Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? None: it’s a hardware problem.

There are ten types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

If you enjoyed those jokes, chances are you would have enjoyed a gathering held in Israel last month, the tenth annual Geek.con, where people come together to combine geeky technologies to build “useless projects.”

Attendees work across disciplines for 52 hours to invent such who-needs-that items as an online Pac-Man game where the protagonist is directed through head motion. Or Bane Mack Translator, which translates Hebrew to English or English to Hebrew, using the accent of the Bane character from “The Dark Knight Rises.” (No kin of mine. I was the White Knight, when I was in asbestos hazard control and wore white Tyvek at times.)

To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.

Software specialist Ilan Graicer dreamed up Geek.con, with Burning Man and Foo Camp in mind, and out of a determination “to create an un-conference” where people would build stuff instead of just talking about it.

If you are thinking “Israel? Sending a lot of geeks to Israel?”, stop being amazed. Israel has been a hotbed of computer and communications technology development for a long time?

How long? Since even before there was instant messaging. The granddaddy of instant messaging was developed in Tel Aviv by five Israelis. I refer to ICQ (say the letters fast to “get” why they named it that), and that was in, um, the mid-1990s.

There had been real-time chat, IRC, before that, but Mirabilis (a Roman name?) was formed to offer stand-alone instant messaging. I was an early adopter, as evidenced by my relatively low user ID number. AIM came along later. AOL acquired Mirabilis and patented the underlying technology, and later sold ICQ to Digital Sky Technologies. ICQ was the beating heart of AT&T’s first web platform.

Before you mark your calendar to attend geek.con in late September next year, you should know that it is an invitation-only event. They have to come with a project in mind.

There are corporate sponsors, which include Autodesk, Google, AT&T Foundry, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Sometimes those sponsors have shared prototypes with geek.con teams. Sponsors also provide the kind of equipment geeks lust for. Even so, participants often bring their own tools. They also are provided electrical power and online connectivity. Oh, and free beer.

What do you call eight hobbits? A hobbyte.

The User Generated Dinner is a dish-to-pass affair, with everyone bringing his or her geekiest dish.

We would suppose ten years of geek.con must have produced a long list of marketable products. But remember, the aim is to produce working but useless products. That makes for maximum creativity.

Still, the connections made at geek.con have led to the formation of startup teams, and to jobs for numerous individuals. One such startup created Face.com, which was bought by Facebook in 2012.

One byte runs into another at an event. He asks, “Are you ill?” The other byte replies, “No, but I am feeling a bit off.”

The notion of untrammeled creativity as practiced at geek.con has been borrowed with some modifications by the corporate world, as a modern form of brainstorming.

There’s TentTech, also in Israel, in a desert setting. It focuses on sustainability in water, energy, shelter and communication. It embraces UGD (“Goce Delcev” University) and the principle of participants being invited on the basis of an idea or project that would lend itself to group participation.

Have you heard about the band called 1023MB? probably not. They haven’t had any gigs.

Coordinator GilliCegla says of these various events are “a catalyst for promoting creative, blue-sky thinking and creative deployment of state-if-the-art technologies.”

Wouldn’t it be grand to have such events in the U.S.? And the one for kids—why not at least have computer camps along the lines of the various sports and arts camps? The difficulties that come to mind are equipment, supplies, bandwidth and internet access. But there are educational facilities that could provide those in their technology labs.

There are only two real difficulties in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.

And now for something completely different: what is this Shellshock.bug we keep hearing about?

Shellshock has a logo that looks like the Shell Oil shell, with a lightning bolt striking it. The term is a nickname for an exploitable bug in the Bourne Again Shell, or Bash, command line interpreter, which is a shell. A number of kinds of Unix, most flavors of Linux, some kinds of BSD and Apple’s OSX since version 10.3 use the Bash shell.

There are Bash shell uses elsewhere, too, in Windows and Android systems. But Bash isn’t installed or invoked by default in those. Most mentions of Shellshock have to do with the CVE-2014-6271 bug.

Users of Bash who are connected to the Internet are vulnerable to remote exploitation through Shellshock. Most at risk are systems that run internet servers. Others include home computer users with Bash on a system who use untrusted networks such as public Wi-Fi access points.

Most internet users running Windows, iOS, Mac OS or Android are not likely to encounter Shellshock.bug. But if they trust an internet server that is compromised, confidential user data on those servers could be exposed.

I could close with a UDP joke, but you might not get it.