Cybercop

On Wednesday, 17th March, we had a visit from Detective Inspector David Reid of the Computer Forensic Department of Lothian and Borders Police.
DI Reid suggested that there was no such thing as computer crime! He argued that there was crime that was committed by using a computer to comit the crime but the computer did not comit the crime! A crime is a crime! If a robber used a car during a robbery does not make it a car crime.

We were told about Hackers and Crackers; e-mail scams and online Fraud; organised crime and abusive/paedophile websites.

Inspector Reid gave us a task to do: A company finds that an internal e-mail contains disturbing, possibly illegal, images ! We were put into two groups, one were the board of directors and the other group was the head of IT. We had to say and explain what action or not we would take.

bouncing balls II

here's another animation that's pretty nice (again, only 30 min to learn how to use the programme). And it's two bouncing balls. and loads of planes. You can see how some CGI animations can easily become somewhat surreal. The shading is nice too.

and if you spent more time on the programme playing around with everything... the timing, speeds, materials, reflections, lights, etc...

and a third one... the incredible bouncing ball !! (to be followed by the incredible bouncing balls once I can sort out the camera angle)

and here's another...
amazing what you can make in 40min never having used the programme before !!

Here's an animation by one student. If they want they can say it's theirs... I forgot to ask whether it's ok to put it up on the blog...

On Thursday some discovered the weird meta balls (or blobs) whilst playing around with the 3D programme Blender.

The class split up into 2 groups today.
One group went to the computer room and started to programme things with a programme called 'Simple'. First we worked on easy commands, later we did codes which were more difficult. After that, we started to play around with the codes. We changed the speed of our UFOs, color and other things.

The other group started of with a logic game. We were told that we had 4 cards. One one card is a A, on one card is a K and on the other two cards are a 2 and a 7. The rule was, that if a vowel is on one side, an even number was on the other. Now we had to check the rule. But we were not allowed to turn all the cards around. So which card should be turned around to check?
We had great difficulty with that, so we did that game with drinks and numbers. Two cards had beer and soda written on them and two cards had the numbers 17 and 25 written on them. The rule was that if there is an alcoholic drink on one side, there has to be a number greater or even than 18 on the other side. We managed to solve this game and after this, we were able to solve the other one as well.
Solution: You have to check the A and the 7 and the beer and the 17.

Then we talked about what intelligence is. We thought that intelligence is, when a person knows alot, is well educated and can remember stuff they learned. You also have to be able to process information and you have to be good at situational intelligence. You also have to be logical. We also decided that self-initiative is a pretty clever thing. Also a common sense and emotional intelligence and creativity.
Then we talked about which of these skills a computer has.

Programming

We are now doing programming in the mainlesson. We first created a simple programe using simple words the computer can understand. Call, Set, If and Goto there are others but we are doing these four first.
Loop:call line color(random(16))
call circle (random(640),random(480),25)
call read quit key
goto loop
This was the first programme we did which just creates random circles jumping around the screen. we wanted to have a shot of making our own but the computers didnt work so we will do it another day.we now are doing an iq test.

Friday the 13th/Red Nose Day/Pyjama day.

Today, we began our main lesson by recalling everything we had learnt in our previous few classes.For example, we talked about binary codes and logic gates and discussed how they were relevant in the running of a computer. We then moved on to list the compontents a computer needs in order to run, which are as follows;
Machine Language
Low Level Language
High Level Language
Operating System
Software.

I can't remember the defenition we gave software, but according to wikipedia it is "a general term used to describe a collection of computer programmes, procedures and documentation." For example, Itunes and Word. Ms Hueber then showed us the Mac programme Blender which is used for graphic design. She showed us how to make shapes, change their colours and make them move. Watch this space for our designs ... :)

(:

Today we found out if we had gotten the code we'd started to unravel yesterday, decoded correctly(Nina and I did, yay! Thankyou Sarah. :D)
We watched a video about Mary - Queen Of Scots' execution; she was sadly executed because of the code and some historians still say she might not have been tied into the conspiracy. Well too tightly at least but was still tried and then killed. :(
What are computers for? Why do we use them? What would a computerless world be like?
- We rely on computers for almost everything, from entertainment purposes to helping solve crimes, ie. facial recontruction.
I learnt today - perverts have been around since forever. :P How scary. :O
"O IQZT IGV WSQOK RGTL FGZ SGCT DT, IT SGCTL FQZOET" (: signing out. (:
loveeyou. >_>" I'm cool ;)
xoxoxoxoxoxox

DAY 8

We started the morning with a nice exercise called Fizz buzz.
Then we looked at what we had done yesterday - the logic gates.
We did an exercise about this as well, trying to figure out whether Sarah will go to a party. Her conditions were that Santa AND Rudolph will come AND Peter Rabbit will NOT.
There were eight different options and the outcome for only one of them was the one Sarah needed for going to the party.

Then we learned about substitution codes - codes where you substitute each letter with a number, another letter or a symbol.
Mr. Farquarson told us a brief biography of Mary Queen of Scots who lived in the 16th century and how she was prisoned in England and the queen of England, Elizabeth was paranoid about Mary becoming the queen instead. Elizabeth send her agents to the castle where Mary was prisoned and they got a letter she had sent to a plot of Catholic people who wanted her to become the queen of England.
The letter was encoded with symbols and they thought it would be very safe that way. Nevertheless, it didn't take very long for Elizabeth's master spy to decode it. That was because by that time the Frequency theory was already known. The Frequency theory tells you how some letters or numbers occur more frequently in English language than others.
Eventually, that piece of evidence got Mary tried and executed.

When working out a key for a substitution code with the frequency theory, you should remember that the shorter the text, the less reliable the frequency theory is!
And also remember to use your intuition, skill and a bit of guess-work.

Today we went over codes. Codes have been around for a long time. About 2000 years ago there was secret agents who wrote messages on their heads so that when they got back to base they could shave their heads and the message could be read. The key is how the code works, for example, with the word DCHMATQFG meaning EDINBURGH the key is the letter after the one used. You can also use numbers in code. 20 15 27 2 5 27 3 15 14 20 9 14 21 5 4 .

A short history of computing

We started the history with the abacus. A counting machine with beads to help with calculations.
In central America, during the times of the Mayans, they had a similar calculating machine, knots on ropes. They used it to work out where the planets and sun were and lunar eclipses.
In Russia, on a class trip two years ago, Mr Farquharson, saw that in a super market, although they had electronic tills, the cashier 9 out of 10 times used an abacus.

Next we looked at the Anithikythera Mechanism. It was used by the Greek in ancient times to, for instance, calculate the exact dates every four years of the Olympic Games. It used the Zodiak year and the months on one side and could work out the days in the year. Richard Whight rebuilt one that had been found in the sea 200 years later.

3 thousand years later...

Blaise Pascal in 1642 in France (while there was the English Civil War in England), built a mathematical adding machine.

In the 1800s, Jacquard built a loom that used punch cards that controlled the patterns of the weaving loom.

Charles Babbage, in 1832, built the difference engine. He was the first to receive government sponsorship to build a computer.

Ada Lovelace, 1815 to 1852, who was the first programmer.

1890s the US Americans built a big computer for the census. They needed an accurate census to estimate how many hospitals and such they would need. And they thought that calculating the census by hand would take about 10 years because the population was so big. With the computer it took only six weeks.

100 years later...

Computers used valves (vacuum tubes). During WWII there was a English computer at Benchley Park called Colossus. It was used to decode Nazi battle plans. For instance, a lady decoded a message of the Italians battle plans. The computer was destroyed after the war because they thought it was pointless. Although it was faster than a laptop.

At IBM the president declared that in the next 50 years the world would only need 5 computers !!

A little while later, still at IBM, they thought that computers would be used in offices but not at home.

Konrad Zuse, 1941 in Germany, built the first computer in binary.

Manchester Mark 1 was the first computer that could store a programme.
1945 first electronic computer ENICA. (used transistors and valves)

Some more dates:
1960 - Silicon chips invented
1975 - Microsoft founded
1976 - Apple founded
1985 - term 'cyberspace' first used in novel, Necromancer.

Today we learned that different cultures and and societies have different number systems: The most common numeral system nowadays is the decimal. It has 10 figures (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) and works on the base 10. We use a different system to measure time. Unlike the decimal system, is the this pattern based on 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day. Other systems are still in use: Inch and feet for example and other systems which are based on 20.

Today we were set different exercises to try to work out a number that was between 1-1000 the only clues we had where that we could ask questions to which they were answered 'Yes' or 'No' it took us 9 questions to work out that the number was '222'  then we had to guess am English sentence that had been put on the board there was 35 blanks for us to guess it took us around about 58 guesses to work out that it was "THERE_IS_NO_REVERSE_ON_A_MOTORCYCLE". The point of this exercise was to show us how a computer uses 'information theory'.

The next exercise we did was in 'algorithm development' but the instructions were deliberately made difficult. The drawing was meant to look like a kite but nobody really did and everybody's was different.

How does a computer work?

Today we learned about the codes a computer uses to send information this is known as a binary code.

Binary codes just consist of the numbers 1 and 0 different combinations mean diffrent letters eg the word CAT would be 0100 0011 0100 0001 01010100.

Computers work with a series of switches being turned on and off all the time . This causes the cpu to heat up very quickly and as compuers got faster they started to heat up quicker . there are 2 main fans on a computer 1 on top of the cpu and another in the power supply , if they where not there your pc would heat up very quickly and stop working without a heat dip on the cpu your computer would not be able to run as fast as it can now.

Dual core processors where made to even out the work load between 2 cpu's this meant that the computer would not heat up as fast therfore using less energy for cooling.

Over the years computers have gotten a lot faster than they used to be dubbling their speed every 2 years this is known as moore's theory.

Scientists are currently working on a quantum computer , this would allow 2 things to be done on a computer at the same time , although it appears to be the case on most computers today they are simply switching between the programs only working on 1 at a time.


0100 1001 0010 0000 0100 0001 0100 1101 0010 0000 0100 0001 0010 0000 0101 0000 0100 1111 0101 0100 0100 0001 o1o1 o1oo o1oo ooo1 ;D

Day Two

• How Does a Computer Work?

A question we all think impossible to answer, but I'll try anyway.
Lets start with a command being typed on the keyboard such as enter. The messenger then takes this message to the motherboard, in particular the CPU (central processing unit). The CPU makes all the decisions and it chooses to send the messenger to the random access memory (RAM). This then passes it the instructions telling the messenger what action should take place from the key having been pressed, eg. get google. With this the messenger returns to the CPU which then tells it to go to the hard drive where the page is stored. Having been to the hard drive and collected the 'google' it returns to the CPU. Surprise, surprise it sends it to the short term memory, the RAM, to store the image. It then goes to the CPU again. The CPU sends the messenger back to the RAM for new instructions with which it returns to the CPU. The instruction from the RAM tells it to 'display google'. The CPU sends it back to the RAM where it gets 'google', then it goes back to the CPU. This time the CPU sends it to the graphics card which then displays the image on the screen. All of this happens before you can begin to think it through on an everyday computer.

• Activity Continued

As yesterday we had taken the computers apart today's gruelling task was to reassemble them, not as easy as we thought... The most common question being, 'Where the hell did this come from?' Suddenly there were lots of bits and pieces unaccounted for in our notes, particularly wires... Where did they go again? they fit here!!! they also fit here... and here...

We did a survey in the class on how many computers we had at home. These were the results:

• no computers - 1
• 1 computer - 6
• 2-6 computers - 9
• 7-10 computers 1
• 11+ computers - 0

Then we were told that the average household has over 100 computers! So either we were way below average or we did not know what a computer was!

Next we got into groups and took computers apart. We learnt some useful computer language:

• a motherboard is the green circuit board inside the computer
• PSU stands for power supply unit
• CPU stands for central prossessing unit
  

Course starting 2nd of March 2009

This is the blog on the mainlesson on Computers running from the 2nd of March 2009.