Working remotely has many benefits, but if you work remotely in an area like, say, rural Maine, one of those benefits is not massively speedy internet connections. Being able to go fast and furious on the internet is one of the many things I miss about our time in Seattle and it is unlikely that… Continue reading
Taking a Shot at cdcfluview v0.7.0 (a.k.a. The Dangers of Relying on ‘Hidden’ APIs)
Unlike @noamross, I am not an epidemiologist (NOTE: Noam battles pandemics before breakfast, so be super nice to him) but I do like to find kindred methodologies in other disciplines to help foster the growth of cybersecurity into something beyond it’s current Barnum & Bailey state. I also love finding and exposing hidden APIs and… Continue reading
I, For One, Welcome Our Forthcoming New robots.txt Overlords
Despite my week-long Twitter consumption sabbatical (helped — in part — by the nigh week-long internet and power outage here in Maine), I still catch useful snippets from folks. My cow-orker @dabdine shunted a tweet by @terrencehart into a Slack channel this morning, and said tweet contained a link to this little gem. Said gem… Continue reading
Yet-Another-Power Outages Post : Full Tidyverse Edition
This past weekend, violent windstorms raged through New England. We — along with over 500,000 other Mainers — went “dark” in the wee hours of Monday morning and (this post was published on Thursday AM) we still have no utility-provided power nor high-speed internet access. The children have turned iFeral, and being a remote worker… Continue reading
gg_tweet’ing Power Outages
As many folks know, I live in semi-rural Maine and we were hit pretty hard with a wind+rain storm Sunday to Monday. The hrbrmstr compound had no power (besides a generator) and no stable/high-bandwidth internet (Verizon LTE was heavily congested) since 0500 Monday and still does not as I write this post. I’ve played with… Continue reading
A Call to Tweets (& Blog Posts)!
Way back in July of 2009, the first version of the twitteR package was published by Geoff Jentry in CRAN. Since then it has seen 28 updates, finally breaking the 0.x.y barrier into 1.x.y territory in March of 2013 and receiving it’s last update in July of 2015. For a very long time, the twitteR… Continue reading
Enabling Concerned Visitors & Ethical Security Researchers with security.txt Web Security Policies (plus analyze them at-scale with R)
I’ve blogged a bit about robots.txt — the rules file that documents a sites “robots exclusion” standard that instructs web crawlers what they can and cannot do (and how frequently they should do things when they are allowed to). This is a well-known and well-defined standard, but it’s not mandatory and often ignored by crawlers… Continue reading
Tragic Documentation
NOTE: If the usual aggregators are picking this up and there are humans curating said aggregators, this post is/was not intended as something to go into the “data science” aggregation sites. Just personal commentary with code in the event someone stumbles across it and wanted to double check me. These “data-dives” help me cope with… Continue reading