Roundup: a minecraft scam and debugging advice
Oct. 12, 2018
A minecraft scam gets out of hand - Murray S
https://www.wired.com/story/mirai-botnet-minecraft-scam-brought-down-the-internet/
The first ever computer worm had a mistake in it that caused it to rampage much quicker and further than intended, and it seems this large-scale attack from 2016 had the same problem. The authors intended it as a specific attack with a specific goal, but it had a much further reaching impact.
A debugging rule - Murray S
https://dev.to/gonedark/the-debugging-golden-rule-7cb
Debugging is a hard skill to develop, even moreso because you usually only get the opportunity to practice it when something real has gone wrong. My favourite advice is "read the error message carefully and start there" - I'm often guilty of assuming the problem is something else and ignoring what the computer is telling me. The advice in this article helps avoid another problem - assuming that the problem isn't yours.
Track of the Week - Neil vB
One of the current Unboxed projects is around data management. This field often refers to the concept of a 'golden record', which is a data record compiled from multiple sets to give the most accurate and up to date information. When I Googled this for the first time I found out that NASA glued an actual golden record to the Voyager spacecraft launched the 1970s which included a bunch of sound samples from Earth. Here's a sample of what's on it!