Blog

Beware, these texts weren't really meant to be read. But putting thoughts into text is often helpful in many ways.

Some of the posts here were made in the context of University courses (for example the ones from the Estonian IT College's Social, Professional and Ethical Aspects of IT (A.k.a the course with the longest name, or SPEAIT), but some others might just be some personal ramblings.

A lot of posts this week focused on the impossibility for the impaired user to move some parts of his body, resulting in the inability to use mice or keyboards. Therefore, I wanted to have a view on different kinds of disability, and ended up searching specific devices used for blind people. The wee...

DISCLAIMER! As I’m planning to try one of these distributions on bare metal quite soon, this article gave me the opportunity to look for the specific differences between them. Because of this, it is much more lengthy than usual and might go a little bit too much into some details that can seem irrel...

The main values of the hacker ethic were put on paper by Steven Levy in 1984, so almost 40 (forty!) years ago. Needless to say that the extent to which those values stood the test of time is quite impressive. When reading them, I was surprised to see how much these matched my own values, and the val...

Censorship

Banning certain words from discussions can sound like an idea from a totalitarian regime. However, we have seen some automatic censorship of potentially harmful words in some messengers or forums for long, and this is going even further.
According to a recent article from The Intercept...

When we talk about ergonomics, we think about whether something is easy or practical to use, but we often overlook the fact that bad ergonomics can have much more serious implications in terms of risks. In this post, we will see through two examples how ergonomics and user-friendliness can impact ri...

An IT professional in France is probably the same as an IT professional in most European countries. In addition, my experience of the professional IT sector (ie. in the workplace) is quite close to zero, so this post is probably making a lot of assumptions.

Like anywhere else, there are people doi...

Netiquette, or net etiquette, is a set of ten rules written by Virginia Shea in 1995, that should be kept in mind while interacting with other people on the Internet. Despite the age of this text, it is still extremely relevant today, even with the massive evolution in the use of Internet we’ve s...

Copyleft is often presented as the opposite of copyright. We’ll see to which extent this can be true, but first let’s stress out that it isn’t 100% accurate (at least to me): in a sense, the total opposite of copyright is the public domain. Copyleft can be seen as a range of licenses providing a way...