corte.si

Edit: Since this post, I've created an interactive tool for binary visualisation - see it at binvis.io In my day job I often come across binary files with unknown content.

Today, I'm launching Netograph, a new privacy-related site that I've been hacking on over the past few months.

Further reading for the guest lecture I'm giving at Otago Polytechnic today: The talk I'm not giving: OWASP Top 10 Tools: FireBug, TamperData, Python.

For the last fortnight I've been hard at work on a new project that aims to examine trust and security on the web at scale.

EDIT: A WSJ Digits article is now up, containing a responses from Zynga and Chillingo.

I'm happy to announce the release of mitmproxy 0.6, featuring a redesigned scripting API, slew of major new features and a panoply of small bugfixes and improvements.

I've just tagged and released mitmproxy 0.5.

After a hectic month, I'm finally able to return to the UDID privacy issues I covered in my last few blog posts.

I recently published some research showing that the OpenFeint social gaming network can be used to link Apple UDIDs to users' real-world identities.

Every iPhone, iPad and iPod touch has an associated Unique Device Identifier (UDID).

This is the second in the series of tutorials I'm writing for mitmproxy.

Yesterday I published version 0.4 of mitmproxy - an intercepting proxy for HTTP/S traffic.

I've just tagged and released mitmproxy 0.4.

This is the second post in which I try to add some data to my nagging doubts about the technical news ecosystem.

proggit - 4 hours I've had a nagging sense of dissatisfaction with my information diet lately, and it's becoming clear that over-reliance on social news sites like Reddit and Hacker News (much as I love them) lies at the heart of my discontent.

One of the nice things about building sortvis.org and writing the posts that led up to it is that people email me with pointers to esoteric algorithms I've never heard of.

The last bit of evidence is now in - it appears that the mysterious Stuxnet worm was indeed aimed at Iran's nuclear capability.

The mailing list for my local LUG recently had a small flurry of posts on The Tau Manifesto, a proposal to replace of the constant π with τ, equal to 2π.

About a year and a half ago, after dinner at a favourite local restaurant, and having entered into that zone of philosophical clarity that sets in around the dessert wine, my wife and I had the sudden simultaneous realisation that it was time for a change.

I've spent a few days this week working on a side-project that relies heavily on Bloom Filters (look for a post on the result of my labours in the next week or so).

Hiked to the end of Sandfly Bay today.

I've just put up sortvis.org, the new official home of the sortvis sorting algorithm visualisation project.

Taiaroa head Taken on a stormy day from Aramoana Mole.

There was a minor flap recently when Andy Rubin compared Apple to North Korea.

There have been some improvements to sortvis!

Just released mitmproxy 0.2.

Mallory hates Bob.

Please note that the criticism of Clipperz in this post is now out of date - the Clipperz team is clearly very security-focused, and responded quickly to address the concerns raised below.

Update: see mitmproxy.org for recent releases!

A couple of days ago I published a set of explosion-in-a-crayola-factory colourful sorting algorithm visualisations, using a colour sequence generated with the Hilbert curve.

I like the Hilbert curve.

[Update: A fix for these problems and one noted by Peter Burns in the comments to this post has been posted.

After my post about my Quixotic quest to draw a portrait of the Hilbert curve, Chris Mueller pointed me to some fascinating related work he had done generating colour maps of images.

Hilbert curve of order 4 The Hilbert curve is a remarkable construct in many ways, but the thing that makes it useful in computer science is the fact that it has good clustering properties.

Although I spend a lot of my play-time fooling about with other languages, my professional and released code consists of Python, C, C++ and, alas, Javascript.

Bank Overflow It's a little known fact, but my only vice...

Logging in Tasmania In 1968, Garrett Hardin coined the term "Tragedy of the Commons" to describe the economic mechanism that drives humans to destroy common resources.

Economist Guardian I've been a long-time reader of two international papers - the Guardian Weekly and the Economist.

Every good programmer has gone through this.

Superorganism It's impossible to talk about The Superorganism without first mentioning Bert Hölldobler and E.

j I've been using ORMs for years, starting with my own hand-hacked library back in the days before there were good ORMs for Python, and more recently settling into a comfortable reliance on SQLAlchemy.

Leopard Seal at Sandfly Bay Took this shot on my morning walk, 15 minutes away from my home.

IP Addresses in Japan I'm spending a fair bit of my time working on a project that uses an IP geolocation database to map internet addresses to countries as part of a security survey.

Spent the moring collecting and taking photos of tiny seashells on Murdering Beach - a secluded local spot with a grisly past.

Jacob Seidelin has created an awesome port of the sorting algorithm visualisations I came up with in 2007 to Javascript, using the canvas element to do the drawing.

Update See sortvis.org for many more visualisations!

An encounter with a magnificent bird today - Buller's Albatross.

I came accross a hilariously inept bit of tech reporting today, courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald.

One of the epic conflicts of our time is being waged between two software design philosophies (bear with me here).

Update See sortvis.org for many more visualisations!