Microsoft Student Partners Evolve – FEBRUARY 2016

As Microsoft Student Partners, one of our important events is our monthly meetup called the ‘MSP Evolve’ during which we try bond with each other, pass on skills, socialize and get updates on our ongoing projects. From time to time, the ‘MSP Evolve’ is also used as a communication channel to create awareness among the MSPs about the latest tech trends or debated topics such as ‘Security & Privacy’ which has been in fact, our last ‘MSP Evolve’ theme. The members of February’s MSP Evolve organizing team were; Dishay Kissoon, Abijeet Lotun, Akshay Pokhun, Varun Horril and myself. When we volunteered to take up the responsibility for this month event, little did we knew that it would be such a meticulous job, but we really enjoyed ourselves so much in the process, I mean the weekly meetings, the incoherent chats, ideas discussion and the excitement and thank god everything went as planned, well mostly!

When we started to plan the event, we really didn’t know where to start and how to relate each and everything together until we finally decided on a theme for the meetup which was ‘Security & Privacy’. Then we started to plan everything accordingly, the presentation, the demos and debates all had to be related to this one theme. Dishay, decided to introduce, TOR (The Onion Router), as a mean to have secure connection over the internet – I came up with the idea of presenting Microsoft Windows most resilient vulnerability along with a demo of my system breaking software Rat! – Abhijeet decided to project something about security in Windows – Akshay would be presenting about security measures in the latest gaming technologies and Varun sprouted the amazing idea of presentation chaos where the MSPs grouped in teams, would have to defend one of the most rejected or unused software/platform.

On the 27th February, the D-day we were all a bit shaken up by the previous sleepless night and we were all stressed since we learned that our friend Varun and another participating member won’t be showing up. So we changed plans and I was the one who got to do the kick-off where the aim of the presentation was to show that even if the world’s most used operating system which is Windows has greatly evolved throughout the recent years, it is still breakable and we have to imperatively take proper measures in order to protect our data and physical devices against tampering.

I believe, I did put up with my objective. On a scale of one to ten, I would be rated a six! Thanks to the debate which was scheduled at the end of the presentation where each team have been requested to make a short slide about how they would protect their data and physical devices.

Then come, Dishay on stage who gave us an instructive yet interactive presentation about the Tor Network; the founders, the project’s aim and unveiled to us the mystery of its functioning

The MSPs really appreciated the presentation that we end up with an unexpected, passionate and interesting debate. The presentation was thus, lively and achieved its aim of promoting the Tor Network as being a tool to have secure connection online.

Due to time constraints, we jumped directly to the Presentation Chaos – which contributed to the momentum of a making the event more fun while learning, thus lessening the lecture-kind standard of the typical ‘MSP Evolve’. The objective of this exercise was to put the team members under pressure to research on a given topic, prepare a creative presentation and come on stage to present their findings without any disruption while articulating the findings; demonstrating a well aligned and creative Team.

We could have related the topics to the theme but I think at some point we focused more on making the event funny than related to our objective and this is point that our team we’ll have to work on next time.

“The best kids are going to become the best. But the best thing about it is that you’re going to learn lessons in playing those sports about winning and losing and teamwork and teammates and arguments and everything else that are going to affect you positively for the rest of your life.” – Carl Lewis

Regards,

Cédric