Welcome, here come 3583 bytes - Ready?

I’m back, baby! After a somewhat embarrassing amount of time tinkering in the shadows, it turns out I couldn’t stay away. For an overly detailed post-mortem of my digital hibernation and a peek at what’s been brewing in the meantime my New First Post is here.

~~My old mothballed site~~

So you’ve found my old mothballed site? Likely you were searching for Australian census information about the Statistical Linkage Keys, or how to scrape data with Python and Xpath? Either way, what you’re looking for is here. It’s all dated and old, but I feel bad about taking it down as there’s still a few hundred pageviews a month.

Diving Back into Blogging: A Blend of Tech, Teaching, and Tangents

Let's get out of here! The blog’s back online, folks. I was going to mothball the blog project all together, but I saw that some of my old posts were still getting hits. So, I …

Posted by on Wed, Mar 27, 2024

Malware Virtual Test Environment: Fail-secure network isolation and VPN routing

There are many reasons you might need to isolate a PC or operating systems from a local network. For example, I often work on live malware and ransomware and I want to minimise the …

Posted by on Sat, Jun 10, 2017

Gone in 60 seconds: your phone is the Achilles heel of your security!

For many, the security of your online life relies on the security of your phone and phone number.I’ve recently been speaking about the security of mobile phone numbers, and …

Posted by on Fri, Feb 24, 2017

Tech explained: Hash puzzles and proofs of work

Following my blockchain Computerworld article, I’ve been getting quite a few questions about how the Bitcoin blockchain is protected by ‘difficulty’. Mining blocks is hard, so, …

Posted by on Tue, Sep 6, 2016

Scraping Data with Python and XPath

I decided to write a short post about how I use Python and XPath to extract web content. I do this often to build research data sets. This post was inspired by another blog post: …

Posted by on Wed, Aug 17, 2016

Tech Brief: Anonymising sensitive data with entropy and salt.

As researchers or programmers, we will often want to protect our data by anonymising sensitive information like names and addresses. To do this, we can combine pieces of user data …

Posted by on Mon, Aug 15, 2016

Why 3583 Bytes & What's With the Blue Box?

My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20; it had 3583 bytes of available memory. That’s about one five-millionth of a modern laptop! So little memory, but still so much you could …

Posted by on Mon, Aug 15, 2016

Security Brief: The Australian Census and Statistical Linkage Keys

There have been concerns among security professionals and privacy advocates about changes to the Australian 2016 Census. The biggest concern is how the ABS plans to combine your …

Posted by on Thu, Aug 11, 2016

Security concerns and Census Statistical Linkage Keys explained

An in-depth explanation regarding the security surrounding statistical linkage keys, why they’re important and how their security can be compromised…The security of …

Posted by on Thu, Aug 11, 2016

Tech explained: What is a hash, what is brute force and are hashes secure?

Identifying DataSecurity professionals often use hashes to represent data - think of it like a unique fingerprint or “key” for the data. While there are many ways to make data keys …

Posted by on Thu, Aug 11, 2016