These are the questions and answers from 404 Tech Quiz by the Computer science society of St. Stephen’s College in collaboration with The Quiz Club.

Answers follow every 5 questions

Q1. If you look into the etymology of this word, it comes from a Czech word meaning forced work or labor. What am I talking about?

Q2. ____ was named after the canned meat! In a Monty Python skit, they said __ meat was “horrible and being ubiquitous and inescapable”. FITB

Q3. In 2010, the United States Air Force used 1,760 Xs consoles to build a supercomputer for the Department of Defense. They used Xs because it was more cost-efficient and “green.” What is X?

Q4. “When you agree to the Terms & Conditions for this app, you are agreeing to not use it to make nuclear weapons. The clause states, “You also agree that you will not use these products for….the development, design, manufacture, or production of the nuclear, missile, or chemical or biological weapons. This is ironic considering how extremely unlikely it is that you would build nukes using this app What app?”

Q5. I’m talking about two companies The first company was called akebono.stanford.edu. The current name is derived from a slang in Gulliver’s travels, which was a fictional race of beings in the book. The second company was called Cadabra.com, and it used to only be an online bookstore. What are the two reasons the company changed its name from Cadabra.com Name both companies?

Answers

Q1. Robot

Q2. Spam

Q3. PS3

Q4. iTunes

Q5. Yahoo, Amazon, 1. Amazon starts with an A.2) Their lawyer head it as Cadaver

Q6. What is blanked out?

Q7. X is a famous beauty of classic Hollywood; she was also mathematically gifted and had learned a lot about weapons systems from her first husband, an arms manufacturer. She was friends with George Antheil, an Avante-Garde composer with similarly broad interests (he wrote a book on endocrinology). Together, during World War II, the two of them patented a technology that would allow radio signals to torpedos to hop from frequency to frequency and avoid being jammed. The Navy rejected it at the time but took it up 20 years later during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the patent figured into the development of numerous broadcast standards, including Y.

Q8. X was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, a lead engineer from Cisco Systems, and also created a program named “Works with X”, which established partnerships with multiple hardware and software vendors such as Logitech, Vaddio, and InFocus. The company was valued at just under US$16 billion at the end of 2019 and today nearly doubled in value to approximately $36 billion. Due to recent trends and controversies, X-Bombing is a federal offense that could result in imprisonment now. X?

Q9. “In 1962, President Kennedy was fearful that individual military commanders had too much leeway to launch a nuclear attack on their own initiative, and instituted a new policy that an eight-digit password would be necessary to launch missiles. Air Force officers, more fearful of a delayed nuclear response than a rogue commander, followed the letter if not the spirit of the rule and used ____ in every missile silo — and, just like half the people in your office do with their passwords, they then wrote the eight-digit sequence on a piece of paper to make sure nobody forgot. The Air Force disputes this story, but it comes from Bruce Blair, who was an Air Force launch officer in the 1970s. What was the password, which I hope none of you use?”

Q10. Service A was a free web-based application launched by AltaVista. The company was taken over by B, but A retained its iconic name, until 2012 when it was replaced by an alternative by Bing. The name of the service itself is based on a species in one of the most iconic sci-fi series of all time. The species had a particularly useful ability, one that bridged communication gaps across the universe. Such accurate and instantaneous communication between different people is the goal behind a lot of attempts by tech companies to create services that go leaps and bounds ahead of A. The name of the species is also an allusion by the author of the series to a certain biblical passage. Interestingly, the root word of A is also the name of an open-source JavaScript compiler, designed to keep JS code up to date. Identify A, B, and the sci-fi series

ANSWERS

Q6. SOAP, RESt

Q7. Hedy Lamarr, WiFi

Q8. Zoom

Q9.”000000000

Q10.A – Babel Fish, B- Yahoo,

Q11. “Released in 1982, this movie began development in 1976, inspired by the videogame Pong. The movie centers around a hacker trying to overcome an artificial intelligence (virtual intelligence acc to the wiki) that works in the company they were kicked out of. The hacker gets transported into the world of the mainframe computer (remember 1982) and has to interact with personified programs, who recognize him as an X. The titular character is a program, created by the hacker’s friend, to help protect the system. Fast forward to the sequel in 2010, and we enter the world of X, otherwise known as the Grid, where the son of the previous protagonist is forced to fight in gladiatorial contests known as Y wars, before being challenged to an iconic Z battle by CLU, the program in charge. Z battles were also a part of the original film, and we do see an iconic prop from the original in the sequel. Y was once a widely popular format of storing digital media, and you’d be hard-pressed to use one in a current laptop, given that they began to be phased out around the 2016-17 mark. Z’s are altogether fictional and are a combination of two words. They are vehicles that one rides the sort of like the BatBike and leave a glowing trail of light in their wake when going fast enough. Identify X, Y, and Z.”

Q12. The game X is a fixed shooter arcade game, published by Namco, as a sequel to Galaxian. The game is most popularly referenced in a scene from a famous movie, a coming together of multiple big names in movies, from someone who is known for having played a detective, a lawyer, with a brief cameo in a famous food-related movie. The scene occurs during a discussion about turning to look at screens, something that Y would have to do, given their physical characteristics. The line is fired off at the end of the scene, “That man is playing X” Give X and Y”

Q13. “This collection, created by X, is one of the fundamental aspects of the world in this 2004 futuristic movie. X may have been inspired by Newton, Kepler, etc while creating this collection. While the film wasn’t intended to have any connection to X’s works, in fact, it had an entirely separate screenplay titled Hardwired, it finally credited X’s works as a suggestion, although it shares the exact same name as the works of X. Give me the collection, X and the film. ”

Q14. “Inspired by the computer conversational system onboard a vessel in this extremely famous and popular sci-fi series, this product also shares its name with a web traffic analysis company owned by the same parent company. The name is said to be a shortened version, and hence a reference, to what is commonly known as the largest repository of knowledge in the ancient world, with the name being chosen in the hope that the internet could one day fulfill the same purpose. Give me the name and sci-fi series”

Q15. “One might know this famous French hacker by his online alias, one created based on a persona in a popular TV series. The hacker was able to scrape through the entire Aadhar website in batches and download photographs with their corresponding Aadhar numbers. They have also been at the forefront of pinpointing security vulnerabilities in major government and political party tech initiatives. More interestingly, their alias comes from a show dealing with such security experts and exploits, the key logo of the show reminiscent of a very famous comic by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. The hacker’s Twitter handle is the name of the collective (X) that the protagonist of the show joins, with a motive to create a better version of the world. X might be a censored slogan one may have heard edgy teenagers use at some point in their lives when railing against the constraints of society. The actor who plays the protagonist has won Best Actor in a Television Series, multiple years in a row at the Golden Globes. Name the show, the collective or the hacker’s Twitter handle, and the name of the protagonist of the show.”

ANSWERS

Q11. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Q12. X – Galaga, Y – Nick Fury

Q13. Collection – Laws of Robotics, X – Asimov, Film – IRobot

Q14. Alexa, Star Trek

Q15. Show – Mr. Robot, Collective – Fsociety, Handle – Elliot Alderson

Q16. “This film is a cornerstone in the _____ genre and raises some pretty philosophical questions in its less than an hour and a half runtime, fundamentally challenging the purpose of human life and our existence, and the superiority with which we treat ourselves vis-a-vis other manifestations of intelligence. The film was originally released in 1995, with a rerelease as 2.0 in 2008, and a live-action version recently, that we do not talk about (as is the case with most live-action remakes) The original films were in Japanese, and interestingly were peppered through with biblical references to highlight changes in perspective with a change in time and age. Name the film and the actor in the live-action flop. also, FITB”

Q17. NBC created a made-for-television speculative disaster movie. Wilderness survival bootcamps suddenly grew popular. The British armed forces announced their readiness to provide assistance if needed. Surveys showed that among the sectors studied in the United States, the government was the least ready. Rated highest for preparedness was the software industry. In mid-December 1998 the UN convened its first international conference on the subject in an attempt to share information and crisis-management efforts. What am I talking about?

Q18. This film begins with the fundamental question: “Should people be allowed to save someone who doesn’t want to be saved?” Following legislation that seems inevitable in these sorts of films, this one revolves around our protagonist and family, as they lead double lives. Once our protagonist is hired by a secret organization to help them with certain difficulties at their headquarters, they discover that they’re trapped, forced to fight against a machine. Our protagonist finds the password to a computer in a cave, carved out in a cave by a predecessor, whose remains are propped up against a rock. Interestingly, the password could only be seen by sitting exactly where the dead superhero lay. The password to the computer has a link to Greek mythology and seems to have been discovered in the nick of time, as the protagonist learns of the countless others like them, killed in order to train the machine to be able to kill him. Identify the company that produced the film, notable for its work in pushing the boundaries of its field, the password, and the dead predecessor’s power/ a well-known figure with similar powers.

Q19. Most of us might not have been active internet users, X used to be a popular social networking site in the year 2005, the year Samy Kamkar created the first Y, the fastest spreading virus of all time. The word Y is quite different when you compare it with viruses (etymologically speaking of course), and is much more akin to a certain class of animals. Y’s also play a part in a seminal 1965 sci-fi novel Z, that first made its way to the silver screen in the year that Apple released the Macintosh. X was an American social media site, that ran from 2005 to 2009, being overtaken by Facebook in 2008. Give X, Y and Z

Q20. X was featured heavily in a 2013 installment of a particular franchise/series. Headed by a rather explosive CEO(the antagonist), the company grew from a small think tank into one of the largest tech firms in this universe, even assisting in the redoing of an icon for the nation the film is set in. Now, in the real world, three companies came together in 1992 to form a particular alliance to end the monopoly of Microsoft in the tech world. This alliance was also named X, (formed by the initials of the three companies) and each of the companies can be considered a pioneering firm in their niche of the technological world, ultimately resulting in their clearest success being the PowerPC. ID the three companies, which will automatically give you X.

ANSWERS

Q16. Film – Ghost in the Shell, Actor – Scarlet Johansson, Cyberpunk Y2K

Q17. Y2K

Q18. PIXAR, Kronos, Cyclops

Q19. X – Myspace, Y – Worms, Z – Dune

Q20. X – AIM, Apple, IBM, Motorola

Q21. Founded in California in 1968, the name for this now globally known company was a point of debate for the founders. Initially rejecting using their own last names, since it would result in a phonetic similarity to ‘more noise’, a rather undesirable trait in this field of technological development, they settled on using their initials, and thus was born NM Electronics, which was almost immediately changed to the name we know today, one which would perhaps indicate this company originated on Krypton. ID the company, and the founders.

Q22. Identify the two companies from the tweet

Q23. The game was created by Markus “Notch” Persson a popular programming language. Following several early test versions, it was released as a paid public alpha for personal computers in 2009 before officially released in November 2011, with Jens Bergensten taking over development. It is recognized as one of the first successful games to use an early access model to draw in sales prior to its full release version to help fund development. As it helped to bolster indie game development in the early 2010s, it also helped to popularize the use of the early access model in indie game development. Which game?

Q24. When coming up with X in the 1980s, the creative team of Nintendo sought inspiration from a popular comic strip of the time. While an official agreement with the comic strip team was canceled, Nintendo decided to make a similar plotline for the game, featuring original characters. This resulted in one of the main elements of X being a love triangle that mirrored the one present in the comic strip, which featured a comically large/muscular man(leading him to resemble something), a man in an iconic uniform of sorts, and a damsel in distress, whose counterpart in X went so far as to also being named after a food item. ID both X and the comic strip.

Q25. The controversial content creator X has managed to stay relevant for ten years, rebranding himself as a horror games streamer to a meme critique and now an internet personality. Facing fraud earlier in his career, he started his own network on the platform he bases his work on, which was later shut down because of a controversy. Been the face of many such controversies, he has been called a racist, anti-semitic, misogynist, and a bully, but still managed to somehow evade the cancel culture. Apart from streaming games, he also has a clothing line whose name literally translates to the moon. ID X.

ANSWERS

Q21. Intel, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce

Q22. Dunzo welcoming Swiggy

Q23. Minecraft

Q24. X – Donkey Kong, Comic strip- Popeye

Q25. X – Pewdiepie

Q26. One will be familiar with this line from a classic show, one that’s an equal mix of adult humor and slapstick violence. The line in question is used in a fight sequence in one of the beginning acts of the series when one of the characters is checking their opponent’s “power levels” in their HUD. It’s interesting to note that the popular meme we’re all familiar with is a mistranslation, but the popular version remains as it fits better over the mouth movement of the character. Give the line, and the show/series it’s from. Another popular line in the show occurs towards the tail end of the series, during a final ‘boss battle’, where the boss is giving the protagonist reason to believe that he has been fighting with a fraction of his power. This line as well exists in meme-culture, as a classic. Give the second line and the name of the character who uses it.”

Q27.This TV show is iconic, for the tough themes it brings to light for children to understand. Originally started as an educational program in its home country, its protagonist was created to be antithetical to popular heroes of the time, who were violent frequently “for the right reasons”. Nothing distinguished them so much other than a genetic oddity, and their tool of choice, which could never be used as a weapon. The show took quite a bit of a break in the 1990s, only to be revived in the mid-2000s with most of its mythology cut away, leaving only the ‘good bits’ according to its showrunner at the time. Give the show, the genetic oddity of the protagonist, and the name of the tool. The tool of choice is a futuristic version of something that is most commonly used to repair rather than destroy. The genetic oddity might cause some doctors palpitations when they see it for the first time.

Q28.The X, of 420,000 devices, was an example of a commonly used thing to perform DDoS, created by an anonymous hacker to measure the extent of the Internet in what the creator called the “Internet Census of 2012”. The data was collected by infiltrating internet devices, especially routers, that lacked any real password protection. Whether ironic or not, it was named after the Roman goddess of inner organs and health, whose name is similar in meaning to primal desires. ID X?

Q29. KML files are used with a specific software X, that has been the dominant player in its field for quite a while. Initially the brainchild of Y, it gained significant attention in 2001, when it was used by various news agencies in their media reporting of the Iraq War. The K in KML is a tribute to the original name of the project and is itself a reference to the idea of a change in perspective that most children who’ve been locked out of a room may be familiar with. After being acquired by Google in 2004, Y then “left” the project, only to spin-off a unit inside the company Z, focused on changing the way users interacted with the world around them, primarily by engaging and moving around their environment. Z has released two games over the past 4 years, each from a different franchise. ID Z and the K in KML.”

Q30. This studio is a pioneer in the world of digital animation, paving the way for films that began to create characters that would become familiar to generations of kids. Their largest franchise recently introduced two new major characters, one of whom has an iconic colored vehicle and costume. This character X is voiced by a legend in a completely unrelated genre, more known for their live-action movies, and recent showing in the video game world. The franchise is also remembered for a scene in the second movie, riffing off of another popular franchise (owned now by the same parent company), with a key dialogue between a protagonist, and someone he seems to have been created to destroy. Name the voice actor for X and the scene that the second movie is parodying

ANSWERS

Q26, “It’s over 9000!”, Dragon Ball Z, “This isn’t even my final form!”, Frieza

Q27. Doctor Who, two hearts, Sonic Screwdriver

Q28. X – Botnet, Carna

Q29. Z – Niantic, Keyhole

Q30. Keanu Reeves, Empire Strikes Back – Luke I am your Father

Q31. This classic 1999 film begins with a key phrase X. The film then goes on to describe a very dystopian future, one that we seem to be on the track towards, with our current love for “AI”, but the phrase X is in fact an ode to a pretty old piece of literature. The various iterations/aspects of the phrase may now have seeped into current usage, especially with our growing usage of social media sites, and our deep dives within those sites. We also find a reference to X in one of Michael Crichton’s most popular novels, involving Denis Nedry, a programmer who decides to go rogue and references X in his code. Give the phrase X, and the book or author.

Q32.

Q33. This term refers to (becoming enlightened to) the truth about reality, especially a truth that is difficult to accept or exposes disillusions. Online, it is especially used among anti-feminist and white supremacist groups to refer to “waking up” to the truth that women and liberal politics are oppressing men and white people as opposed to living in blissful ignorance

Q34. This verb originally meant to run a baited fishing line in the water while boating and waiting for fish to bite and get caught. What?”

Q35. The first online community to use the term X was started in 1993 when a Canadian university student known only by her first name, Alana, created a website in order to discuss her lack of an activity prevalent in her age group. X came to wider public notice with the banning of r/X. What’s X?

ANSWERS

Q31. X – Follow the White Rabbit, Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

Q32. SEGA

Q33.redpill

Q34. trawling – trolling

Q35. incel

Q36. In this pseudo-documentary movie, one character tells a story of how seafood suppliers had trouble shipping live cod from the U.S. to China – on arrival, the meat was mushy because the cod had been sluggish. But the suppliers found that if they put one of the cod’s natural enemies in the tank with them, they stayed active, and the exercise made their flesh stay firmer and tastier. “There are those people who are these enemies in life,” the character says, “and they keep you on your toes. They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh. And I thank god for them because we would be droll, boring and dull if we didn’t have somebody nipping at our fin.” This movie led to the rise of a term used pretty often by dumb people on the internet. What term?

Q37. This man is notable for beginning his campaign for the President of the United States in 2020, which was suspended on Nov 1, 2019. The man was also recently revealed to be a member of a hacker group X, back when he was a teenager, which was notorious for releasing tools that allowed ordinary people to hack computers running Microsoft’s Windows. The man wrote numerous poems and texts for the group, under the pseudonym “Y Z”. Now X would be quite a horrific name for any organization in present-day India, and might even result in one of its members being lynched, before the purpose or the actual content discussed on the group is examined. Y is an adjective, usually used in terms of the ’60s, to describe the hippy movement, rock and roll, and art. Z is a term one would associate with Genghis Khan, or the movie, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” Id X, Y and Z

Q38. X is a show that was quite recently in the news and is notable for its connection to the company Y. Y in 2011 was notable for creating Z, responsible for defeating two previous winners of X. The year 1969 was quite eventful with regard to scientific breakthroughs and innovation. At Y, Forrest Parry invented the P, one that revolutionized transactions. Most of us will be more familiar (and frustrated) with the act of using a P because of our current interest in Q, something that recently garnered a lot of attention, particularly political attention, when a member of a current, very polarising, four-member group, hosted their first live stream. ID P, Q and why X was recently in the news

Q39. X is a phrase from a 1983 film, centered around a teenager who unwittingly hacks their way into a system they were never intended to access. The phrase might be familiar to younger viewers, born after the turn of the millennium, as it appeared in a film Y, part of a much larger franchise, during a scene where the main characters are accessing an ancient (in terms of the tech used) database. Y is the prequel to the introduction of Z back into the franchise, after a long and painful custody battle with A. A was most famously known around the time of the release of Y for being hacked, and a politically charged movie being leaked all over the internet. ID X, Y, Z

Q40. X Y is a technical term for a kind of CGI, developed by Ken X in 1982 for the Disney film Z. In 1997, he was awarded the Academy Award for Technical Achievement, for creating such an algorithm. A is an album that’s very popular for its 5th track, one that all school children are sure to have heard at some point in their lives. Now the album itself reminds one of a famous event in history, taking place somewhere with a name pronounced similar to X, but these many hints are literally casting pearls before swine. Y is a term we’re a lot more familiar with, particularly the engineers who are seeing this question. Laymen will have caught a glimpse of this phenomenon while watching content produced by a network, whose logo is accompanied by an iconic sound. ID XY

ANSWERS

Q36. Catfishing

Q37. Beto O’Rourke,  X – Cult of the Dead Cow, Y Z – Psychedelic Warlord

Q38. P – Credit/Swipe Cards, Q – Among Us, X was recently in the news because of the death of Alex Trebek

Q39. X – Shall we play a game?, Y- Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Q40. X Y – Perlin Noise 

Q41.X (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. He was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS and many other things that make the internet as we see it today. In 2011, X was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet and setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT. Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release. X declined a plea bargain under which he would have served six months in federal prison. Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by X, he was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, where he had hanged himself. In 2013, he was inducted posthumously into the Internet Hall of Fame.

Q42. X is a fictional company, one that we see as the big bad in a show Y by the network that also brought us Mr. Robot. X is headed by a rather stereotypical tech billionaire CEO, about to be ousted by a small start-up Z. The show is a sublime parody of the tech scene most software engineers dream about getting into, and the naming of the companies X is a clever reference to two big rivals in the history of the Internet. The first company has the name of a species seen only in fiction, ruled over by benevolent equine masters (Jonathon Swift was at his finest). The second was pretty famous for its Moonshot division. X is a 5 letter word, the first half of a synonym of how one might describe the first company’s namesake species, and phonetically similar to the second. If you find you’ve reached a nonsensical word, it’ll be correct if it rhymes with a particular root, famous in Hindi for making people gassy

Q43. The core principle of what I’m talking about was developed in the mid-1990s by the United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, with the purpose of protecting U.S. intelligence communications online. It was further developed by DARPA in 1997. The alpha version, developed by Syverson and computer scientists Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson launched on 20 September 2002. The first public release occurred a year later. In July 2016 the complete board resigned and announced a new board, made up of Matt Blaze, Cindy Cohn, Gabriella Coleman, Linus Nordberg, Megan Price, and Bruce Schneier. What am I talking about?

Q44. In order to create this now iconic effect for an iconic film series, designer Simon Whiteley used a custom typeface, which he said borrowed heavily from his Japanese wife’s sushi recipes. The effect, due to its coloration and downward fluid motion, is given a particular two-word name. Swapping out the coloration aspect for a scientific term (which is commonly depicted with the same color in media), we get a very well known phenomenon that has caused destruction to many calcium-based structures.

Give both the effect and the phenomenon

ANSWERS

Q41. X – Aaron Swartz

Q42. X – Hooli

Q43. Tor

Q44. Green Rain, Acid Rain