There are a lot of things you can do with some printers that enable web servers without any authentication at all. Print things, ask to do a scan (people forget things on scanners), view and modify contact lists for FAX and scan to email tools, etc. Definitely potential for "denial of ink and paper" attacks on a printer.

IMO manufacturers should only allow local network access to these devices unless you explicitly set or modify the default login.

I'm no fan of Java-based curricula, for the same reason I'd be no fan of Fortran-based curricula. Computing isn't about one language. Each language and system shows you one hyperplane of a vast multidimensional space. The best programmers know lots of languages, and choose wisely among them — or even create new ones when appropriate.

In the production world, there are times where some C++ or Java code is appropriate ... and there are times when what you want is a couple of lines of shellscript and some pipes ... and there are times when the most sensible algorithm for something can't be neatly expressed in a language like C++ or Java, and really requires something like Common Lisp or Haskell. If you need to exploit multiple processors without getting bogged down in locking bullshit and race conditions, you're much better off using Go than Java.

(Just last night, at a meetup, I was talking with two bright young physicists who reported that their universities don't do a good enough job of teaching Fortran, which is the language they actually need to do their job. Scientific computing still relies heavily on Fortran, Matlab, and other languages well removed from what's trendy in the CS department — no matter if that CS department is in the Java, Haskell, or Python camp. But if you want to learn to write good Fortran, you basically need a mentor in the physics department with time to teach you.)

And there are times when the right thing to do is to create a new language, whether a domain-specific language or a new approach on general-purpose computing. There's a good reason Rob Pike came up with Sawzall, a logs-analysis DSL that compiles to arbitrarily parallel mapreduces; and then Go, a C-like systems language with a rocket engine of concurrency built in.

(And there's a good reason a lot of people adopting Go have been coming not from the C++/Java camps that the Go developers expected, but from Python and Ruby: because Go gives you the raw speed of a concurrent and native-compiled language, plus libraries designed by actual engineers, without a lot of the verbose bullshit of C++ or Java. Would I recommend Go as a first language? I'm not so sure about that ....)

What would an optimal computing curriculum look like? I have no freakin' clue. It would have to cover particular basics — variable binding, iteration, recursion, sequencing, data structures, libraries and APIs, concurrency — no matter what the language. But it can't leave its students thinking that one language is Intuitive and the other ones are Just Gratuitously Weird ... and that's too much of what I see from young programmers in industry today.

SCIENTIST 1
I'm afraid we'll be deviating a bit from standard analysis procedures today, Gordon.

SCIENTIST 2
Yes, but with good reason. This is a rare opportunity for us. This is the purest sample we've seen yet.

SCIENTIST 1
And potentially the most unstable!

SCIENTIST 2
Oh, if you follow standard insertion procedures, everything will be fine.

SCIENTIST 1
I don't know how you can say that. Although I will admit that the possibility of a resonance cascade scenario is extremely unlikely, I remain uncomfortable with the---

SCIENTIST 2
Gordon doesn't need to hear this. He's a highly trained professional. We have assured the Administrator that nothing will go wrong.

SCIENTIST 1
Ah yes, you're right. Gordon, we have complete confidence in you.

SCIENTIST 2
Well, go ahead. Let's let him in now.

Exactly. HP does this with contractors (2 years work, 100 days you can't work).

The issue is that in California they have to sell a certain portion of their fleet with zero and low emissions. He is saying that in order to convince people to buy the zero or low emission vehicles in adequate proportion, they have had to subsidize the price by $14,000. He does not expect that they will "sell too many" â" they picked this price because it's the number they expect will sell exactly the right amount.

The 2nd SOMALGET country was first leaked by defense contractor resume. Hinted at, in any case. Defense Contractors put all the illegal shit they do in their resumes to get more jobs doing those things.

Christopher Soghoian's tweet on the subject.

Erica A's resume

Erica A spent December 2012 to October 2013 in Afghanistan, is an expert in "Somalget Retro GUI" and is available for hire immediately.

But the big G doesn't contribute anything to the work of creatives.

You never use a search engine while writing? They're awfully handy for fact-checking, looking up sources, and so on.

But I suppose those sorts of activities are not required these days ....