Facebook Search- The fall of the machines

Increasingly I am beginning to search more and more on Facebook. This is for the following reasons-

1) Facebook is walled off to Google (mostly). While within Facebook , I get both people results and content results (from Bing).

Bing is an okay alternative , though not as fast as Google Instant.

2) Cleaner Web Results When Facebook increases the number of results from 3 top links to say 10 top links, there should be more outbound traffic from FB search to websites.For some reason Google continues to show 14 pages of results… Why? Why not limit to just one page.

3) Better People Search than  Pipl and Google. But not much (or any) image search. This is curious and I am hoping the Instagram results would be added to search results.

4) I am hoping for any company Facebook or Microsoft to challenge Adsense . Adwords already has rivals. Adsense is a de facto monopoly and my experiences in advertising show that content creators can make much more money from a better Adsense (especially ) if Adsense and Adwords do not have a conflict of interest from same advertisers.

Adwords should have been a special case of Adsense for Google.com but it is not.

5) Machine learning can only get you from tau to delta tau. When ad click behavior is inherently dependent on humans who behave mostly on chaotic , or genetic models than linear CPC models. I find FB has an inherent advantage in the quantity and quality of data collected on people behavior rather than click behavior. They are also more aggressive and less apologetic about behavorially targeted  ads.

Additional point- Analytics for Google Analytics is not as rich as analytics from Facebook pages in terms of demographic variables. This can be tested by anyone.

 

Color Palettes in R using RColorBrewer #rstats

The lovely colors at http://ColorBrewer.org can be used for much better color palettes in R.

library(RColorBrewer)

display.brewer.all() 

and we use the function brewer.pal(N,”Name”) as the col  parameter for the new color palettes

where we can see name of palettes  from the list above

data(VADeaths)
par(mfrow=c(2,3))
 hist(VADeaths,col=brewer.pal(3,"Set3"),main="Set3 3 colors")
 hist(VADeaths,col=brewer.pal(3,"Set2"),main="Set2 3 colors")
 hist(VADeaths,col=brewer.pal(3,"Set1"),main="Set1 3 colors")
 hist(VADeaths,col=brewer.pal(8,"Set3"),main="Set3 8 colors")
 hist(VADeaths,col=brewer.pal(8,"Greys"),main="Greys 8 colors")
 hist(VADeaths,col=brewer.pal(8,"Greens"),main="Greens 8 colors")
Created by Pretty R at inside-R.org

Rplot7

Colors from [http://www.ColorBrewer.org] by Cynthia A. Brewer, Geography, Pennsylvania State University
• Erich Neuwirth (2011). RColorBrewer: ColorBrewer palettes. R package version 1.0-5. [http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=RColorBrewer]
Note-ColorBrewer is Copyright (c) 2002 Cynthia Brewer, Mark Harrower, and The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved. The ColorBrewer palettes have been included in the R package with permission of the copyright holder.

Cricinfo StatsGuru Database for Statistical and Graphical Analysis

Data from the ESPN Cricinfo website is available from the STATSGURU website.

The url is of the form-

http://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/stats/index.html?class=1;team=6;template=results;type=batting

http://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/stats/index.html?

class=1;team=6;template=results;type=batting

If you break down this URL to get more statistics on cricket, you can choose the following parameters.
class
1=Test
2=ODI
3=T20I
11=Test+ODI+T20I
team
1=England
2=Australia
3=South America
4-West Indies
5=New Zealand
6=India ,7=Pakistan and 8=Sri Lanka

type
batting
bowling
fielding
allround
fow
official
team
aggregate

 

ESPN Terms of Use are here-you may need to  check this before trying any web scraping.

http://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/content/site/company/terms_use.html

 

However ESPN has unleashed the API (including both free and premium)for Developers at http://developer.espn.com/docs.

and especially these sports http://developer.espn.com/docs/headlines#parameters

/sports News across all sports/sections
/sports/baseball/mlb Major League Baseball (MLB)
/sports/basketball/mens-college-basketball NCAA Men’s College Basketball
/sports/basketball/nba National Basketball Association (NBA)
/sports/basketball/wnba Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA)
/sports/basketball/womens-college-basketball NCAA Women’s College Basketball
/sports/boxing Boxing
/sports/football/college-football NCAA College Football
/sports/football/nfl National Football League (NFL)
/sports/golf Golf
/sports/hockey/nhl National Hockey League (NHL)
/sports/horse-racing Horse Racing
/sports/mma Mixed Martial Arts
/sports/racing Auto Racing
/sports/racing/nascar NASCAR Racing
/sports/soccer Professional soccer (US focus)
/sports/tennis Tennis

 

I wonder when this can be enabled for Cricket as well (including APIs  free,academic,premium,partner ).

(Note you can use R packages XML , RCurl , rjson, to get data from the web among others).

Plotting is best done using ggplot2 http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/ or d3.js at http://mbostock.github.com/d3/, and the current status of cricket graphics can surely look a change- they are mostly a single radial plot of shots played /runs scored or a combined barplot/line graph.

How to learn Hacking Part 2

Now that you have read the basics here at http://www.decisionstats.com/how-to-learn-to-be-a-hacker-easily/ (please do read this before reading the below)

 

Here is a list of tutorials that you should study (in order of ease)

1) LEARN BASICS – enough to get you a job maybe if that’s all you wanted.

http://www.offensive-security.com/metasploit-unleashed/Main_Page

2) READ SOME MORE-

Lena’s Reverse Engineering Tutorial-“Use Google.com  for finding the Tutorial

Lena’s Reverse Engineering tutorial. It includes 36 parts of individual cracking techniques and will teach you the basics of protection bypassing

01. Olly + assembler + patching a basic reverseme
02. Keyfiling the reverseme + assembler
03. Basic nag removal + header problems
04. Basic + aesthetic patching
05. Comparing on changes in cond jumps, animate over/in, breakpoints
06. “The plain stupid patching method”, searching for textstrings
07. Intermediate level patching, Kanal in PEiD
08. Debugging with W32Dasm, RVA, VA and offset, using LordPE as a hexeditor
09. Explaining the Visual Basic concept, introduction to SmartCheck and configuration
10. Continued reversing techniques in VB, use of decompilers and a basic anti-anti-trick
11. Intermediate patching using Olly’s “pane window”
12. Guiding a program by multiple patching.
13. The use of API’s in software, avoiding doublechecking tricks
14. More difficult schemes and an introduction to inline patching
15. How to study behaviour in the code, continued inlining using a pointer
16. Reversing using resources
17. Insights and practice in basic (self)keygenning
18. Diversion code, encryption/decryption, selfmodifying code and polymorphism
19. Debugger detected and anti-anti-techniques
20. Packers and protectors : an introduction
21. Imports rebuilding
22. API Redirection
23. Stolen bytes
24. Patching at runtime using loaders from lena151 original
25. Continued patching at runtime & unpacking armadillo standard protection
26. Machine specific loaders, unpacking & debugging armadillo
27. tElock + advanced patching
28. Bypassing & killing server checks
29. Killing & inlining a more difficult server check
30. SFX, Run Trace & more advanced string searching
31. Delphi in Olly & DeDe
32. Author tricks, HIEW & approaches in inline patching
33. The FPU, integrity checks & loader versus patcher
34. Reversing techniques in packed software & a S&R loader for ASProtect
35. Inlining inside polymorphic code
36. Keygenning

If you want more free training – hang around this website

http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cheat_Sheets

OWASP Cheat Sheet Series

Draft OWASP Cheat Sheets

3) SPEND SOME MONEY on TRAINING

http://www.corelan-training.com/index.php/training/corelan-live/

Course overview

Module 1 – The x86 environment

  • System Architecture
  • Windows Memory Management
  • Registers
  • Introduction to Assembly
  • The stack

Module 2 – The exploit developer environment

  • Setting up the exploit developer lab
  • Using debuggers and debugger plugins to gather primitives

Module 3 – Saved Return Pointer Overwrite

  • Functions
  • Saved return pointer overwrites
  • Stack cookies

Module 4 – Abusing Structured Exception Handlers

  • Abusing exception handler overwrites
  • Bypassing Safeseh

Module 5 – Pointer smashing

  • Function pointers
  • Data/object pointers
  • vtable/virtual functions

Module 6 – Off-by-one and integer overflows

  • Off-by-one
  • Integer overflows

Module 7 – Limited buffers

  • Limited buffers, shellcode splitting

Module 8 – Reliability++ & reusability++

  • Finding and avoiding bad characters
  • Creative ways to deal with character set limitations

Module 9 – Fun with Unicode

  • Exploiting Unicode based overflows
  • Writing venetian alignment code
  • Creating and Using venetian shellcode

Module 10 – Heap Spraying Fundamentals

  • Heap Management and behaviour
  • Heap Spraying for Internet Explorer 6 and 7

Module 11 – Egg Hunters

  • Using and tweaking Egg hunters
  • Custom egghunters
  • Using Omelet egghunters
  • Egghunters in a WoW64 environment

Module 12 – Shellcoding

  • Building custom shellcode from scratch
  • Understanding existing shellcode
  • Writing portable shellcode
  • Bypassing Antivirus

Module 13 – Metasploit Exploit Modules

  • Writing exploits for the Metasploit Framework
  • Porting exploits to the Metasploit Framework

Module 14 – ASLR

  • Bypassing ASLR

Module 15 – W^X

  • Bypassing NX/DEP
  • Return Oriented Programming / Code Reuse (ROP) )

Module 16 – Advanced Heap Spraying

  • Heap Feng Shui & heaplib
  • Precise heap spraying in modern browsers (IE8 & IE9, Firefox 13)

Module 17 – Use After Free

  • Exploiting Use-After-Free conditions

Module 18 – Windows 8

  • Windows 8 Memory Protections and Bypass
TRAINING SCHEDULES AT

ALSO GET CERTIFIED http://www.offensive-security.com/information-security-training/penetration-testing-with-backtrack/ ($950 cost)

the syllabus is here at

http://www.offensive-security.com/documentation/penetration-testing-with-backtrack.pdf

4) HANG AROUND OTHER HACKERS

At http://attrition.org/attrition/

or The Noir  Hat Conferences-

http://blackhat.com/html/bh-us-12/training/bh-us-12-training_complete.html

or read this website

http://software-security.sans.org/developer-how-to/

5) GET A DEGREE

Yes it is possible

 

See http://web.jhu.edu/jhuisi/

The Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute (JHUISI) is the University’s focal point for research and education in information security, assurance and privacy.

Scholarship Information

 

The Information Security Institute is now accepting applications for the Department of Defense’s Information Assurance Scholarship Program (IASP).  This scholarship includes full tuition, a living stipend, books and health insurance. In return each student recipient must work for a DoD agency at a competitive salary for six months for every semester funded. The scholarship is open to American citizens only.

http://web.jhu.edu/jhuisi/mssi/index.html

MASTER OF SCIENCE IN SECURITY INFORMATICS PROGRAM

The flagship educational experience offered by Johns Hopkins University in the area of information security and assurance is represented by the Master of Science in Security Informatics degree.  Over thirty courses are available in support of this unique and innovative graduate program.

———————————————————–

Disclaimer- I havent done any of these things- This is just a curated list from Quora  so I am open to feedback.

You use this at your own risk of conscience ,local legal jurisdictions and your own legal liability.

 

 

 

 

 

 

April Fool's Day- Catblock!

Since Anonymous didnt disrupt the internet on April Fools Day by overloading the DNS Servers! , the best April Fool’s day imho goes to Adblock- that  nifty extension that allows you to block ads.

Well for today- it replaced ads with funny cats- and you can even buy the cats for ads extension  permanently. That’s right cats take over the Internet!

Only 2% of Chrome and Firefox users block ads! so what are you waiting for- this is how the NYTimes looks for me!!

 

Replace ads with cats-

for chrome here-

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom

for firefox here-

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/

read more on catblock here-

http://adblockforchrome.blogspot.in/2012/03/inturdusing-catblock.html

but if you want to buy catblock—

see this

https://chromeadblock.com/pay/?source=catblock

 

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