Arkem ^{(30 Posts)}

A few years back I ran a small advertising campaign on Facebook and in an attempt to recover my business Facebook graciously gifted me USD50 of advertising credit. Unfortunately I didn't have any goods or services that I wanted to advertise just then so I figured that I'd have to get creative. Unsurprisingly Facebook advertisements are boldly commercial and quite direct in what you will get out of clicking on them, part of this is inherent…

Just a quick note to say that my paper "Twitter as a Vector for Disinformation" was published in the Journal of Information Warfare last month. This is my first academic publication and I'm very excited about it. The paper is also available right from this very blog!

Facebook has a series of puzzles they use to evaluate potential engineering employees or for the enjoyment of anyone curious. I've worked through quite a few of them and in the process learnt that I really need to brush up on my algorithms. At the moment I'm working through Dinosaur Island which is an AI exercise which surprisingly is about dinosaurs on an island. You need to create an AI that pilots a species of dinosaur to…

I finished Dinosaur Island managing to exceed the score required to 'win'. Silliosaurus, most majestic of the Imbecephalosaurians thrived on Dinoisland unperturbed by the predators and rocks and only occasionally abandoning their herbivorous tendencies to engage in cannibalism (5th on the high score chart with 315,000 points). This success lead to overpopulation which created an evolutionary pressure that spawned Crazyodon which rose to a level of glory only seen by 3 previous species (4th on the…

Last weekend I distracted myself from my university work by competing in ddtek's Defcon CTF quals. It was a bunch of fun and I recommend that everyone gives it a go. A good place to start if you're not sure what I'm talking about is over at wikipedia: Capture the Flag. Defcon CTF is played by teams of 5-6 people who spend the weekend trying to solve puzzles ranging from binary reverse engineering, exploit development, disk forensics, cryptanalysis…

Lately my blogging energies have been redirected into my study, namely a communications plan and a research proposal. The communication plan was for a persuasive communications class and the aim was to be able to devise a plan that could realistically alter the attitudes (and hopefully the behaviour) of an audience, it was a fascinating exercise that I don't plan on repeating any time soon. It turns out that I'm not much of a public…