[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- --doesn't really mean anything at all.
And, in fact, if you look at popular media today or various television
shows, you'll see--
DAVID MALAN: One of my favorite things to play--
if only because it kind of switches things up,
it gives a fun interlude in the middle of class,
but that's nonetheless relevant-- is playing some of these excerpts
from popular TV shows or movies wherein technology is just completely abused.
And I think it's representative of how Hollywood and studios don't necessarily
expect their audience to understand certain things.
And there's absolutely no reason for that.
It's not all that hard to uplift folks to understanding
these kinds of fundamentals so you don't have to pull the wool over their eyes
by printing a graphical crayon program as though it's attack code.
DOUG LLOYD: Yeah.
That is actually an excerpt of what appears
to be some drawing-based software.
And the IP address that was punched in at the top,
in the URL there, was not a legit IP address,
DAVID MALAN: No.
But at least that one I'm more OK with because maybe they're
just trying to prevent someone from visiting some real IP address.
But even then, I don't know.
DOUG LLOYD: They could've done something else, though,
as opposed to something just completely wrong.
DAVID MALAN: There's another clip.
Actually, what some shows do--
I think The Simpsons do this-- is they'll actually use domain names.
But they'll actually buy the domain names, which is brilliant.
Because invariably, I'm one of those people who pauses the show,
pulls up my laptop, and checks--
DOUG LLOYD: See where it goes?
DAVID MALAN: --to see if they bought that domain name.
And the only thing is, they're kind of committing themselves
because of syndication to owning that domain name in perpetuity.
Anyhow, Computer Science 50--
DOUG LLOYD: No.
It gives us a chance to, again, educate students
about protocols and IP addresses and expose the flawed way in which they're
presented.
DAVID MALAN: And it's not arcane, this material.
Right?
Even though you might think that this is really
just the domain of computer scientists, this stuff really is all around us.
And there's no reason why you shouldn't be
able to now spot these things in the media
and realize just how interconnected some of these ideas and these technologies
actually are.
But some of them are just completely over the top.
There's a clip we occasionally show where
twp people are trying to either secure or hack into a system
by both typing on the same keyboard at the same time.
It's just moronic.
DOUG LLOYD: But they get it.
They succeed.
DAVID MALAN: Oh, yeah.
They--
DOUG LLOYD: They're really coordinated.
DAVID MALAN: --hack into the mainframe or defend
the mainframe or whatever it was.