I have just watched a TED lecture and been shocked at the way a computer hacker described what he could do if he was board in his hotel room. Coming to a realisation there is no such thing as a secure IT system. He said, whenever microchips are put into devices, such as toasters the become vulnerable to the usual IT issues of a computer. He then went on to describe what he did while sitting in his hotel room. Seeing a TV on the wall he said it was just like a node in a network, he accessed the TV and was then able to watch any film he wanted, play any game he wanted and it would cost him nothing. His next step was to see what other people on the network were watching on TV. In due course he took screen captures, from porno site log ins to incredibly large financial transactions taking place. The more I watched this man describe his abilities the greater a shock. It is taken for granted we all used laptops or play stations and they are also used for doing a lot of financial transactions on all of these are hackable. His lecture went on to talk about a new credit card people are using, the swipe and pay type. Audience members came up on the stage, he had them wave their card over his scanner and within a few seconds the card was hacked, with their numbers in his possession. The only way this could be stopped from happening was to enclose the card in thin steel case which he gave to each of the volunteers. As the talk went on he talked about other hacks and how his team were now researching a method of beating malaria. This man was certainly in the top of his field, but the way he described hacking was like for these people it was simple, it was something they did as a normal thing all the time. In my semi shocked state I realised the rest of the human population is vulnerable, the human population who doesn't know how to hack, who doesn't know how to be secure or who puts too much into security, because for him it was like, if there is a security process at work then there was a way to beat that security process. Then just to think this may only happen with electronic devices he demonstrated how he found a way to hack door keys and it was simple.
The second TED lecture I watched was a discussion from a memory expert in Sweden. He described how after finishing his degree he wanted to find another challenge in life and in so doing thought about learning another language. He wanted to try something so different he could not even recognise the characters, and considered Arabic or Hindi. While in his research he came across a book which described some simple memory techniques. A few years passed and he went through the exercises and was getting pretty good at them then decided he would enter a memory championship. At which he then came 22nd in the world. He went on to say students study too hard. They are not taught how to remember, and to become a memory expert wasn't difficult it was about having fun with things. It was about making connections, images, exaggerations and unique sensory experiences to the things which had to be committed to memory. For him he was able to remember the order of a shuffled pack of cards in five minutes. For the world memory champion this could be done in about 20 seconds. In effect memory strength was not about spending lots of time doing something it was about making it fun and vivid and getting on with your life. But with practice these simple methods of connecting things together didn't only become easy, they appeared to be incredibly powerful, so powerful as to be frightening. To make an ordinary human being appear to be extra-ordinary, extra, extra smart. When it was not what you know but rather how it was all put together. The more fun had doing this the better the memory would become, and the more practice the more extra ordinary the individual would appear to be.
If such methods were applied to schools then they examination system would have to be re-written, for students would be so extraordinary and able to get the highest marks the exam system would fail. The answer are not secrets, they are available and they are there for anyone to find or pick up. Just as it is easy for some normal people to hack anything in the world. Of all these things though, something both individual's didn't touch on was a little but large topic of "motivation," as the saying goes, you can lead a donkey to water but you can't make him drink.
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