Once upon a time, a friend of mine accidentally took over thousands of computers. He had found a vulnerability in a piece of software and started playing with it. In the process, he figured out how to get total administration access over a network. He put it in a script, and ran it to see what would happen, then went to bed for about four hours. Next morning on the way to work he checked on it, and discovered he was now lord and master of about 50,000 computers. After nearly vomiting in fear he killed the whole thing and deleted all the files associated with it. In the end he said he threw the hard drive into a bonfire. I can’t tell you who he is because he doesn’t want to go to Federal prison, which is what could have happened if he’d told anyone that could do anything about the bug he’d found. Did that bug get fixed? Probably eventually, but not by my friend. This story isn’t extraordinary at all. Spend much time in the hacker and security scene, you’ll hear stories like this and worse.

It’s hard to explain to regular people how much technology barely works, how much the infrastructure of our lives is held together by the IT equivalent of baling wire.

Computers, and computing, are broken.

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from Versioning

Hoping to teach children the basics of coding from as young as three years of age, Primo is on the surface a wooden toy for children, but is in fact a robotics kit that uses a visual block-based language to enable kids to learn how to program.

The play set features a small, motorized cube called Cubetto, which is wirelessly connected to a wooden board with several slots in it. The board acts as the programming interface and children control Cubetto by placing the code - color-coded instruction blocks - into the slots. Once the blocks have been placed, pressing a red button on the side of the board executes the code and sends Cubetto to the programmed destination. The four blocks of the code include forward, turn left, turn right and a function block. The programming board includes a separate section where users can create a ‘saved’ sequence of code they can call at any time - when the function block is placed into the main code, it replays the piece of code stored in the function box. This replicates the way languages such as PHP and JavaScript use functions. This feature can even be hacked to create infinite loops.

Video: http://vimeo.com/82620072

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h/t Rich Pollett