people in the IT field) by trying to be the most digitized country in the world. It has worked somewhat, although some of the claims circulating the internet are false (like the "wifi anywhere in the country, even forests" thing, who thought of that one). This goal has greatly increased the demand for IT professionals in Estonia over the years.

How did it start?

Estonia's recent history is entangled with tech, becoming the first country to allow digital voting as early as 2005. It was no small effort, and the voting system itself is inherently very security-focused, so a considerable workforce versed in cyber security was required.

The cyber security focus escalated massively after 2007 when Estonia suffered the then-second largest cyber attack ever recorded. This attack displayed the potential vulnerability of a country, unprotected from potential cyber threats. As a response, Estonia took up bolstering its cyber security capabilities, creating even more demand for workers in the field. Today, Estonia houses the NATO cyber defence hub CCDCOE and has a separate branch in its military dedicated to cyber defence (KÜVJ).

From a non-defence perspective, Tallinn has been dubbed the Silicon Valley of Europe, with the number of startups per person surpassing any other European country.

What does this mean for an IT professional?

The range of jobs a professional can find here is pretty colourful. In CVKeskus.ee, as I'm writing this, there are 188 job offers in the IT category, with the oldest offers being just under a month old. A lot of them offer the chance for working from home, and almost all of them are well-paid by Estonian standards. In addition, a lot of professionals prefer to change jobs every ~3 years to keep the pay competitive by market standards. Some of the offers are listed in English, but most of them require at least some English language skills anyway.

Common expectations for a worker in the field

In addition to whatever skill set is needed to complete the technical job, good English and overall communication skills are highly valued. As the crowd in Tallinn becomes more international, the Russian language loses a little bit of its importance in the workplace compared to the past, however, it is still a plus.

Comparing past expectations and conditions to current ones, we can see that the amount of jobs has grown, but workers are also much less "loyal to their workplace". I see it as a good thing because it incentivizes employers to make working for them more beneficial for the worker as well. In addition, the importance of the Russian language has declined, with English mostly taking over in the IT sector. Skills with newer version control technologies like Git have become almost required to facilitate more efficient development. Formal education in the field has lost a little bit of its importance, however, it is still heavily considered as a factor in hiring (although experience and overall competency outweigh a certificate – if you make it to the interview).

Conclusion

Estonia's strides towards digitization (successful or unsuccessful, depending on the take) have undoubtedly facilitated the emergence of a fairly IT-focused job market that has changed and evolved quite a bit over the years.

Online interaction and power abuse

Moderation

The Internet is vast and mostly open. Its userbase is comprised of extremely different people in almost every way – and it shows. Massive flame wars, disagreements, propaganda, trolls and other similar issues plague most online communities. This is why moderation is almost always present in every such community – it's a must, and doubly so in communities dealing with relevant/serious topics. For this purpose, communities use the fittingly-named moderators to keep the discussion at least somewhat civil.

As moderators are people themselves, they are vulnerable to being biased or unfair. They are usually known members of the community, chosen for their integrity and overall contribution to the community, so the moderator is somewhat of an honorary position in these communities. Still, not every person in this position is always fit for it.

Power abuse

The job of a moderator is to stay objective. When one of them does not agree with what is said in the community they're supposed to be protecting, what should they do? The answer is obviously simple but often does not match up with reality. A moderator abusing their power is a dangerous thing – and will warp the perception of their community's userbase substantially if not caught. 

For example, in 2016, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, known on Reddit as u/spez admitted to using his engineer-level access for editing comments that criticized him, replacing his name/username with the usernames of a pro-Donald Trump subreddit, r/the_donald. He was met with severe criticism from both the community of his website and his own community team.

Why?

Being a moderator is essentially an unpaid job. In all communities except the largest like huge social media networks, moderators are simply respected members of the community and spend some of their free time on this work. This poses some potential problems:

• If the moderator does not have much free time due to being an overall active person, the quality of moderation will suffer because the moderator is simply not available.
• If the moderator does have a lot of free time to work for the community, where does this free time come from? Can we be sure they are fit for the job of controlling what the members of the community see, and more importantly, what they don't?

These problems are very nuanced and there is no straight answer. Most of the time, it has to be handled on a case-by-case basis.

Conclusion

Moderating is an important job in online communities, but it is almost always a hobby. Extreme care must be taken when selecting moderators because a power-abusing one is a dangerous thing.

Copyleft, its forms and choosing a license

Copyleft

First of all, what exactly is copyleft? The name comes from a pun on the phrase "Copyright – all rights reserved", turning it into "Copyleft – all rights reversed". Copyleft was born due to the ageing licensing laws of copyright, which were largely hard and impractical to use on software, especially the open-source kind. It is distinct from copyright mostly in the sense that it is generally much more lenient in terms of distribution and modification. Of course, different variations exist, but this difference remains.

Variations

Strong copyleft

Strong copyleft licenses are characterized by the demand that all derivations from the original licensed work retain the license of the original. This means that nothing derived from a strong copyleft-licensed creation can be made proprietary. Integrating such modifications into hybrid systems with other kinds of software is much more difficult under a strong copyleft license, however, it is the most beneficial for end-users. Publishing the source code of the creation is also required.

The most common strong copyleft licenses are:

• GNU GPL
• Affero GPL, which is generally similar to the GNU GPL; but additionally deals with the SaaS loophole.

A strong copyleft license may be chosen if the creator does not want anyone deriving their proprietary software from their creation. 

Weak copyleft

A weak copyleft license, like the strong license, requires that any modifications of the original work retain the license. However, some exceptions are set to make software integration easier. This is especially useful in creating code libraries. Like the strong copyleft, the weak copyleft requires the publishing of source code.

Examples of weak copyleft licenses:

• GNU LGPL
• EUPL, can be considered a "variable" license
• MPL

A weak copyleft license would be a wise choice if the software is meant for further development and integration.

Non-copyleft/permissive license

A permissive license is the most lenient of the three, not requiring any sort of license inheritance. It does also not enforce publishing the source code. This sort of license gives the most freedom to the developers.

Examples of permissive licenses:

• BSD license
• MIT license

This sort of license may be good for some component-level programs such as drivers.

Conclusion

The copyleft licenses greatly help in regulating the world of open-source software. There is a multitude of licenses to choose from, at least one of which will be fit for whatever project a developer may have.

Copyright laws, Christian Engström and Rick Falkvinge and their take on it

Copyright reforms – are they needed?

Copyrights are a relatively new thing in the history of humanity, with the first legislative text, the "Statute of Anne" being passed in 1710. Since then, the laws around copyrights have continually changed somewhat over the years. However, since the dawn of the age of the Internet, it is fairly clear that the copyright laws of the past are often hard to apply and even downright terrible for the common consumer. Seeking to fix this problem, a few key changes to the laws were proposed by Christian Engström and Rick Falkvinge in their 2012 publication "The Case for Copyright Reform".

Main points of the proposal

The suggested changes to the legislation were as follows:

1. Keep the moral rights as they are.

An author should keep the right to be recognized as the author, and nobody else should have this right.

2. Keep copyrights for commercial purposes.

The copyright laws should keep existing for commercial purposes for fairly obvious reasons – to keep people from profiting off of others' work. However, this shouldn't apply to any kind of non-commercial sharing of files, especially seeing as trying to regulate that would be in direct violation of fundamental rights, like privacy. There would be no way to regulate it without snooping through private exchanges of information.

In reality, this was already the case before the Internet – anything you could feasibly do as an ordinary person wouldn't violate copyright. However, as the Internet came to be and evolved to what it is today, so did copyright laws, and not for the better. This is one of the reasons why reform is necessary – to specify that copyright laws should only apply to copying for commercial reasons. Other copying for non-profit oriented sharing should not be illegal.

3. 20 years of commercial monopoly.

The entertainment industry of today, though, largely relies on the commercial exclusivity of copyrighted works. This shouldn't change, of course, but the protection time of copyrighted works is... long, to say the least – a lifetime plus 70 years. This is far longer than any reasonable window for earnings on the works, which is why the proposal wants to shorten the protection time to 20 years from publication.

I think 20 years is a little on the short side, but it's still better than the life + 70 years system.

4. Registration after 5 years.

Another issue is that there exist copyrights on works, which don't have a clear owner, or the owner is impossible to locate. These works then provide no commercial value to the owner, yet are still covered by copyright, making them impossible to reuse or distribute.

The proposed solution is that automatic copyright protection should be kept working, but it should only last for 5 years. If the author desires to extend this period of commercial exclusivity, it must be registered.

I like this change, it's a good way to stop the copyright clutter from piling up while not introducing much hassle to authors who intend to publish their works.

5. Free sampling

The current copyright legislation limits a lot of artists who work with samples – musicians and filmmakers, for example. Clear limitations and exceptions should be made to facilitate the creation of parodies, remixes and the like. 

Anything that facilitates easier production of parodies, remixes and other creative work based on something else is good in my books.

6. A ban on DRM

DRM or Digital Rights Management stands for multiple different technologies that aim to limit people's abilities to copy and redistribute works, even if it's legal. The proposal states that it should always be legal to bypass these DRMs and that an outright ban on DRM technologies that limit legal copying should be considered.

I think this is a logical step, as the rest of the changes would be quite meaningless if corporations would still be able to write their own laws on what we can and cannot do even if it would be legal otherwise.

On the proposition as a whole

It seems to me that the proposal is quite reasonable. I must admit I am not very well versed in terms of legislation and copyright laws, but the suggested changes all seem within reason to me (much more so than the current laws, anyway).

Board/tabletop games, their virtual counterparts and their effects on each other

Computer games and their roots in the tabletop

When we talk about modern computer games, the first things that come to mind are massive, visually pleasing AAA titles, incredibly complex in both development and maintenance. Doubly so, if you consider the fact that most of them feature some kind of online multiplayer system. Their ancestors, board games, continue to exist to this day though, and keep evolving, influencing and taking influence from video games constantly.

The early days

A lot of the games from the infancy of the video game era were similar to tabletop games, with a lot of text-based roleplaying games and MUDs that took inspiration from classics like D&D, borrowing elements like dice rolls and various cards that each affected gameplay in its own way. Many games also use hexagonal or chessboard-like grids for their playing field.

Early text-based LOTR RPG, with a surprising amount of player freedom. Image source

A surprising development

It would be fairly expected, then, that video games would eventually push board games out of the market, especially with the advent of smartphones and their convenience – and for a while, that was the case. When smartphones came around, the "casual" board games like Scrabble, Pictionary, Uno etc. did see a major drop in popularity, and have not recovered since. It should be noted, though, that while the physical form of these board games might be dying, it's not like the games themselves are "dead" – the tabletop form is just used less because the same simple games are available as apps, some even official (and if you don't like the official ones, hundreds of clones exist).

Unexpectedly though, the interest in the more strategical, thoughtful (also known as German style) board games like Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne actually increased. With deeply strategic video games being fairly large players in today's entertainment market, many people that enjoy this type of game tend to also like strategic board games. The experience of chatting with friends over an engaging tabletop game is something you can't quite achieve or emulate in video games. These games can vary, with some being co-op, while others make the players compete against each other (with varying degrees of frustration, with the scale varying from "mildly frustrating" to "a hellish chimera of Monopoly and UNO").

In the world of games, the student has become the teacher. While in the early days video games drew inspiration from board games, the opposite is now true. With many board games adopting video game mechanics to varying degrees of success, the market has become truly colorful. From board game adaptions of popular video games like DOOM, The Witcher, and Fallout, to somewhat original titles like Terraforming Mars, there is something for almost everyone.

DOOM board game. Who could've guessed? Going on the bucket list. Image source

Personal experience

While I haven't ventured into the world of board games much myself (haven't bought them, that is), a lot of my friends are enthusiasts and have introduced me to their world. I have to say, I really enjoyed the Lovecraftian Cthulhu: Death May Die, a fairly classical dungeon crawler-type game. In the game, the players co-operate to clear out a dungeon and stop one of the Old Ones. I enjoyed the difficulty of it, and the possibilities of coming up with weird and outlandish strategies, that might be stupid enough to work.

Box art. Image source

I also enjoyed city(stable?)-building games like Unstable Unicorns, Citadels and Everdell. Their competitive nature is very fun, once the basics/game mechanics become clear, and they aren't nearly as frustrating for the fellow players as some classics. Looking at you, Monopoly.

Conclusion

The history of these two distinct, yet connected types of entertainment is heavily intertwined. While video games have mostly taken over the market, board games still fill a niche that is nigh impossible to achieve virtually, and thankfully are here to stay.

References:

https://www.mcvuk.com/development-news/how-video-games-both-killed-and-improved-the-board-game/

Early web technologies: the survivors and the forgotten

Circuit-switched networks

Before the advent of packet switching in its modern form, other ways of sending data were considered and used. Designed in 1878, one of these methods was circuit switching. The idea of it is fairly simple – a dedicated point-to-point connection is established to exchange information. This method was widely used for phone calls, and the use case survives to this day.

Organic network switches. A PBX in Seattle, 1952. Wikipedia

In modern circuit-switched networks, a connection is established through several switches. When data is being transmitted, no other network data can use these switches due to the continuous, dedicated connection. In a packet-based network, the data is broken into small packets, which then take the most efficient route possible at the time of sending. This means packets from the same transmission can take different paths and don't need a dedicated connection. This makes circuit-switched networks inherently more reliable, but far less versatile and scalable.

While obsolete in the sense of the Internet and its usage in it, some other networks still use it. In the telephone world, some hybrid systems are still in use, but VoIP is gradually being adopted. Whether circuit switching will become completely obsolete in the near future or not is up to debate.

TCP

TCP or Transmission Control Protocol is a connection-oriented data transmission protocol. Developed in May 1974, it is one of the main protocols used in the Internet today. It performs multiple functions, such as:

• Determines how to divide data into packets before transmission

• Sends and receives packets

• Performs flow control

• Handles transmission errors, such as dropped or corrupted packets by retransmitting them

• Packet acknowledgement

It was developed by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, for which they received the Turing award in 2004.

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. Photo source

Today, the TCP protocol works in tandem with the UDP (User Datagram Protocol) protocol. TCP handles the use cases where reliability is needed thanks to its error detection and acknowledgement system, while UDP covers things where speed and latency are key such as video calls. Together, they are the two main data transfer protocols of the Internet.

References:

https://www.lifewire.com/circuit-switching-vs-packet-switching-3426726

https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/definition/TCP