You are viewing a read-only archive of the Blogs.Harvard network. Learn more.
Skip to content

Category Archives: Non Sequiter

Tangent

non-ASCII characters

I do a lot of web scraping. Sometimes I need to send the data to other people and the fun non-ASCII characters I scrap will really freak other applications out. I needed a quick and dirty way to just screen out non-ASCII code. Enter Regular Expressions. I’ve had a fondness for regexp since I first […]

A history of hackers from the underground

A really cool db has been leaked to the internet which contains releases to “the scene”. I did a quick search on the term “hackers” and got the following presented in chronological order. mysql> select section, rlsname, grp from predb where rlsname like ‘%Hackers%’ order by CTIME; +———+————————————————————————————————————————————-+—————+ | section | rlsname | grp | […]

Beansec turns 1!

This Wednesday will mark the 12th ever beansec! If you haven’t been to one yet or haven’t found time to attend then this is the month to make it. BeanSec! is an informal meetup of information security professionals, researchers and academics in the Greater Boston area that meets the third Wednesday of each month. Come […]

Simple Shell Script for Testing Badware

day:~ zero$ cat fake_ie.sh curl -A “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)” $1 | less

Poor Mans Multithreading

for i in `ls urls_*`; do ruby dns.rb $i & done #main section from dns.rb ip_addresses.each {|id,url| begin host = parse_host(url) ip = get_ip(host) if not ip.nil? addresses = Ipaddress.new addresses.address = ip addresses.review_id = id addresses.save end rescue Exception=> e results.write(“#{e},#{id},#{host}\r\n”) end }

Flickr takes photos hostage

“Just pay us the money and you get your photos back unharmed. No one wants to see any pixels get hurt here, just pay up” actual text from my account You’ve run into one of the limits of a free account. Your free account will only display the most recent 200 photos you’ve uploaded. All […]

Anti FUD

I was amusing myself with the Microsoft “Get the Facts on Windows” site and the case studies they publish are fairly unbelievable. The Wipro report in particular rings hollow and reeks of numbers manipulation. It essentially offers the following Windows costs less to patch Windows has greater uptime I am in the middle of finals […]

Finding Patterns in Time Series

This is a topic I’d like to research a little more and apply towards my research at Stopbadware. Meta Topics Dynamic Time Warping: aligning time series and a specific word template so that some distance measure is minimized n-by-m plane or grid Monotonicity Continuity Warping Window Slope Constraint Boundary Conditions Once we can detect patterns […]

Musings of a Chinese Vegetarian

Evil is the most dangerous when done in secret. Good is the least admirable when performed in public. In other words, evil is less dangerous when it is manifest than when it is secret; good is more laudable when it is occult than then it is public. translated by Yaichiro Isobe

User Generated Content

credit: Jason Arends