Dear Hollywood,

Please stop making cyber crime story lines, you have no clue what you are talking about and to anyone with half a brain it makes it hard to watch. I work in IT, not InfoTech or the Cyber team, seriously who comes up with this? Do you hire consultants, if so are they IT consultants or does their business card read InfoTech? I watch prime time tv with my wife and recently I have noticed an uptick in the number of “hackers” in your story lines. Here’s the thing I have found myself yelling at the TV so I feel the need to write this open letter.

So you are aware, “hacking” isn’t running a -t on an ping, neither is running a proper post mortem diagnostic. Graphics and screen savers do not actually depict an algorithm running, nor a brute force password attack. The majority of hacking is done with social engineering and phishing.  When you use terms like “trace the IP” when the “hacker” is on a coffee shop wifi, you are basically saying you are going to find the IP from that wifi, not tracing the hacker back to his house.  Using an anonymizer on a laptop doesn’t prevent the authorities from finding the source IP of the ISP, you can catch someone with an onion router inside your network by having a solid firewall and intrusion protection and intrusion detection systems.

Most secure environments tap all in-bound traffic, and monitor all out-bound traffic. Really secure environments have constant scans for rogue wireless networks and devices and can narrow down to the person with the cell phone in their pocket in minutes. IRC is not “the deep web”, or “the dark web” or whatever you are trying to call it. Thousands of people use IRC it’s pretty standard actually.

“Enhance” I swear to all that is holy, when they say that while looking at a digital image on any detective show and then can magically zoom in and clean up an individual pixel to show a reflection. That’s something they did in Bladerunner to show what the future would be like on floppies and a kodak printer with voice control, but it’s not reality.

All I can hope is that this reddit thread, where a guy claims he is a TV writer and just puts this techno-babble nonsense into shows as a joke is real. Otherwise I need to just stop watching the second the term “we’ve been hacked” gets uttered for my own sanity.

Thanks,

The Actual IT Community
Since these folks won’t actually respond what are your favorite, worse hacker shows or movies? In terms of pure bad mine are The Net, Hackers, and any CSI show. Oh and Scorpion that show is beyond stupid.

Kim Delgado asked me the other day what I used to help my daughter learn how to code. What better way to use the VDM30in30 challenge than to write a post on just that. I am fortunate enough to live in an area that has a school program that uses the Hour of Code system. That is a great help and if nothing else gets the kids interested in coding. But if I wanted to reinforce it, so I used Tynker initially. Tynker has a free program that let’s kids build characters and levels for a 2D game that they build out. It’s a pretty fun way to get them goofing with If\Then commands and causal\effect relationships.

But then I am not someone who just sits back so I had to press it to see what the kids could do. After they both (daughter and son) built out games, we moved onto a couple of puzzle games, where you have to maneuver a monster through obstacles to get pieces of candy, this is another app on Tynker. I then stumbled upon a Lifehacker article on helping kids learn to code. Ipad games like Daisy the Dinosaur and Hopscotch are great tools to keep them interested, but seemed a little too little kidish for my 10 year old. Scratch is a learning program developed by MIT and is designed for 8-16 year olds. This was the one that my daughter really enjoyed.

Ok these are great but I needed to step it up this was all visual programming language which is cool, but what about the more abstract code bases. So we began to look at basic HTML and some Python. I had them build a simple Hello World page, and showed them how to put together a text based Python game.

What’s next? Well honestly I was hoping I could get some help on that, I am looking for a way to have my guest wifi network password changed weekly, and a puzzle, test or project requirement to learn the password. I have seen the chore for wifi pw pictures online, but what I really want to see is something that can make it a more fun way to learn and earn the online privilege. Anyone have any suggestions or ideas?