Coffee Musings of a Cyber Security Expert

Has anyone ever completely nerded out over numbers, patterns and maths? I saw this article on ABC News about commonly used PINs, and I clicked into it not expecting to be quite this interested. The authors have taken the four digit PINs from Troy's Have I Been Pwned site (using the API) and split them into the first two digits and the last two, so that the data could be plotted on an X-Y graph. The result is a graph which shows visually the most common combinations of digits. It's a brilliant idea, because it makes the task of identifying patterns very simple, using visual means. Unsurprisingly, PINs like 0000, 1111, 1234, 1212 etc are the most common. The repeated digit combinations nicely show up as a straight diagonal line. There's also a strong representation for PINs beginning with 19 and 20, because these form the first two digits of the birth years of everyone alive today. The visual representation also shows some popular PINs that I didn't expect to be common, ...

Everyone is talking about AI. Everyone from politicians to the crowd at my coffee shop, and everyone has either a fear of it, or an enthusiastic story about how it's transformed their lives.  A teacher writing up a behaviour incident report threw a bunch of bullet points containing the raw data at ChatGPT, and it responded with a business-like email, formatted and ready to send (after adding the sensitive info like names etc manually). A small business owner chucked a few words at CoPilot and it formatted that into a well written social media post, ready to go. The fears that people speak of are either job redundancy or "will humans never think for themselves again". I see the emergence of these tools as just that: tools to get a job done. Just like the invention of "wireless" (radio comms), the telephone, the transistor, computers etc, a set of new pathways are created. What are we doing to facilitate the creation of those pathways? The teachers I know ha...