ICS0006 Rashad Gafarli Blog

  The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age is a book released in 2001, and written by Pekka Himanen, with prologue written by Linus Torvalds and the epilogue written by Manuel Castells. Pekka Himanen is a philosopher. Manuel Castells is an internationally well-known sociologist. Linus Torvalds is the creator of the Linux kernel. Before I started reading the book I myself thought it was going to be delving into famous cases of hackers and the ways performed their activities throughout the years and maybe a delve into the reasoning behind them. I was quite wrong in my in my initial assumption, and the book provides a different view into hacker and their activities with a broader view.  I believe what I got from the book was that hackers can be represented as those people who, regardless of what area of work they are involved, do what they are doing for self-satisfaction and therefor the inherent rewards of furthering their interests and gaining peer recognition fro...

There is a wide assortment of Linux distributions out there and due to the way the idea behind Linux matured as a form of OS that is built and maintained by people all over the world for their specific needs, and most have particular differences between them. It's a good idea to go over and check out what a distribution offers with their unique characteristics and qualities before picking one, and I'll compare Fedora and CentOS as distributions as an example of what one could expect. Fedora Fedora is developed by the Fedora Project, an independent project to coordinate the development of Fedora Linux mainly sponsored by Red Hat and the community. Fedora distribution was officially released on 6 November 2003. It was a volunteer project which was providing extra software for the Red Hat distribution, but was launched when Red Hat Linux was discontinued. Before Fedora 7, Fedora was called Fedora Core after one of the two software repositories, Core and Extras. The difference be...

20th century hacker ethics and ideals are a curious things in my opinion. The fact they are ethics and ideals, means that not every one who practices the art of hacking follow them or care even the slightest about them. In my perspective thinking about them I can't but help imagine the worst case scenario that could exists even with these ideals existing. However, I myself like the way the ethics are set up in a way that provides logical reasoning for our brains to interpret and rationalize why one practice hacking. Going over the seven ethics Pekka Himanen discusses in his Hacker Ethic, I'll explain my thoughts on each are.  Passion,  a very important motivator that allows for people to continue on practicing and improving on a chosen skill as long as they feel like their drive for it still remains, I sometimes feel like people often rationalize their sunken cost fallacies as passion in order to not feel that their time has not been worth it.  Freedom , not being constr...

In my home country, Azerbaijan, online censorship is a curious thing. As my father has worked in a governmental role, sometimes I'd lean over his shoulders and read the news articles he read on the variety of local online newspapers. An alarming thing that you'd notice is that anything speaking against the government would in time be taken down. Any news or events of a riot, discontent against the ruling body, vagrant corruption, and in general anything against the government didn't last long. This mainly had to do with the majority public in Azerbaijan mostly receiving their information from mainstream television, as well as and having heavily monitored and censored radio and news publications. Censorship amongst the younger people however was quite different, while the majority of public did indeed consume censored media, that didn't mean people didn't have access to foreign world. Surprisingly, the ISP's that Azerbaijan had didn't have much influence on w...