When Martha Payne, a Scottish schoolgirl, created a blog in April 2012 to share with the world her thoughts and experiences of eating the non-nutritious crappy meals served at her school, little did she know that she will become an Internet sensation overnight with her blog reaching 2 million viewers within few weeks forcing politicians to ban her from taking any more pictures of her school lunches.
Martha started posting pictures of what the primary school kids were being fed everyday and then being expected to perform academically. Her blog, Never Seconds, was written up in Time, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and a number of food blogs; and got support from celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, whose series “Jamie’s School Dinners” kicked off school-food reform in England.
Instead of applauding her for bringing light to the poor quality of food that is being served to children in schools, politicians silenced her. However, after the decision angered the world community and created a storm on the Internet, school officials, including the education minister and the local council, changed their minds, reversing their ban on Martha’s postings.
In February 2014 Martha’s blog reached 10 million viewers. She has begun posting pictures of school dinners sent to her by children in Germany, Japan, Spain, Taiwan and the United States. Her efforts have made school administrations change their meal programs. Because of Martha’s blog, the school council has announced that all students would be allowed unlimited servings of fruit, vegetables and bread. The ban on Martha’s photos couldn’t silence her; it helped school kids get access to healthy, nutritious, organic and non- genetically modified food.
A Fresno California Walmart was greeted with some unexpected customers when the Hells Angels dropped by for a visit on Black Friday. They were there to buy the store’s entire supply of bicycles so that the group could donate them to needy kids. Onine videos show the bikers stack up mountains of boxes with the aid of the helpful store manager who had arrived at the scene. The store manager told the Fresno Bee that he had been “very happy to work with the Hells Angels and their organization donating bikes to the Poverello House.” The Poverello House is a local non-profit organization in Fresno dedicated to helping the homeless and needy.
According to a viral post on Reddit, the group of Hells Angels bikers had to stand in line outside the local Walmart for days so that they could take advantage of the store’s Black Friday deal. The post had been made with an attached image that showed one of the bikers pay for the items.One of their members told the Fresno Bee that the purchase was part of the group’s 16th annual toy run for needy kids.
Watch the video (if you can’t see the video in full screen, flip/tilt your smartphone to enable full screen view):
Recently, we’ve been having requests and answers which needed a basic knowledge of programming languages to be fully understood.Sometimes starting studying programming languages can be seen as a long and tedious process, particularly when people discover hacking and try some tools for the first time. GUIs for hacking are everywhere nowadays, but their objective is to be PoC (Proof of concepts, see, there’s a whole dictionary behind every topic that you should know when starting studying it, hacking too, though I don’t know it all), to be something to show how easy hacking can be (not to be misunderstood with “hacking is easy”, better “see how easy hacking you is? Go and fix this”).So you basically can’t hack without programming knowledge, as you would just randomly press buttons and writing senseless commands. Once you start digging in the programming field, you’ll slowly fill those commands with sense, and you’ll be able to understand how the tools you use work.
You should never run programs that you don’t know how they work, especially in the hacking field, because you don’t know the consequences of a failed attack or of a successful but noisy one.
I wanted to apologize for any grammar error you might encounter, please let me know if you find any, I’m not mother tongue.
Interesting, So Programming Knowledge Is Important…
Yes! And, because I like lists, let me recap some of the most valuable reasons why programming is that important:
-First thing first, technology and Information Technology is considered the future, so programming (IMHO) is the key to understand the future by taking notions from the past (story of IT is fascinating too, I’m always amazed).
-Speaking about hacking without programming knowledge, it’s like building a house with only half of the ground floor. You can build one or two floors, then it will fall poorly, leaving you with rocks only. Being blind on this topic can cause you serious problems with law if something goes wrong, but more importantly you actually don’t know what you are doing.
-Sure you encounter errors sometimes, right? A better understanding of how computers work can give you the skill to solve problems without the constant help of someone else, not only in the IT field, but also in the pure logic one, as training your brain in always positive. And trust me, programming is the way to go.
-Using someone else’s tool is, quoting Cracker Hacker, “no fun”. This is actually true, what kind of satisfaction would you feel id you hacked something without even knowing how it happened? With programming knowledge you might be able to not only understand someone else’s code, but also program tools yourself, and once you understand the basic logic it’s not that hard.
-The vantages are infinite after all, just think about smartphone apps (iOS apps are written in C-objective btw), web applications, java running almost everywhere…
So Yeah, Where Do I Start From?
Wrong approach.
As long as we talk about following lessons, the only problem is that “so yeah” (but I think that readers don’t have this kind of behavior really), but learning programming is a need first of all. You write a program when another one misses a feature you need, or if there’s actually no tool that does what you want.
And the sad thing is that there’s no cookbook for it, no step by step how to solve errors. Sure problem solving is a natural skill (you’ll need it so much), but it’s directly generated by the will of doing what you are doing.
So, in case you didn’t understand it, last warning: this is in fact a long process and it is required. No cool tricks to show to friends allowed (newbies, don’t worry, just trying to scare unwilling people).
Formal Recomposition, May I Know Where to Start From?
Yes. But keep in mind that I’m not a teacher neither I’m trying to be one.
School, courses or self-teaching doesn’t matter: find you own way, I’m just posting some start points suggested by me and other Null byte users. I’m personally studying it as with the self-teaching way, but if you are able to frequent a stable course, I recommend you to do it (waiting for experts thoughts…).
Understanding the basics of programming doesn’t take too long if you have an advanced knowledge about computers. The hard part is the experience building, and the time spent really depends on each person.
I wrote this article as an inspiration, because I want it to be a general topic about programming and ways to approach this world, as recently there has been a lot of confusion about explaining this to newbies, so if you have any correction or new resource you’d like to add, please participate and write it in the comments.I think that we should build a public of people where the most have this kind of knowledge, but there’s absolutely nothing to say about what Null Byte taught until now. I also take the occasion to thank this amazing community which is doing a very great job, especially in pointing newbies in the right direction, so thank you, everyday user of Null Byte.
Resources
I’m going to divide the resources in sections, for a better reading and documenting. future updates will be made for references posted in the comments that might deserve to be added.
General understanding
–Introduction to computer science and programming @ MitOpenCourseware (also linked on the main page): As the Video Lectures list shows, this is a very general though specialized introduction to computer science hosted by Mit. In my opinion this is very reliable and should out stand in this list. I’m quoting the description: “This subject is aimed at students with little or no programming experience. It aims to provide students with an understanding of the role computation can play in solving problems. It also aims to help students, regardless of their major, to feel justifiably confident of their ability to write small programs that allow them to accomplish useful goals. The class will use the Python™ programming language.” This course, as said, aims to provide students also with problem solving, which is one of the points I highlighted in the introduction. The programming language used is Python, one of the most common when talking about hacking.
–Choosing a programing language @ MSDN: In case you don’t know MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network), you’ll learn to rely on it while studying programming languages. This is a very interesting, though a bit outdated in terms of time and not contents, writing about choosing the programming language that fits to you. Although as a developer you should be able to work with multiple languages, it points you in the right direction, and also helps you to better understand low and high level programming, the differences and the features they offer.
–Learn C @ Learn-C.org: The C programming language is a basic knowledge that IMO everyone should have. My studies started with C, and C is still widely used today. Also deserving to be mentioned the languages C++ and C objective, which are currently used for many applications, e.g. iDevices applications are written in C objective.
–Code Academy: As initially suggested by CyberHitchHiker, this “Academy” is a very interesting and reliable resource to learn major web development and scripting languages like HTML, CSS, JS, Ruby and Python.
Post learning and hacking references
As suggested by ghost_, a useful way to get into the topic of hacking is frequenting “information security news sites, as it’s always good to stay in the know”.
–CSO Online: suggested by ghost_, this is a valuable reference for news about information security aimed to every security enthusiast.
–Infosec Institute: A huge documentation about hacking is hosted here, I recommend you to visit Infosec Institute.
–Null Byte: You can’t skip this one. This is the best community I’ve ever found about hacking, so go check every Linux Basics how-to (you should also have Bash knowledge), read this introduction to hacking and tools and you can start hacking like a pro (a thank to OTW for the time spent on these awesome posts)!
Warning: I only checked the validity of every reference I posted, not followed the actual courses, so if you notice something strange is going on with any reference, I’ll provide to remove them asap. If this post is somehow considered spam, please provide to remove it as soon as possible.
Notes
And the list goes on and on.
And I repeat it: I just wanted to start a constructive topic about programming to point newbies in the right direction and to teach myself new things, so that everyone can learn from this.
Because of this post being extremely subjective, please correct any error you find in the comments and I’ll provide to edit, as I want it to be as clear as possible.
A police chief has finally been charged with misconduct, having shot an African American dead in 2011 after a disagreement over a minor driving offence.
The incident occurred in a parking lot in Eutawville, South Carolina. The small town has a population of just 300, around a third of which are black.
54-year-old Bernard Bailey had visited the Town Hall to fight a ticket his daughter had been given for a broken tailgate.
After a disagreement about the ticket, Chief Richard Combs unlawfully issued Bailey an obstruction of justice warrant, which led to Bailey leaving the building and getting into his pick-up truck. Combs opened the door, attempting to wrestle Bailey out of the vehicle. Within moments, the officer had fired at Bailey three times – once in the shoulder and twice fatally in the chest.
A U.S. Justice Department investigation initially determined Combs didn’t violate Bailey’s civil rights. Eventually, after much criticism, state prosecutors reviewed the case in August 2013, charging Combs with misconduct in office. If found guilty, he faces up to 10 years in prison. He had already been placed on administrative leave and was fired from his position.
Last Wednesday’s indictment states the police chief may have “unlawfully used deadly force…when deadly force was not necessary”. It did not mention that the state would pursue any murder charges.
Combs’ legal team have maintained that the shooting occurred in self-defence, although a judge recently rejected his “Stand Your Ground” claim. At Thursday’s hearing, a $150,000 bail was ordered. The trial is scheduled to begin in January.
The case echoes that of the Michael Brown shooting. On November 24th a grand jury in Missouri chose not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for shooting dead the unarmed teenager. The result led to mass protests, in Ferguson and around the world.
This social experiment comparing “normal” people and homeless people will shock you. Watch the video below and test yourself, would you have given this young man a slice of you pizza? Let us know in the comment section below.
Share with friends and family, let’s spread the kindness.
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