Happy Holidays! Next year challenge - think outside of a box.

Happy holidays to all my dear readers!
Thank you so much for your loyalty, comments and ideas. Please keep them coming.
Wishing you a healthy and successful year.
Today I would like to tell you a story and give you and myself a New year challenge: Lets try thinking outside of a box.

the story:
You have likely heard of a field of cryptography that is dealing with secure data storage, transfer and access. It is applicable to anything from protecting your personal medical information, sending online payments to breaking into the Pentagon computers. In the past century very complex algorithms have been developed to encode and decode such secure data. Many algorithms are using extra-large prime numbers. $150,000 dollar prizes were announced to people that could find such large primes consisting of hundreds of thousands of digits. Even since the Second World War cryptography has been a very hot field and many brilliant scientists are working in it.

A group of them just published a ground-breaking study announcing that you can decode the encrypted message that your computer is sending or receiving by ... looking outside of the computer box. You don't need to break into the computer, instead concentrate outside of the box, just listen to it.  Computer at the end is just a machine that process any keystroke into series of bits that are translated into electrical signals: on and off. And as we all know these on-off switches usually makes tiny noise. In the computer case this noise could be captured by any smartphone microphones. So, if you are a secret agent you can spy on your enemy by accidentally leaving a smartphone near his laptop, taping and transferring the noise to your computer and de-crypting the data at home.
This is one of those things when many other scientists and lay people probably think: It is so simple. Why haven't we thought about it before? We have been concentrating so hard and deep inside the box that we forgot about the outside options.

Next year - let's try to thinking outside of the box.  At work or at home, let's try to step aside and find creative unconventional solutions to any challenge we may face.
Happy New 2014!