Friday, December 10, 2010

Cyberattacks and microtasks

Today, a long bank holiday came to an end for me. Five days which had been led by the air traffic controllers and the Internet-war due to the W¡k¡leaks issue.

It's quite impressive how a relatively small number of users are creating such a mess to big companies like Mastercard, Visa or Paypal (I'm talking about the DDoS attacks). It is true that there are lots of people who want to show their support to W¡k¡leaks, but I don't know if this is the right way, mostly because of the possible side effects (such as using them as a an excuse to restrict the Internet user liberties in the future). The figures about this attacks are being tracked by Panda labs.

However, these days have been quite normal for me on the RealWorld™. I have been able to enjoy them with friends and also to prepare myself a bit more for the final exams on January. The end of this holiday seems to me the start of the countdown for exams, so that, my hours of studying are going to be increased in an exponential way in the next days.

To finish this entry, I would like to share the little piece of work we were working on last week for Microprocessors class. It can be useful for other students who have to face up to a task similar to this one.

The aim of it was just developing a program (for a specific machine) in assembler to calculate the factorial of a given number throughout consecutive sums. It was not a difficult task, but it took us more than expected owing to the fact of being used to coding in higher level languages.

The design of the machine for ISIS: http://db.tt/b00z7lG
The program itself: http://db.tt/rOZ3bg4

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