Headline July 27, 2017/ ''' HACKERS HAPPY *HOURS* '''

''' HACKERS HAPPY *HOURS* '''

*IN THE HALL OF MIRRORS*      - I stop by and entertain myself to dining alone, nay,  with Parents, Students, Professor and Teachers   -from the World over-

Just about every nook and corner, choosing at times incomprehensible back channels, chorus in many beautiful words of appreciation, gratitude, and total commitment.

The World Students Society, most lovingly and respectfully called, !WOW!, the exclusive ownership of every single student in the world, thanks you all.

What now matters : is for all of you to join up post haste as we get preparing for the sterling honour of  Global Elections,  under the auspices of the great Students, Professors and Teachers of America............

This point of time, may just call for an inspiration of the moment, and a little tiny speech. So, hear this as you read on, bit it ain't me. I concede the stage to Student Milo:

I PROMISE A NEW ERA OF VIOLENT DICTATORSHIP  -where all and every dissent is suppressed, using violence and other nefarious tactics-

I promise that you shall fear for your safety should you speak out against the regime,'' he says, to more heckling.

That's the Next up, and it  is  Milo  for VP. and he seems to be at his very best. He climbs onto a swivel chair, flailing and  torquing around.

''This I vow, to all of you, on my honour. Thank You, and please don't vote for No Confidence. That would really suck.

''That speech is a lot less funny given the  president-elect right now,'' someone says.

One of the candidates for  treasurer  gives his speech,  calling NU Hacks a cross between an authoritarian dictatorship and an anarchist collective, and meanwhile everyone's whispering . No Confidence is gaining momentum.

Obviously they're just clowning around, but I do start wondering how much the joke extends to real life-

Whether, at a time when Hackers and  Email leaks influence elections, theirs is a  politics of  No Confidence, disengaged and distracted by fuzzers and messing with strangers' baby monitors.

Sure, college is a time for indecision, for gathering knowledge without immediately forming an agenda. Then again, they're also voting age.

I'm still not sure what they stand for. in them I see a various decades of youth culture, imperfectly reflected : the footloose idealism of the 60s but not its counterculture.

The skepticism of the  90s  but not its disaffection; the technophilia of the aughts bit nit its grandiosity. Yet 

*Where's the anger? With all their talent, why don't they want to  rip down the systems that gave us mass surveillance and  fun-size ice caps?*

*None of them have gotten into any real trouble, though their harmless rule-testing often looks like trouble* -

In high school    some of them would remotely hijack     other students computers for pranks, like running a script to play the  Game of Thrones theme sung by Hodor for 10 hours at full volume.

David's bug bounty work confuses me a bit. Though they've existed since the 1990s,  bug-bounty competitions  have seen a boom over the past few years since big companies like  Google and Facebook started hosting them.

A handful of  superstar  whitehats  can clear  $250,000 in a good year, but aside from the air miles and some nominal fees from Uber , Davis's been working mostly pro bono.

To me this sounds suspiciously like a  corporate ploy for cheap labor, but he says he considers it a   public service:

''They hold data on you, on millions of users, and so to help with their security is in the  public interest .'' 

 He has a point -when we have collectively volunteered so much personal data to the private sector, the notions of  public welfare and  corporate security  have fused.

Secure in their  future earning potential , not one them expresses colossal ambitions of  ''changing the world''. 

Except for Peter,    with his  bottom-line  business focus,    they all seem indifferent to wealth, power and the popularity that comes with both. So maybe they feel that politics, which is all about those things, doesn't bear on them.

''Vote No Confidence,'' David enthuses. 

''You can vote No Confidence. No Confidence!''

Niousha tallies the votes aloud. Someone wrote  in  ''Milo For Dictator.'' A pen comes twirling at Jacob :  ''There's already been an assassination attempt!''

The winners are announced to  applause and calls for bloodshed. No-Confidence does not prevail; humans/students do.

The next  day,  David and I attend  Technology and Human Values, a class that fulfills the   ''ethical reasoning''  requirement for  Computer Science majors.

Almost everyone is using a  laptop, and of the  40 or so students,  three, including David, have their webcams covered with either masking tape or sliding doodad.

Student Taha Vasowala   :  Age 19......... !WOW!

First Computer : Dell Latitude D620 laptopn when I was 12 or 13.

Most Recent Hack : The Codex Hackathon in February. We built a Wikipedia plug-in which analyzes what  Wikipedia  articles you've read and then tries to suggest what Wikipedia articles you might be interested in.

Biggest Tech Moment : The first time I started programming, in ninth grade/ It was on a  TI-84 Plus calculator programming in TI-BASIC and that kinda started it off.

Last App Used : Relay For Reddit.

A.I. Friend Or Foe : I'd say Friend. It has a lot of potential.

IOS Or Android : I have an Android phone and an iPod Touch.

Preferred Coding Language : Java Script.

Favourite Class At NU : Intro to Linguistics.  Its kind off my major, but it's pretty interesting to me.

Dream Job Out Of School : Probably Web Developer, but I'd like something that integrates music or art in some way.

The Honour and Serving of the latest  Operational Research  on Nu-Nerds, Technology and  Ethics continues.

With respectful dedication to this Great Nation America, and its great Students, Professors and Teachers, and the rest of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW!  -the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Dawn To Dusk '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless