2014 is "The Year of Code"

In the United Kingdom, the government has named 2014 the “Year of Code” and has started a campaign to prepare all schools in the country to start teaching children to program computers from the start of the next school year in September 2014. Prior to then, all teachers have to ensure they have the right training themselves to be able to teach computer programming.  Extra money has been promised from central government to support this initiative.

The UK government is responsible for setting out a national curriculum, which most schools have to follow when devising their lesson plans for the year.  In September 2014 coding will be introduced to the UK school timetable for every child aged 5-16 years old, making the UK the first major G20 economy in the world to implement this on a national level. This is a landmark policy change that will arm a generation of school-leavers with the skills for the 21st century, and “Year of Code” wants them to make the most of this first class opportunity.

“Year of Code” is an independent, non-profit campaign to encourage people across the country to get coding for the first time in 2014. Through code, people can discover the power of computer science, changing the way they think about, and get the most out of, the world around them.

The campaign will be banging the drum for all the fantastic coding initiatives taking place over the course of year and wants to help many more people engage with technology and access important training opportunities.

Over the course of the year the “Year of Code” website will signpost national and community tech events, crowdsource funding to help parents, pupils and educational organisations. It will commission detailed polling and analysis on how to take coding far and wide.

More on this campaign can be found at: www.yearofcode.org

What do you think of this? Do you feel that more schools should be teaching our children how to program computers? Why do you think this might be important?

This is an example of a youngster who taught himself to program and made a lot of money from his skills.

British teenager Nick D’Aloisio, taught himself to code at the age of 12, and created an application program called Summly while revising for his mock GCSEs in 2011. He made $30 million from selling it to Yahoo! in March 2013. At the age of 18, D'Aloisio is now a product manager at Yahoo! The app has been rebranded Yahoo! News Digest. The new app will give users news summaries twice a day. Each summary is comprised of nine stories, with each article constructed from multiple sources, which will feature tweets, videos and maps.

Here is another example of a youngster with big ideas.

Jack Kim learned to write HTML code at school and immediately decided to create Benelab, a search engine that earns money for charity.  His company only employs youngsters, all staff members are aged 17, and it has already donated thousands of dollars to numerous charities. Kim aspires to donate $100,000 before graduation.

This isn’t to say that everyone will have great business success simply because they can code, but it does open up opportunities that you might not otherwise have had.

The rise and rise of data encryption for everyone

Years ago, I came across stories of a government-backed scheme to monitor communications traffic. This project was established by the USA, UK, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand governments (“FiveEyes”) to monitor phone calls, faxes, emails, etc, on a worldwide basis. “Ah”, you might say, “I’ve read about the NSA monitoring in the recent news”. I’m not talking about that, I’m describing Project ECHELON, which was set up in the 1960s as part of the Cold War.

By the end of the 20th century, this system had evolved beyond its military and diplomatic origins to become "a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications" (according to a European Parliamentary report). In 2001, the EU Committee investigating ECHELON recommended to the European Parliament that EU citizens routinely use encryption in their communications to protect privacy - to counter economic espionage conducted by US intelligence services via ECHELON.

So, when the disclosures by a former NSA contractor began to be revealed by the press in 2013, it was not exactly “new” news - at least to people who knew about ECHELON. Because of the way the disclosures have been made and the major increase in on-line communication during the 21^st century, a huge public debate has started about how governments spy on their citizens and other people worldwide.

Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, has been called variously: a hero; a patriot; a whistleblower; a traitor; and a dissident. Which moniker applies depends upon your point of view.  Should we expect our emails to be private, or should the government be allowed to check (in secret) for “threats to national security”?

A lot of people believe that, while they have nothing to hide, they have a fundamental right to privacy. In line with the recommendation made back in 2001 by that EU report, many have resorted to using encryption to keep the contents of their online communications private. What exactly does it mean to encrypt email?

If you know your World War 2 history, you will have heard of the Enigma machines used by the German military to keep their communications secret.  Messages were coded via a complicated mechanism, broadcast to the recipient who would use the same type of machine to decode the message. The coding/decoding method changed regularly by means of new “keycodes”. It took the Allied forces a long time, but they eventually managed to break the Enigma coding system and read the secret messages.

The same idea is used today.  An email is passed through encryption software and then the coded message is mailed. The recipient uses a decoding version of the software to decrypt (unscramble) the message and read it. There are several types of encryption, some involving more and more lengthy or complex keycodes. However, as the sophistication of such software has increased, you can be sure that the capabilities of the NSA, GCHQ and other services have also increased, as has the legal backing for their actions.

The Lavabit email service tried to provide secure email by automatically encrypting all email sent through their servers. Lavabit decided to close down in August 2013 after the US Government ordered it to hand over its SSL private key (which opened all email to official scrutiny).

Encryption is being used more widely. You can keep your secrets away from most people. It just makes the security services work a tiny bit harder to read your data if they choose to. You can’t (yet) keeps things secret from THEM.