The first ever bug bounty program was launched in 1983. The prize for finding a bug in the software? A Volkswagen Beetle (a bug – geddit?). Such is the pressure on software firms to produce vulnerability-free code that they will offer cash rewards to white hat security researchers who can find and report flaws. Bug-hunting has become an industry, and anyone with the right smarts can try for a slice of the bug bounty pie.
In August last year courseindex.com published an article about how blockchain technology might be used to prevent the falsification of academic records. Development of such a blockchain was being developed by Sony and IBM in collaboration at the time. A shocking statistic quoted in the article was that 21% of U.S. job applicants’ resumes stated fraudulent degrees.
The cryptocurrency boom and its underlying blockchain technology is generating such levels of global interest that even authoritative institutions like the London School of Economics – a world leader – are sitting up and taking notice. The bitcoin scene has been like the Wild West for years, but as understanding matures, educational structures are emerging to better prepare those who want to enter the fray.
When King Henry VI of England founded Eton College in 1440 as “The King’s College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor”, he could scarcely have imagined that 578 years later it would be attended by students from all over the world, and least of all that they would not even need to leave their home countries to study there. But modern witchcraft (the internet) has made it so in the form of Eton’s online teaching arm, EtonX.
Computers are dumb. They do what they are told to do, and that’s it. Powerful as they are, computers cannot (yet) make decisions on anything like a human level. If a nasty piece of code gets injected into a computer, it will execute it - unless other software tells it not to. The computer doesn’t ‘know’ that the code is undesirable.
Over 50 leading AI and robotics researchers have said they will boycott a leading Korean research institute over its plans to develop AI-powered weapons.
In February, KAIST (the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) announced that it was launching a joint research project with defense company Hanwha Systems to develop AI technologies for lethal autonomous weapons that search for and eliminate targets without human control.
Why exactly did the apocryphal apple fall on Isaac Newton’s head? That’s what Newton wondered, and set out to discover why. Many of us wonder in the same way about why things happen, but don’t have time to dedicate our lives to getting to the bottom of it. Most of us don’t have a nuclear reactor or particle accelerator in our garden shed. Here’s a course for armchair physicists around the world who want to be told how it all works by people who have done all the hard thinking.
With the UK having voted to leave the European Union and right-wing leaders in Europe and around the world celebrating the decision (when this was written), it might be a good time for future leaders, administrators and businesspeople to deepen their knowledge of International Relations. In an atmosphere of growing nationalism, diplomacy and knowledge of world affairs are skills that might be in higher demand.
How can we be free in a world of jobs, debt and alarm clocks? What’s the best way to live life from moment to moment? If we don’t decide this ourselves, the pressures of life are sure to fill up those moments for us and we risk being left without a sense of peace, purpose or pleasure.
‘The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.’
Have you ever wanted to solve a crime? It seems to be a common fantasy – stepping into the shoes of a flinty-eyed detective, assessing the evidence and leaving no stone unturned to tighten the net around the criminal until he is forced to confess. These days a lot of that work is done via forensic science. There are quite a lot of games on the Google Play and Apple Stores based on forensic TV shows like CSI and NCIS in which you analyse the evidence to deduce who committed the crime.
