Editors Note: a follow up post that provides code to use this technique without pyflag has been combined with this one I've been a bit busy recently as I'm preparing to move across the world to the US to work at a small Internet company in the SF Bay Area. In the mean time though my current employer has been kind enough to let me contribute back some of the code we have written for…

I was going through the pages of an old defunct blog of mine and I saw this image and thought that I would repost it for old times sake. This is one of my proudest computer gaming moments of all time (from October 2009).

Talloc is an excellent memory management system for C that provides hierarchical memory pools with other cool tricks like destructors. It's written by Tridge for Samba and I really like it. If you are writing a complex system in C you could do worse than to replace your calls to malloc with calls to talloc. So that's talloc, but the thing you really should know about talloc is right there at the bottom of the project page. In particular: when…

I've ported some of my old projects over to git and uploaded them to github. A much better solution than hosting raw source files on my web server! The projects that have been ported: talklikewarren - A twitter bot that posts things that sound like Warren Ellis. fakemiddleman - A twitter bot that posts things that sound like The Middleman. hottest100 - A python script that created a live music video channel out of The Triple…

I'm releasing the code and docs that I wrote during my Xbox 360 research. py360 is a FUSE filesystem driver and associated file parsers for reading Xbox 360 hard drives. It is designed to aid forensic examination of the Xbox 360. The main components are a FUSE file system for mounting the XTAF file system and a set of python classes for parsing the the STFS, XDBF and Account block file formats and the XTAF file system.

My research activity is coming to a head and I thought I'd let you all know how it is going. My early explorations were plagued by a plethora of hardware and software failures. The Xbox 360 thoughtfully provided to me by my University had a damaged hard drive which took me longer than it should to diagnose because I had to eliminate my procedure and imaging equipment as possible sources of errors. My setup is a…

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…