Structured Penetration
Like many human activities, the process of running a penetration test can be broken down into a series of steps that generally describe the whole action in smaller chunks. While, from far enough back, the penetration test might look merely like throwing a bunch of bits at a complicated system and collecting the results, breaking the activity down the way Weidman does in the text makes it a process far more approachable to those from non-technical backgrounds...
Moore's Law, Broadly
In this excerpt from "SIR: A Computer Program for Semantic Information Retrieval" by Bertram Raphael and edited by Marvin Minsky in the book Semantic Information Processing, we are offered several suggestions of areas where computers being able to really "understand" would be helpful. A modern listener can listen to these few paragraphs, nodding along. Information retrieval, more specifically document and fact retrieval, and mechanical translation, are all problems that modern computer scientists still work on...
Logging in Practice
In this excerpt on "Continuous movement of log and binary files..." from Hadoop in Practice by Alex Holmes, the overall class of things called log files are discussed -- and the excerpt hints both at the widespread availability of log files, but also the overwhelming amount of data that they represent. It is this "overwhelming" aspect of processing logs that Holmes is taking up here; naturally since the book is about Hadoop, he goes on to discuss how Hadoop can be used to manage these potentially vast data streams...
Code polished...
In this excerpt from Eloquent Ruby by Russ Olsen, ed. Obie Fernandez, the author is providing a quick introduction in "The Very Basic Basics." It might be tough to find a programmer who disagrees with these two rules being core precepts in any project where other coders -- or yourself in a few months or years -- are involved. So why does it seem that these rules are so rarely followed? ...
Complexity
In this excerpt on "Complexity" from Cryptography Engineering: Design Principles and Practical Applications by Niels Ferguson, Bruce Schneier, and Tadayoshi Kohno, the authors argue that intense modularization and localized correctness are necessary for any security system to serve its intended purpose. As someone who first came to programming through Java, I still cringe a little when I'm browsing through code and discover repetitions or very similar chunks of code. Or even worse -- ...
Surefire Questions
In this excerpt from Gerald M. Weinberg's "A Surefire Question" essay in his book Rethinking Systems Analysis and Design, he discusses an approach to the design of systems that he felt was already too overlooked back in 1982. He suggests an approach where the software or network designer spends time utilizing the system already in place. In any company approaching an IT specialist for help automating a manual process, developing new software, or...