Recently I’ve done a lot of work requiring heavy computation on large datasets. While python is not a great choice for speed, it can be extended by modules written in C for those speed critical moments. For such moments I always try to find solutions written as C modules …

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 …

Update 2012/02/14: Added post: Python Multiprocessing Pool and KeyboardInterrupt Revisited

Update 2011/02/03: Added commentary regarding Georges’s comment about this stackoverflow thread.

Update 2011/01/28: There is an issue with this code when passing large objects through the queue. While the code listed below will …

Edit 2010/08/27: I thought I should update this page stating that the AWS S3 Console was updated about a month ago with a feature to convert entire folders to/from Reduced Redundancy. Additionally the boto source has moved to GIT, thus a few changes are needed to run …

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 …

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 …

Update 2010/05/27: I’ve made further updates to photograbber. Read about them in my post titled, “Facebook Photograbber Updates“. The patch file linked to from this page has been updated to include those changes.

I started using Facebook in October of 2004, during my freshmen year of college …

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 …

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 …

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 …