schwit1 shares an interesting story. Newsweek reports:
A British teenager managed to obtain access to sensitive U.S. plans about intelligence operations in different Middle East countries by acting as former CIA Director John Brennan, a court heard on Friday. Kane Gamble, 18, researched Brennan and used the information he gathered to speak to an internet company and persuade call handlers to give him access to the spy chief’s email inbox in 2015. He pretended to be both a Verizon employee and Brennan to access Brennan’s internet account.
Astonishingly, Gamble managed to gain access to Brennan’s emails and his addressbook, as well as his iCloud storage. He even managed to remotely access the iPad of Brennan’s wife… Gamble, aged 15 at the time, also persuaded a helpdesk at the FBI that he was the then deputy director Mark Giuliano… In October 2017, Gamble pleaded guilty to 10 charges, including eight charges of “performing a function with intent to secure unauthorized access” to the computers and two of “unauthorized modification of computer material.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – A 15-Year-Old Convinced Verizon He Was the Head of the CIA

The Guardian quotes Paul Verhoeven, the director of Starship Troopers:
Robert Heinlein’s original 1959 science-fiction novel was militaristic, if not fascistic. So I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism… I was looking for the prototype of blond, white and arrogant, and Casper Van Dien was so close to the images I remembered from Leni Riefenstahl’s films. I borrowed from Triumph of the Will in the parody propaganda reel that opens the film, too. I was using Riefenstahl to point out, or so I thought, that these heroes and heroines were straight out of Nazi propaganda…
With a title like Starship Troopers, people were expecting a new Star Wars. They got that, but not really: it stuck in your throat. It said: “Here are your heroes and your heroines, but by the way — they’re fascists.”
The actors weren’t even clear on what the giant arachnids would look like, since their “Bug” battles were filmed entirely with green screens, remembers one of the movie’s stars, Denise Richards. Instead Verhoeven “would be there jumping up and down with a broom in the air so we would have a sense of how big they were.”

Verhoeven told one interviewer that he never actually read Robert Heinlein’s original book. “I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring. It is really quite a bad book.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – ‘How We Made Starship Troopers’

An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld:
When it comes to which programming languages are in demand by employers, JavaScript, Java, Python, C++, and C — in that order — came out on top in a recent developer survey. Developers, however, want to learn languages like Python, Go, and Kotlin. A survey of developers by technical recruiter HackerRank, conducted in October, found no gap between languages employers want and what developers actually know, with JavaScript barely edging out Java…
HackerRank also found gaps in JavaScript frameworks between what employers want and what developers know. The React JavaScript UI library had the biggest delta between employers and developers, with about 37 percent of employers wanting React skills but only about 19 percent of developers having them… [But] problem-solving skills are the most-sought by employers, more than language proficiency, debugging, and system design.
The survey involved 39,441 developers, and concluded that “Python ruled among all age groups,” according to Application Development Trends, “except for those 55 years or older, who narrowly prefer C.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Employers Want JavaScript, But Developers Want Python, Survey Finds