I know that times have changed of late, but when I read of young midshipmen getting only four or five hours of sleep at night while engaged in a spirited competition with the other service academies over “honeypots,” I must confess that a smile of welcome recollection comes to mind. Ah, youth!

But then I read the article:

It might not have looked like it, but there was a war going on yesterday between midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy and the “Red Team” at the nearby National Security Agency at Fort Meade.

The Red Team — a group of NSA hackers tasked with breaking into U.S. government and military information systems to expose vulnerabilities — was “attacking” servers set up by computer science and information technology majors at the Annapolis military college. The midshipmen, in turn, were trying to defend their network.

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The Naval Academy won last year’s competition, and this year is joined in the exercise by cadets from the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, N.Y., the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., and the U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology in Ohio.

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Some did administrative work, monitoring all the e-mails sent and how the server was being used, properly or improperly.

Others monitored the attempts to access the system internally and externally, and one team of Mids was set up to monitor a group of “honeypot computers.” These computers, designed to be less secure, act as decoys so the Red Team will spend its time hacking into computers that won’t slow down the Mids’ overall system.

Feh.

Youth: It’s entirely squandered on the young.