The problem with the youth of today is hard work and excessive talent

Almost a decade ago in 2006 Eben showed off his Raspberry Pi protoype with the original aim being to improve the standards of computer science for Cambridge University Computer Science students. Four years ago the Raspberry Pi launched, and the first post-pi generation of students are now in their final year. Today I went back to the Computer Science department to deliver a lecture for their e-commerce course on web application architecture and scaling. Several of the examples were taken from scaling of the Raspberry PI website – a website literally built with the aim of educating the students sat directly before me.

One students in the room was Will Shackleton. Will came over after the lecture to show me one of his projects, he’d taken my original Upside-down-ternet project for messing with my neighbours who stole my wifi, and turned it into an android app, Network Spoofer that you can use on wifi networks.

His first implementation embedded a Debian chroot with my original terrible perl script and squid before he reimplemented it properly with a proper proxy and parser to enable many more features and cleaned it all up. We discussed some issues – e.g. evil hosting providers like us enabling free SSL which prevents intercepting connections, how a sense of ethics is important – Will has refused to implement SSL strip – and I gave my sketch idea of how to do an IPv6 gateway version that wouldn’t require arp spoofing.

So The Youth of Today are taking the things we built, cleaning up the messes we left behind and making things better.