Kirill Kurkin's blog for the E-SPEAIT course

In this post I would like to review the 2004 Information Society Report to the Parliament of Finland by Pekka Himanen . This report briefly describes what is information society, what challenges Finland and Europe may face during the adoption of information society model and how these challenges could be overcome. As the report is also a vision of the future in some way, I would like to evaluate, what has come true from these predictions and what hasn't. Though, I will mostly focus on Estonia, as it is my home country and I can fully observe the life of the country from the inside. Taken into account that Estonia is in Europe, the information given in the report covers Estonia as well.  First of all, I would like to state that Estonia has definitely become a great information society country with the developed tertiary sector of the economy, even though manufacturing and agriculture also play an important role. The main focus is put on information technology, which can be seen in ...

For many centuries people have exchanged news via written media. With the invention of the Internet the principle of news exchange changed quite a lot, though traditional printed media still exists. In this post I would like to describe how blogs influenced written media, journalism and news exchange in general.    1. Information exchange speed and availability It is obvious that the most important advantage of blogs is the fast speed news are delivered with and their availability, if we compare it with the traditional printed media. As I mentioned above, printed media still exists, though many people now tend to refuse from it, as they can immediately get necessary information and the most recent news from social media and blogs. In addition, the digital information is absolutely free, unlike many magazines and newspapers that need paid subscription. One another great feature of blogs that influenced news exchange speed is RSS feeds. It is now much easier for news agencies to...

With the rapid development of internet services and technologies in the 20th century, many technologies were later replaced with more powerful and convenient ones. However, there are some technologies that managed to survive to our days. In this post I would like to describe two such technologies - the one that was replaced by a better alternative, and the one that survived to our days and is still in use.  1. NCP (Network Control Protocol) As you may know, the predecessor of today's Internet was ARPAnet created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and launched in 1969. This network was created in response to the potential threat of nuclear attack from the Soviet Union, so in case of an emergency U.S military leaders could stay in contact with each other. ARPAnet used Network Control Protocol , an early predecessor to TCP/IP. This protocol was developed in 1970 with the objective of interconnecting computers with Interface Message Processor (IMP) between various sites...