Please take an Arts degree...
Years ago I remember coming across some choice graffiti in the Engineering facility toilets at my university. Above the toilet roll dispenser some wit had added the comment: “Please take an Arts degree” with an arrow pointing down to the roll.
I have an Arts degree (Liberal Arts degree to my American readers). I majored in Politics and Philosophy. My politics interests were largely around political theory and US politics and my philosophy major was in Cognitive Science. But somehow I ended up being a geek. And weirdly I found that I am not alone.
These companions of the road have prompted me to start thinking about how and why I ended up in IT. What makes we Arts graduates and students, who are obviously a minority in IT, attracted to the field at all? My musings are obviously highly subjective and your mileage may definitely vary but I thought I’d put a few thoughts down.
So how did I end up in IT? I’ve always had an interest in computers from an early age and can remember when I first discovered BBS’es and the sound of our first modem, a monstrously fast 1200 baud brick, featured heavily in my childhood. I never really considered actually working with computers though. I had some idea I might like be a lawyer, a journalist or perhaps work in government. Those are certainly fields many of my classmates at university ended up in.
I stumbled into IT through local government. I worked through university doing odd jobs but largely as a library assistant. Libraries were one of the environments that computerized early and, for all the jokes people make about matronly librarians, are often at the cutting edge of … well managing information. At the library they had an AS/400 that ran things. Or sometimes not as often happens. When that “not” happened they generally had to find someone to get it working again. Being one of the more computer literate people I wasn’t afraid to try to fix it. Throw in dumb terminals, PC, scanners, bar code readers and a myriad of other electronic devices and that quickly turned into a full time job. When I worked out that the full time job I had just acquired paid a hell of a lot better than stacking books I decided I’d give this IT thing a shot. That was twenty-something years ago.
As my career in IT continued I began to run across more and more people with Arts degrees. Before I worked in IT I had presumed everyone who worked with computers had computer science, mathematics or information technology degrees.1 That turned out to be a somewhat erroneous assumption. Looking around the office today I can see three Philosophy majors, one Anthropology major and dog help us an English major. All cutting code.
So why did we all end up there? I could say money. That certainly played a factor for me. But I actually think it’s something more interesting. I think we’re wired right for IT. Arts students are generally good at three things2:
- Consuming information,
- Assimilating information, and
- Synthesizing information
And IT? It’s intrinsically about those three processes. Replace “information” with “data” and you’ve just described about 80% of the workflows I’ve built in the last twenty years. I’m good at taking the inputs, working out how to manipulate them and output them in some new, hopefully useful, way. I don’t claim to be a brilliant developer. I’m much more a hack’n’slash experimenter. But learning how to do this manipulation with code instead of prose actually wasn’t that hard.
Another reason I think a lot of Arts students are attracted to IT is that we’re good at Systems thinking. Good at seeing the big picture. You want to understand political, economic and social models? Welcome to Systems thinking 101. Perversely some IT graduates I’ve worked with seem wired to respond to specific outcomes or events in systems rather than see that those are components of a larger whole. Naturally they often then trip down the stairs of unintended consequence.
Finally, many of us are also quite articulate.3 Most Arts students can make a serious case for Marxism as a viable political system. Arguing vim versus emacs is kinda child’s play in comparison. We can produce documents, presentations, design specifications, cut code, and argue obscure points of German philosophy. Don’t get my started on one of my colleagues obsession with Saul Kripke.4 All of which means we’re people who can combine tech with talk. A winning combination for getting cool jobs and making good money.
And I never did become a lawyer. So I guess things can’t be all bad.
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This is not to say Computer Science, Eng, and Maths students don’t go into IT - they do in huge numbers - but more highlighting the strangely large pool of Arts graduates in IT.↩
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Oh and also smoking, drinking and shooting pool and/or shite.↩
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I know - not me. :)↩
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Although you know modal logic makes a lot of sense in the context of a configuration language designed to express application and service relationships.↩
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Sunday February 5th, 2012
Knives
One weird thing I’ve noticed since I moved to Portland was the number of people carrying knives. Or Leathermen tools. But mostly lots of folding clasp knives. In Australia you rarely see it outside of farms or occasionally tradespeople. I am not even sure it’s legal in some states to carry a knife at all.
Initially I thought it was a bit silly: a bunch of office workers wandering around with knives. Then I started to notice another American phenomena: packaging from hell.1 All of a sudden every time I got a package I had to go find a knife or scissors to open it (or have the three people near me nod knowingly and lend me their knives).
So whilst I don’t think I am ever going to need a Leatherman tool on a regular basis a simple clasp knife is actually quite useful. So I bought a nice and fairly cheap Gerber folding knife with a clip that I can tuck into my jeans. It’s proven quite practical so far.
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Now I know “packaging from hell” is not uniquely American but it is particularly egregious here. Rarely do I get a box where the contents haven’t been vacuum-plastic sealed, wrapped, boxed and the box sealed with half a roll of tape.↩
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Sunday January 29th, 2012
Best and Worst Hacker Movies Ever
Whilst at the Puppet Triage-a-thon today we put on a few films that featured hacking and hackers. This prompted a discussion of the worst hacker movies of all time and their appalling representations of technology. I present our brief list. Note SOME of these movies were good despite the appalling use of technology … others not so much.
What a cast of off-beat and improbably handsome computer hackers: Crash Override AKA Zero Cool, Acid Burn, Lord Nikon (token black hacker!), The Phantom Phreak (token Puerto Rican hacker!), Cereal Killer and of course my personal favourite: Mr The Plague. In the classic “Damn you meddling kids” scenario famous since Enid Blyton and Scooby Doo our youthful hackers foil the evil plans of evil hacker The Plague to steal money and sink oil tankers?!? Add and stir rapidly a bumbling Secret Service agent, a lame romantic sub-plot, hip young folk on roller blades and a club scene soundtrack. Instant hot geek.
The Good: Social engineering at the start of the movie as Crash Override hacks the TV Network.
The Bad: The typically ridiculous depiction of the actual hacking. The appalling clothes. Matthew Lillard.
Oh my … where to start with Swordfish? We have the classic hand-wavey construction of a virus to hack 1024-bit DNA Binary SSL HiTek Security TM. We have “Axl” Torvalds - famous and bloodily assassinated Finnish hacker. And of course we have Hugh Jackman’s improbable hacker pentetrating a government system in 60 seconds with a gun held to his head and whilst getting blown. Oh please.
The Good: Ummm… Halle Berry?
The Bad: Pretty much everything technical AND non-technical in the film.
P.S. None of which compares to John Travolta’s massive piece of over-acting in a performance that would be truly hideous had Travolta not made Battlefield Earth.
Another “blackmailed hero forced to do wrong” story has Harrison Ford as a corporate security expert forced to rob his own employer. Mayhem ensures, family kidnapped, lamest bank security ever and incredibly tenuous connection between the title of the movie and the plot.
The Good: Using his daughter’s iPhone as a USB drive…
The Bad: Using his daughter’s iPhone as a USB drive… Oh wait. Completely unrealistic security controls. Also firing his secretary on the spot? Yeah the script writers have never worked in a bank.
Rogue AIs, war dialing hacker, cute teen romance, nukes and Cheyenne Mountain? What’s not to like about this movie? Computer hacker breaks into what he thinks is a game company but rather finds a back-end into a top secret NORAD system. From there whilst trying to play a war game he accidentally triggers the countdown to World War III and nuclear war. He then rushes to try to stop the AI launching it’s missiles and “winning” the game.
The Good: Actually resembling good depiction of social engineering, war dialing, and how a hacker compromised a system back in the day. Except the AI of course. Everyone knows the US government doesn’t have an AI running war games at NORAD…
The Bad: Actually there’s not much to hate about this film. I mean the AI theory (tic-tac-toe as learning tool) is kinda lame but generally it’s good fun AND has Ally Sheedy.
P.S. We don’t discuss the sequel - WarGames: The Dead Code. IT DID NOT HAPPEN. DID NOT HAPPEN.
What is it with buttons/ciphers/boxes that can magically hack through all encryption instantly? Yep here’s another. This time in a unique twist a mathematical genius comes up with a box that allows all encryption to be overcome. Naturally it also magically interfaces automatically with every system ever developed.
Throw in a quirky team of hackers lead by on-the-run super-hacker Robert Redford (BTW no one background checked this guy for 30 years? Really? Whatever…). The team’s line-up even sets the pattern for a number of future films: young kid looking to prove himself, cynical older operative, brilliant but disabled tech, conspiracy obsessed oddball, etc, etc.
Sneakers though does have some street cred. Despite the magic cypher box they use some nifty social engineering and much of the ‘tiger team’ hacking they perform at the start of the movie is reasonably feasible. They even hearken back to the glory days of phone phreaking with a Cap’n Crunch reference.
The Good: Cosmo on InfoWar - “There’s a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think… it’s all about the information!”
Open source. Obviously most people know us because of the beaucoup bucks we make as rock-star developers but many people don’t realize it’s also mandatory to have our model-like good looks. This movie thankfully captures that and the purity of our code. Like some others in the list it’s not a true hacker film, more a glorified action movie/thriller, but some code is actually cut and they do introduce open source software.
The Good: Hmmm. Ummm. “Look! Over there! A large software company that really isn’t Microsoft… honest.” Probably vaguely raised public awareness that open source code exists.
The Bad: That anyone got paid for this film.
Reclusive but beautiful developer (giggles) discovers secret Internet conspiracy and is forced to go on the run. Against all odds do you think she’ll win through? Yeah I totally didn’t either. So apparently every website has a magic link (and you can bet about a thousand idiots added that icon to their sites right after the movie came out) that allows you to take control of it. Despite the magical decryption link this isn’t actually a hacking movie. The main character cuts code and the evil terrorists use the Internet to conduct their foul deeds but it’s largely a rather poor action movie.
The Good: Nothing.
The Bad: A little icon on every web page that unlocks the secrets of the Interwebs…
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