Joke from CS245 today:
A physicist is biking along and his friend stops to ask: “Where did you get that nice bike?”
The other responds: “Well, I was walking one day, and this girl bikes by me, gets off her bike, rips off all her clothes, and tells me, ‘Take anything you want!’”
“Good choice. The clothes wouldn’t have fit you.”
I’m taking a class on web programming and security, CS142. I’m not actually sure if I’m going to stay in the class, but for now, the assignments are interesting enough for me to stick with it. Like the other security classes I’ve taken, the professor usually tries to have a balance between being the “good” guys and then being the “bad” guys. It turns out, being the bad guy is always so much more fun.
This most recent assignment was pretty fun, I think mainly because there was a small story line to it. Basically, the premise was that someone in your World of Warcraft guild was helping an enemy guild. Your goal was to force him to come out of hiding using clever web hacks. As unplausible as it was, it made it a fun excercise and was a neat way to put all the attacks into perspective.
I’ve been hanging out in the room where office hours for the graphics class is held and I’ve been able to overhear conversations between the TAs and the kids. It turns out, a lot of students have no idea how their computer gets stuff done. They kind of follow instructions and fiddle with things until they work. I guess in general, people aren’t really comfortable with their computers. They’ve been taught a series of things to do that have typical side effects. But the second something weird happens, they’re scared to touch it.
Just hanging around grad students has helped me rid of that fear. One of them, instead of playing games, likes to take them apart and write hacks for them. I always thought you downloaded hacks! He writes them! That is just one example of their general curiosity. I think that’s what sets them apart. When they see some blackbox, they don’t keep feeding it stuff. They hit it over the head, or feed it something backwards. Most of us are just content with that black box doing its magic.
I have asbolutely no clue how toilets work.
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