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UK's Top Police Warn That Modding Games May Turn Kids into Hackers (vice.com)
Joseph Cox, writing for Motherboard: Last week at EGX, the UK's biggest games event, attendees got a chance to play upcoming blockbusters like Battlefield 1, FIFA 17, and Gears of War 4. But budding gamers may also have spotted a slightly more unusual sight: a booth run by the National Crime Agency (NCA), the UK's leading law enforcement agency. Over the last few years, the NCA has attempted to reach out to technologically savvy young people in different ways. EGX was the first time it's pitched up to a gaming convention; the NCA said it wanted to educate young people with an interest in computers and suggested that those who mod online games in order to cheat may eventually progress to using low level cybercrime services like DDoS-for-hire and could use steering in the right direction. "The games industry can help us reach young people and educate them on lawful use of cyber skills," Richard Jones, head of the NCA's National Cyber Crime Unit's 'Prevent' team, told Motherboard in an email. "Through attendance at EGX and various other activities, we are seeking to promote ethical hacking or penetration testing, as well as other lawful uses of an interest in computers to young people," Jones said.
The term "Mod" is abused here, when I think of a mod I think of something that is a positive effect on a game. Someone who is doing something to cheat in an online game is referred to as a hacker or cheater, not a modder.
The Acorn BBC computer was one of the best machines of its era, with one of the very few decent(*) built-in BASIC interpreters available then. For learning the principles of computing and clean structured programming it was an excellent computer.
Learning is more about understanding how and why things work, rather than just a set of skills. How popular it was worldwide, is not important at all. The UK(**) was at the forefront of teaching programming in the early 1980s with good classes on BBC-TV.
(*) procedures and functions in stead of having to use GOTO/GOSUB, REPEAT/UNTIL & WHILE/WEND control structures, IF/THEN extended with ELSE and ELSEIF, variable names which were longer than 2 chars, in-line assembler in stead of having to POKE/PEEK hand-compiled numbers, etc...
(**) No, I am not a Brit and I was/am not in the UK.