It's actually considerably more difficult. Unlike your computer, the helicopter encounters different environmental conditions each time it flies, so that just blindly recording the controller inputs and replaying them will cause the helicopter to crash.
The trick in apprenticeship learning is to learn the flying model used by the pilot, not just recording and replaying a macro.
Have you considered contacting professors at your local university? Plenty of research groups can use someone with coding skills, and you'll have a great experience. It might not be paid, but you're likely to find someone who'll take you and you'll be able to pick up letters of recommendation for future work.
You might also get to learn something about actual computer science (rather than simply programming or IT), and better yet, you might get to contribute to the development of cutting-edge technology.
As a warning, you may have to knock on a lot of doors before you find someone who thinks a high school student knows enough to contribute usefully to a project (many academics might just ask you to read a stack of books and come back in a few years), but there are those of us willing to take on a high school intern -- you'll just have to be persistent.
I concur wholeheartedly with the parent and caution you to be extremely cautious in going about this correctly.
I work as a student lawyer of sorts at a major US university and defend students involved in disciplinary/judicial incidents with the university. Last year I represented a student who was ultimately expelled for exploring (not exploiting) severe security vulnerabilities on a campus library network with an eye to pointing out to someone higher-up that the school had massive holes in its architecture. Bureaucratic admins and faculty are hard-pressed to understand that the way to check system security is to carry out the same probes a h4xj0r would.
My recommendations:
1) Cover your back. Document what you are doing and notify someone you trust (a faculty member in the CS department would be great) about your plans and benign intentions.
2) Contact the -company-, not the school, and notify them that you'll be issuing the exploit to BugTraq within a set time frame if the bug isn't corrected. Don't let your school even find out about this if you can help it. No need to be anonymous when contacting the company. They oughta thank you, really.
3) Publish the exploit on Slashdot unless the company specifically tells you why they cannot correct the problem during the set time frame. You don't even need to be anonymous. Legal action against security whistleblowers ought to be illegal, but at least here/.ers will die by the hundreds to defend you.
Slashdot Mirror
It's actually considerably more difficult. Unlike your computer, the helicopter encounters different environmental conditions each time it flies, so that just blindly recording the controller inputs and replaying them will cause the helicopter to crash. The trick in apprenticeship learning is to learn the flying model used by the pilot, not just recording and replaying a macro.
Have you considered contacting professors at your local university? Plenty of research groups can use someone with coding skills, and you'll have a great experience. It might not be paid, but you're likely to find someone who'll take you and you'll be able to pick up letters of recommendation for future work.
You might also get to learn something about actual computer science (rather than simply programming or IT), and better yet, you might get to contribute to the development of cutting-edge technology.
As a warning, you may have to knock on a lot of doors before you find someone who thinks a high school student knows enough to contribute usefully to a project (many academics might just ask you to read a stack of books and come back in a few years), but there are those of us willing to take on a high school intern -- you'll just have to be persistent.
I concur wholeheartedly with the parent and caution you to be extremely cautious in going about this correctly. I work as a student lawyer of sorts at a major US university and defend students involved in disciplinary/judicial incidents with the university. Last year I represented a student who was ultimately expelled for exploring (not exploiting) severe security vulnerabilities on a campus library network with an eye to pointing out to someone higher-up that the school had massive holes in its architecture. Bureaucratic admins and faculty are hard-pressed to understand that the way to check system security is to carry out the same probes a h4xj0r would. My recommendations: 1) Cover your back. Document what you are doing and notify someone you trust (a faculty member in the CS department would be great) about your plans and benign intentions. 2) Contact the -company-, not the school, and notify them that you'll be issuing the exploit to BugTraq within a set time frame if the bug isn't corrected. Don't let your school even find out about this if you can help it. No need to be anonymous when contacting the company. They oughta thank you, really. 3) Publish the exploit on Slashdot unless the company specifically tells you why they cannot correct the problem during the set time frame. You don't even need to be anonymous. Legal action against security whistleblowers ought to be illegal, but at least here /.ers will die by the hundreds to defend you.