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What really drew me to this article was how interesting the author made the subject sound. They hooked me right away by presenting something we usually consider to be ordinary as extraordinary. Additionally, the authors voice was really present and interesting throughout the whole article which is something that I really need to learn from. Also, once I got to the end I realized how well the article was organized. The title and initial premise wrapped right back up at the end with the experiment with spoons of different metal types. All in all, this article was well written; it was well organized, intriguing, and also concise.

This resource is interesting in light of our discussing Babbage and Lovelace, as well as Ada Lovelace Day. This article is particularly interesting to me as it deals with women's contributions to significant advancements in history, many of which are often ignored or excused.

Riley, I mentioned in class that October 14th is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day for recognizing the contributions of women in science. Details: http://findingada.com/. I've wanted to organize an Ada Lovelace Day event here at Vanderbilt for a few years now, but never found the time. Let me know if you'd like to cook something up (an event? a blog series? a Wikipedia editing party?) for the 14th.

I found it really interesting that people took the fact that Lovelace made a few mistakes as an excuse to try to remove her contribution to computer programming. Male scientists and programmers also make mistakes, but we rarely see those used in an attempt to discredit them. Also, she literally designed a computer program before the computer even existed. I think we can excuse a few past mathematical errors.

An app circulated among the protesters in Hong Kong that supposedly was for coordinating protest efforts, but was in reality a phishing attack that would track keystrokes, messages, and identity information of devices it was installed on. Many signs point to the Chinese government as the origin of the malware, though. Not the first time a government has done something like planting spies and monitoring protestors. We saw this in Little Brother too, with the DHS spies on the Xnet.

This video talks about a hack done by a group of Russian hackers that gained access to 1.2 billion records, and discusses the idea that perhaps passwords are no longer the best way to protect our information. It's a quick video, but what was interesting to me was that I hadn't even considered that something other than the current password system could protect our information.

Some advice from security expert Bruce Schneier on how to keep the NSA from snooping on you. "Trust the math. Encryption if your friend."

I found this article interesting because it actually mentions the "firesheep" add-on we discussed during class as well as the encryption of our data.

Good find. It's important to note that this piece is from 2011, shortly after the Firesheep controversy. As far as I can tell, HTTPS use is now mandatory, at least on Facebook.com. I don't know about the Facebook app, however. That might be something to look into.

This might be something we look into for our class project on practical cryptography later in the semester.

The recent news that someone using your computer can see all of your passwords stored in Chrome with a few clicks made me aware of something that I had known -- but ignored -- for a long time: I have five or six passwords for dozens of accounts. ...

This article gives a method for generating secure yet easy to remember passwords for online accounts, using encryption and modular arithmetic (!). It is an interesting use of encryption in everyday life for something we all have, password-protected internet accounts. If you click through to the computer science category, you can find other posts on cryptography, encryption, and privacy.