Popular open-source computer hardware company Adafruit Industries accidentally exposed customer data…
…via the GitHub account of a former employee.
As you’ve probably figured out already, Adafruit is named after after Ada Lovelace, a nineteenth-century British intellectual who was a computer programmer long before any programmable computers existed.
As mysterious as that might sound, the story is both uplifting and disappointing in equal measure. In the 1830s, British inventor Charles Babbage designed a general-purpose computer that he dubbed the Difference Engine. While he was busy trying to construct the device, Ada started wrestling with how it might be used. She outlined numerous programming principles that today we take for granted, such as loops and subroutines for commonly repeated computations, essentially coding various algorithms that would run on it.
