Belvedere Times

The Award Ceremony in Google HQ, Dublin.

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Challenging Norkom

Michael-David McKernan, Co-curricular

The Belvedere College Norkom Challenge team of 2010 consisted of four TY students;

Michael-David McKernan, SA,
Michael Stone, SK,
Kevin Sweeney, SK,
Conor Ryan, SA

We were given the project title of "Safe surfing online" and told to use our intiative to create anything under that heading. With three other teams battling against us in order to win the grand prize of €3,000 each we needed an original idea that would make us stand out from the rest.

Many ideas were thrashed out over a period of four weeks, before we came to the ground-breaker. Our mentors Harold and Oscar were often taken aback by some of our ideas. Things like tricking the judges into giving us their credit card details, software that would block illegal sites being viewed as well as ideas regarding illegal sales on eBay just weren't good enough we thought. Then we went back to the foundations of internet security and got very basic.

We realised that there are three areas where people are vulnerable online: the computers themselves (viruses), their personal information stored on the computer and also the people themselves (being affected by what you see on the internet). This is the gap in the market that we spotted and wanted to exploit.

In doing this we came up with the idea of a computer software that would collect information about people on social networking sites and determine whether they were legitimate people or not. This would protect against paedophilia and illegitimate profiles being set up in the first place.

The software would work in a similar way to how when you type something into Google information is returned back to you. Our software would use detection points such as ISP address, multiple e-mail addresses and patterns of use to find social networking site users posing as someone they aren't.

The prize-giving took place in none other then the Google Ireland HQ but for legal reasons I can't write about the inside of the building (but it was awesome!). We were announced as runners up and got the second prize of €2,000 each. This money goes towards our college education when the time comes.

I'd strongly reccommend the current third years to apply for the Norkom Challenge as it is, as you've read, very rewarding! And you don't have to be a computer nerd to do well either. God knows none of us were and we still came away with a hefty prize.

Library Lecture IV

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Challenging Norkom

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