CS50 Hackathon 2016

Another fun Hackathon with the CS50 students.  A few hundred students, huddled up at the iLab’s Hive.  My year old setup in c9.io was still there and working – sweet!

Me talk pretty one day – or the importance of soft skills and communication skills for Tech

I just got some coverage in an article with Harvard Extension.  Check it out!

New semester, and over 200 students!

Here we go, another semester starts for CSCI e45a, with the “all online” format that we started last year.  Very exciting and a little scary to have 226 students enrolled. I hope this is an indication that the content of the course is becoming more important and relevant to folks out there!

 

Another successful run of the Cyber warfare exercise

As part of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Executive Education program on Cybersecurity: The Intersection of Policy and Technology, we ran the cybersecurity warfare scenario that we have used for many years now.  As usual it seemed to be a blast for both participants and organizers.  The original gang was back with professor Jim Waldo leading the charge.  I also had a couple of folks from the Harvard Info Sec team join the fun.

Incidentally, I today I received a patch for the U.S Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) with an MD5 hash on it: 9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a

It is the hash for the mission statement of USCYBERCOM:

USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries.

A Herman Hollerith early IBM tabulating machine

Today at the MIT Swapfest, I found and bought a punch card making machine/device.  It is from The Tabulating Machine Company.  The Tabulating Machine Company was founded by Herman Hollerith – initially in 1896 as Tabulating Machine Company, and again in 1905 as The Tabulating Machine Company – to commercialize his tabulating machine which he invented and revolutionized the US Census tabulation process in in the late 1800’s.  In 1911, The Tabulating Machine Company and three other companies came together as the Computing Tabulating Recording (CTR) company, which a few years later in 1924 became International Business Machines corporation (IBM).  But the individual companies in the CTR holding company continued to use their original name until 1933, so this device could have been made anytime between 1905 and 1933.

PHP_Tabletop Cyber simulation application on Cloud9

I just put the PHP_Tabletop application on Cloud9. Took 20 minutes. Works great! I would definitely recommend checking out Cloud9 and their in-browser IDEs for quick and easy development in the cloud. Several templated environments are available (e.g., LAMP, Django, etc.)

CS50 Hackathon 2015

Another great CS50 Hackathon! You can find pictures of this crazy fun event here. As usual, I was the oldest staffer by a long shot. Slow start until the Mexican food came in at 9:00 pm, then the questions and requests for help started. Wherever you may be around the globe, if you have not experienced CS50 yet and are interested in learning the fundamentals of programming – go see CS50x on edX.

Why cybersecurity skills are in demand

Today Harvard’s Extension School published an article, based on an interview of Scott and I, to start advertising the Cybersecurity certificate – see it here.

CSCI e45a is now all online! First run starting today

After many sessions in the recording studio this spring and summer, the fall installment of CSCI e45 is now all online. We are venturing off in the brave new world of online teaching. I can tell already that we will be missing our in person interactions with the local students. But, as expected, the online format offers the possibility to do a number of exciting new things that will hopefully help students learn and retain knowledge better.

Harvard cyber intrusion

As some people may have seen in the media Harvard was hit with a larger than usual cyber intrusion (see http://security.harvard.edu/cyber-alert ). I am not going to go into non-public details of the incident, but I will mention a few things that may be of use to some folks out there. I have studied, and taught on the topic of information security for a while now, yet this was the first large scale intrusion I had been involved in navigating.