Submitting Binaries to VirusTotal

VirusTotal is a web service that essentially performs a virus scan of an uploaded file, or url against many of the top virus scanners (see full list). I recently needed to submit over 100 binaries to VirusTotal, and being a computer scientist I knew this task, like many other things …

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Facebook Photograbber Updates

I previously wrote about my preparation for leaving Facebook. This morning I have finally completed the last few things I wanted to do. Those last few things were to store the photo captions, photo comments, and photo tags for each photo downloaded.

Yesterday, in order to extract this information from …

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Defcon 18 Quals Forensics 200 Write up

Edit: A bunch more DEFCON 18 write ups can be found at the vnSecurity site.

This weekend I competed in the Defcon 18 Qualifiers with team Shellphish. We unfortunately only placed 15th, nonetheless, it was an exciting and challenging weekend. Below is my write up for the Forensics 200 challenge …

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iCTF09: UCSB’s International Capture the Flag Competition

As a member of the Security Lab at UCSB I had the privilege to help create and run this year’s iCTF Hacking Competition. The six-year-old competition was very unique this year. Unlike CTFs seen before in which teams try to protect their services whilst attacking other teams’ services, our …

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Dynamic Programming - Coin Change Problem in Python

Update 2011/02/25 12:07
Updated the code such that it doesn’t rely on a coin of denomination one.

I assisted in hosting the UCSB Programming Competition again this year. Doing so rekindled my love for dynamic programming algorithms, thus why I prepared an example similar to this …

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Random Lines from a File

Update 2011-07-18: As Ernesto correctly points out in the comments, this algorithm selects N independent random lines from a file.

The following is my python implementation of choosing N random lines with equal probability from a file. This implementation is both memory and time efficient unlike other solutions. This problem …

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