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In Hacker Highschool, Students Learn To Redesign the Future

Posted by timothy on from the nsa-recruiting-tool dept.

caseyb89 writes "Hacker Highschool is an after school program that teaches students the best practices of responsible hacking. The program is open source, and high schools across the country have begun offering the free program to students. Hacker Highschool recognized that teens are constantly taught that hacking is bad, and they realized that teens' amateur understanding of hacking was the cause of the biggest issues. The program aims to reverse this negative stereotype of hacking by encouraging teens to embrace ethical, responsible hacking."

1 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. I hope they don't try to teach math... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Now, my math may be a bit off, but I read through their "Lesson 12 - Passwords" and found this sentence:

    With a 2 letter password, and 26 letters in the alphabet, plus 10 numbers (ignoring symbols),
    there are 236 possible combinations (687,000,000 possibilities).

    And I can't for the life of me get those numbers. (26+10)^2 = 1296, right? Or if we count uppercase (26+26+10)^2 = 3844
    The square root (only two characters) of 687,000,000 is ~26,210. Last time I checked, there are not 26210 writable characters in our alphabet. Or in UTF-8 for that matter.

    Increase the password length to
    8 characters, and there are 836 combinations (324,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
    possibilities).

    836 combinations? Now im just confused. That's even less than 4 two letter passwords! (4*236 = 944)
    And where does that 323*10^30 possibilities come from?
    I can't be THIS bad at math, can I ?