April 16, 2013
Mike Shema speaks about a lot of different kind of attacks in his book in a real deep way, at the point that sometimes I wondered if he was planning to instruct people how to hack websites or only how to secure own websites. The book has often some code samples that allow a faster understanding of what the author is saying. Even if a coding knowledge is not required, the ability to understand HTML, JS, SQL, PHP, Python and C++ speeds up the reading.
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April 9, 2013
Logs are one of the most powerful tools in the sysadmin hands, and probably of all kind of IT roles.
This book does deep into the logs and their management.
One of the aspects that I really liked about this book is the division of the text in chapters.
The book is “only” 420 pages long, but is well split in 22 chapter, so they are (on average) 21 pages long. This is a huge advantage, since it allows the reader to stop frequently without dividing a concept in two different reading sessions. Also, this policy, allows the reader to quickly find what is more important for her in that specific moment.
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April 2, 2013
As the name suggests, this set of videos is for developers.
HTML 4 and Javascript are often used without much explaination about the JS code it self but only about the HTML5 Canvas part.
I felt to point this out immediately since I’ve not found it on the O’Reilly page, but I believe that is really important to specify.
Another thing that I’d like to point out is that (as it is easy to imagine, but not obvious) these videos only speak about 2D graphics in HTML (therefore there will no WebGL topics).
After these two notes (that will not influence in any way my judgement about the videos), let’s start talking about the videos.
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March 26, 2013
Ganglia is the most robust and scalable tool for performance monitor I’ve tried or heard of.
This book, written by some of the top contributor of the project, is an awesome guide to Ganglia.
Due to its organization and the authors writing style, the book is easy to understand and can be read as a “full-guide” reading it from the first page to the last one, or a reference book reading only the parts that are relevant to you in that specific moment.
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March 19, 2013
When someone says the word “wireless”, 99.9% of the audience thinks at the Wireless Networking Technologies (802.11 family).
Very few think to the Bluetooth.
Even fewer people think to all the other technologies that use wireless technology to work, such as cordless phone, guard radios, headsets, wireless camera etc.
This book embrace the last point of view.
The first chapter provides basic information and motivation for Wireless Profiling.
The chapter 2 provides the reader with all the information she needs to be able to understand the wireless technology and it’s usage.
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March 12, 2013
Metasploit is the most common and complete framework for testing security.
Metasploit is an entire suite of tools and methodologies designed for testing the security of computers and networks.
The book is written for both experienced penetration tester and people new to the security field. For the first group, one of the most interesting thing is the explanation of the rules and ideas that formed the Penetration Test Execution Standard, while for users new to the field, is really interesting what can be done and how.
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March 5, 2013
After Microsoft’s CompTIA A+ Training Kit, here I am reviewing the Microsoft’s A+ Rapid Review.
This book is really similar to the book CompTIA Security+ Rapid Review (this too by Microsoft Press).
Darril Gibson, the book’s author, have compressed a huge amount of contents in a (relatively) small amount of pages (411). This is the first big difference in respect of the Security+ Rapid Review, since this book has more contents per page (and about the double of pages).
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February 28, 2013
Today I would like to give you an idea on how to implement a spam system that can reduce some kind of spam.
The problem
Sometimes a company or a politician, that does not respect the usual privacy policy, continues to send e-mails even if the user already tried to unsubscribe.
My postulates
- The people who usually send this kind of e-mail are not very familiar with how e-mail work or how the privacy policy works. Obviously there is the case in which they are malicious, but I prefer to think that the biggest part of these people are in the first two cases.
- These people probably will have issues removing a person from a mailing list, therefore they will tend not doing it, unless they have an advantage.
- Is really annoying sending an e-mail to 10 contacts and receive 8 mail-delivery-subsystem errors.
My approach
My approach is dividable in two directions that have to be implemented as features from the e-mail provider:
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February 26, 2013
This book does cover one of the hardest topic that are present in digital photography.
In fact, the photographies in the dark are the are the ones which are more frequently bad looking.
The book provides with a big amount of techniques and tips covering equipment, the actual taking of the image, and post-production.
A lot of these techniques and tips are easily found on photography specific magazines and articles, but a book grouping all these techniques is really good since it’s an organic and easy to found and read collection.
Also, unlike many articles, the book contains a lot of reasoning on the techniques so it’s not a mere how-to book.
Despite usually the author does provide this kind of enhancements over the how-to techniques, this is not always true, and - I think - this should be corrected/improved in the next version of the book.
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February 19, 2013
It’s Make! I think Make is one of the greatest, if not the greatest magazine available worldwide.
I think that this is a really cool number of Make.
As it usually happens to me, the part I like the most i the “Projects part”, in which I always find awesome ideas.
The article I liked the most is “Growing the Ghost” by Gabriel Nagmay.
This article speaks about the growing of the Bhut Jolokia, one of the world most powerful chili flavour.
I really liked it since I really like peppers and the author gave me a lot of ideas and tips on how to feed the peppers properly.
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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog