Headline July 25, 2017/ ''' HACKERS HUE HEAVENS '''

''' HACKERS HUE HEAVENS '''

*MEET THE NU-NERDS :.........STUDENTS ALL* :   

They're all guys, perhaps due to gender imbalance in  STEM  fields, but at least partly because the dorm floors here are gender segregated.

Where it seems like a race, sexuality, gender, and class dominate collegiate discussions right now, the young men of Sthacks simply identify as hackers-

*Though they hate how the term has been twisted to mean trespassing*. 

*Hacking,  as they'll tell you,  means  quick-and-dirty  programming and problem-solving , taking things apart and putting them back together*.

And that's what they do. *Nonstop*

They'll do it for school; outside of school, they do it for work, they do it for fun. Unlike every other gathering of male undergrads I've ever seen, there's no horseplay or grab-ass, no profanity or pop references.

Instead there is a bewildering flurry of  shoptalk :

''It's a fuzzier that inspects the code as it runs to make sure it hits every single possible branch, and when you compile it with their compiler, it's all open-source, and it adds its own instrumentation.........''

'' Fully automated fuzzer? ''

''Fully automated, and it hits every branch. That's the crazy part. Everything from, like,  Firefox, Internet Explorer, SQLite, GnuPG, NTPD, FFmpeg -''

''So it needs to generate a whole   -like, a whole control free tree?''

''Yeah, it hooks into the compiler. I don't completely get it.........''

This goes on for hours; according to Sam [!WOW!], their conversations are ''about 70 percent technologies, 20 percent morals and the implications on society of that kind of stuff, and then 10 percent where do we want to go eat for the  night.''

Matt amuses himself by scraping  public user data off the video game platform  Steam  and  putting it all up onscreen so his monitor looks like a midnight blizzard.

Sam  [!WOW!] enjoys running multiple antivirus programs simultaneously, which causes them to battle against and eventually destroy one another-

''I just like watching everything burn,'' he says

Peter talk about a Google search query that leads to lists of devices with default certifications, where you can log on and make ghost noises come out of strangers' baby monitors.

Their conversations are frequently sidetracked by  Google fact   -checking: the merits of  polyphasic sleep; the difference between  tint and hue; how many lines of code were in the original  Linux kernel. 

The  !WOW! of Jacob Aronoff :

First Computer : I got this old black Dell laptop when I was 5 or 6. Then in fourth grade, I got one of the old white Macbooks,

Current Computer :  2016 MacBook Pro.

First Hack : In seventh grade. Everyone was  jailbreaking  their iPhones, and jailbreaks were really terrible back then, so I hacked  into like eight different  iPhones on the network and shut them down at once.

Most Recent Hack : I scrapped  Reddit for data on commenters, And I have a couple of side projects.   

Tech Hero :  Alonzo Church, 'cause he did some really cool programming theory stuff. Actually, No, Edsger Diijkstra. Actually, Steve Jobs. Can I change my answer?

Douglas Engelbart. He invented all the thongs we use today, and that was in the  1960s. That's my final answer.

A.I. Friend or Foe : Friend, definitely.

IOS  Or  Android   IOS, hands down.

Favorite Social Network : Reddit.

Preferred Coding Language : Swift.

And then Jacob Aronoff  and the other Nu-Nerds custom build their own computers.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Operational research on Nu-Nerds, Hackers, Practitioners, Students,  Professors and Teachers, continues. See Ya all on !WOW!   -the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW!  -the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Pint Slices '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless