Friday, December 2, 2011

So...

I realize I haven't posted in eons. I guess that means Sarah and I have become one of those old boring married couples. My day-to-day life, anyway, has heavily revolved around work, which while possibly interesting to the outside world in a few ways on a few occasions, mostly involves me sitting at a computer. I'll make an effort to get back in the habit of writing about things in my life.

But since that hasn't been a regular source of teeth-clench-worthy copy, I'll share this pretty interesting story that just popped into one of my feeds.

I always wondered how agencies like the CIA (or their foreign counterparts) recruited people to work for them. According to this piece, the British GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) has traditionally recruited smart recent college gads, "but in the digital age, it says, there may be a lot of bright young hackers out there who are worth talking to."


Thus it has set up this web-based challenge. Apparently, if you can crack the code they put on this website, you can join up with them. Promotion for the challenge has been done mainly through social media. I'm sure it's beyond even that wisest wizards in my regular readership, but I thought it'd be interested for someone to at least give it a shot.

When I saw this, I did think immediately that this could be a good way to update a familiar movie plot from the 80's-90's, where video games morph in some way into real-world action, like WarGames or TRON.

2 comments:

Sarah said...

I am not boring.

Larms53 said...

I didn't try to crack the code. However, I am relying on my mad skills/knowledge obtained from 50+ years of reading mystery novels and watching PBS Mystery, as well as my natural disguise as a middle-aged, nondescript librarian, to make me a "natural" as a British agent.