AK Blog on Fintech

My experience with IT professionals in Estonia is coming from pure "business consumer" side: normally i have a business problem that needs resolving and IT is one of the tools, among many others, that can be used to resolve it. Therefore i will be outlining my view current level of IT professionals in Estonia from this angle. Most likely biased and limited with one person's experience, working with internal IT departments of several companies, plus several external IT development companies. But nonetheless practical experience. One of the strongest sides i see almost universally - is the no-nonsense approach: IT professionals clearly want to understand the business problem, not afraid to ask questions, and looking for very practical (efficient and fast) ways to solve the problem. To the point that this can be almost described as "growth hacking it". The waterfall approach, traditional for historical software companies in the past, is almost not used anymore....

CopyLEFT, distinguished from CopyRIGHT, is the practice of offering people the right to freely distribute copies and modified versions of a work with the stipulation that the same rights be preserved in derivative works created later.[1] Copyleft software licenses are considered protective or reciprocal, as contrasted with permissive free-software licenses.[2] ( Wiki ) Essentially, Copyleft is a part of an umbrella licenses used for different ways to protect free distribution of authors’ work with several levels of protection and couple of restrictions, as Copyleft licence is a protective license, thus limiting some parameters of its use: prohibition of appropriation (cannot make the source code “closed”, it must remain open). requirement to distribute derivative work under the same license And from these restrictions we can see that the use of Copyleft, although is very noble and well-intended for the good of the public, has its own limitations. We take our knowledge from Wi...

Teema 6. Review and comments of Pirate Party proposals to Copyright laws. The source of the document is located here:  The Case For Copyright Reform (2012) Engstrom-Falkvinge.pdf The main proposals are outlined in the Chapter 2 of above document. I start with outlining my general approach to Pirate Party proposals: with most of them I do agree with in spirit (if not always to the letter). The progress of humanity was hampered on many (well documented) occasions by corporations. Corporations used existing Copyright laws to prevent innovations from being used by the public, due to the potential risk of damaging their revenues. Laws are created in the interest of the people However, not all approaches suggested by Pirate Party I can fully agree with, but we can review them one by one below. Moral rights unchanged “Credit is where credit due” - no arguments, authors suggest to leave as is and i fully agree. Free non-commercial sharing Positives are undeniable in usin...

Ruleset described by Virginia Shea makse a lot of practical sense. As the key point from where Internet have started - was to share expert knowledge. Years ago when living in London, we had an online forum for russian-speakers in the UK which started as the place where people with some experience in UK could share information and advice with people who recently arrived and did not know much. This was extremely useful source of quick advice, life-hacks, even psychological support for people in new environment. But something that started as simple place for support for local russian speakers, after a year had became a great place where a lot of smart people communicated daily, shared stories, opinions and established real life friendships. And the main reason why smart people with smart jobs and busy lives had spent some part of their time communicating on this internet platform was due to simple rules enforced by moderators: no swearing, no unpolite behavior, no “anonymous comme...

The report itself can be found on this link: https://web.archive.org/web/20170221105053/https://www.eduskunta.fi/FI/tietoaeduskunnasta/julkaisut/Documents/tuvje_1+2004.pdf Indeed the Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen has a quite solid approach to this work and he brought quite wide aspects of society into his review. However i cannot help but notice that his approach lacks one very important aspect - realities and implications of those challenges to real life are left almost unattended. Philosopher writes for politicians, what sense of reality are you waiting for? From which of those two? All right, we are not in 2020, so let's have a look at what has changed since 2004. Himanen list following main global trends that will affect us in the next 20 years. 1. Increasing international tax competition 2. The new global division of labour 3. Population ageing 4. Increasing pressures on the welfare society 5. The second phase of the information society 6. The...

The subject for this week’s homework is the effect that one of the new media components has on its field. There are tons of published articles and gigabytes of text written on each of the most known areas of new media: chat rooms, social networks, blogs, wiki- effects. But all of these different New Medias  have one common subject - us, humans. What is the effect of New Media on human behavior, our thinking and addictions? Therefore i decided to look at this aspect mostly in this blog post. How our thinking is affected by new media and are we benefiting from positive effects of new media or suffering from its negative influences? And is it possible to have a balance between these two? Obviously, this post is based on my own experiences, preferences and observations. And while i will try to be objective for the sake of brevity i will limit my post to only three most popular categories of new media alliance: Wikipedia, YouTube and Social Networks. Positives: Wikipedia and si...

The topic of this week, is the early stage of the internet and two items from that era: one that is still in use or at least familiar to users and the other one that is completely dead. Back in nearly 90’ties, the word “internet” was still associated with “TTU lab” and weird sounds coming from dial-up modems available to a few lucky ones at home. From these long forgotten times comes something that is still alive today: MUME.  MUME is one of the early MUDs, Based on Tolkien’s books, my favorite game and the sole reason I speak and write English today. made me read all Talkien's books and find even those that were not translated and read them also. For those who are completely unaware of what MUDs are, it is a type of game that happens completely inside your head. The only things that you see on your computer screen are lines of text jumping at you:   *a Dwarf* is here, riding a mountain mule. Message like this brings in your head, an image of a ve...