You know about Target losing control of your credit card numbers. You know about Hollywood stars losing control of their nude photos. And you’ve heard about the 15-year-old kid who hacked into NASA just for fun, and shutdown computers that control the International Space Station. Turns out, those examples are the low-hanging fruit when it comes to computer hacking.
Wait until you learn about ultra-paranoid computing and .
Hackers have moved on from stealing your passwords and taking over your Amazon account to the more globally threatening business of cyber weaponry. PBS’ “NOVA” makes this frightening reality understandable while teaching us ever so gently about math, prime numbers, quantum physics, quantum cryptography and the various kinds of con jobs going on online every day. If you’re not at least a little worried, you’re not paying attention.
“The Internet is a bad neighborhood. In the digital world there are ne”er-do-wells coming by to rattle the door all the time,” says Patrick Lincoln of SRI International, one of the cyber-security experts interviewed.
“NOVA” isn’t above using clips of George Clooney in action-adventure mode, switching out security camera footage to make it look like nothing’s wrong, to explain how hackers get into supposedly secure systems.
NOVA explains how mischievious teenagers, criminals and nation-states are going head-to-head in the hacking game, getting into “quantum weirdness,” “ultra-paranoid computing” and using video games to encode password sequences in the human subconscious brain.
Creepy-cool.
