Why Engineers Should Care About Security Too
One of the things I’ve discussed before is that it can be hard to get developers - or really engineers in general - to care much about the security of the products they work on. In some cases, this results directly from issues discussed in Eugene’s Law, that is where an engineer thinks that they know better than you that their product is secure. But there’s another unfortunate case that I’ve seen a lot, at especially amongst many of the students I’ve met at UAH - the assumption that security won’t ever matter on their product. Now this too technically...
Book Review: RESTful Web APIs by Leonard Richardson and Mike Amundsen
For the past few months, much of my time has been absorbed by my senior design project at UAH. Setting aside the specifics of what my group and I are working on, the design calls for a web service that has an open API to allow for the simple creation of new clients. Looking at the options, it was quickly obvious that we wanted to approach the API design with a RESTful architecture rather than using SOAP, owing to its flexibility and the comparative ease with which a new client can be implemented to use a new RESTful API. Unfortunately,...
Survey of Automated Malware Identification Systems
This summer I took a course on artificatial intelligence, and wrote a research paper on automated classification of malware. The paper isn’t the best written in the world, and has some interesting formatting thanks to the requirement it be formatted in the ACM style, but that being said it includes quite a bit of material on automated malware analysis, as well as references to more in-depth works. With that in mind, I’ve attached a copy of the PDF to this post. PDF
Book Review: Hackers by Steven Levy
Hackers is Steven Ley’s attempt to trace the roots of hacker culture to its beginnings. That is, hackers in the sense of people for whom learning about and building upon technology is a way of life, not hackers in the sense of criminals breaking into computer systems. This is one of those books that everybody seems to feel you ought to read if you are involved with technology. So what’s it all about? Hackers is broken down into three sections. The first addresses the origins of the culture at MIT in the 60s, where hackers worked in the AI lab,...
Book Review: Version Control with Git by Jon Loeliger and Matthew McCullough
Version Control with Git is pretty much what you would expect, a book all about using Git as a version control system. This book is written to be picked up by a developer entirely unfamiliar with Git, and as such starts out by explaining how to install Git in Linux or Windows. It then moves on to talking about how to do basic version control actions in Git, and from there on through pretty much all of Git’s features you’d ever want to know. This includes working with remote repositories, and has a chapter devoted to working with Github. It...