Mining OpenVAS Knowledge
Cyber Security, Artificial Intelligence
May 16th 2023
Vulnerability scanners like OpenVAS are an integral part of many security monitoring operations. OpenVAS produces reports that contain a ton of precious information about a networking environment. In fact, if you use OpenVAS you probably know more about your network than you realize...
EDXML 3 Released
Software Development
April 6th 2023
Today I can finally announce the availability of EDXML 3. It is the result of more than a decade of hands-on experience in law enforcement, forensics and cybersecurity. Initially sparked from personal frustration in data analytics, it has slowly evolved to become what it is today.
EDXML is about teaching machines to tell stories. It is about teaching machines to understand what story data is telling. To see data like a human analyst sees it. Then, assisting the analyst in reasoning about that data. Connect the dots, complete the puzzle, reveal the big picture.
Ingredients for a Concept Mining Algorithm
Artificial Intelligence
August 26th 2021
In this post I will sketch the various ingredients needed for an EDXML concept mining algorithm and show how these fit together. Concept mining in EDXML is a simple form of machine reasoning that is inspired on how human data analysts extract knowledge from data.
Hacking the PHP Runtime System
Software Development
June 7th 2021
First things first. Working on the PHP runtime system is not for the faint of heart. It consists of a large body of highly optimized C and assembly code, enlightening comments are usually scarce, and you may even come across variable names in Hebrew (ok, just one, but still). Also, virtual machines and compilers are not trivial technologies. So why bother getting into this stuff? Well, there's reasons. Here are some to choose from:
PHP 8 released
Software Development
November 26th 2020
PHP 8 was released today. While I made my very first small contribution to PHP 7.4, my contributions to this release are a tiny bit more substantial. I even earned an equally tiny mention on the release name cloud. Yay!
On the Joys of Templates
Software Development
June 11th 2020
For a project I was asked to replace a procedural document generator with one based on templates. The rationale was that templates are simpler, more flexible and the end users can edit them to their liking instead of requiring the help of developers to do that. And yes, templates are completely en vogue these days.
Hint: This is actually a story about how not to use templates.
A Type Check Cache for PHP
Software Development
January 25th 2020
Recently I submitted my very first major contribution to the PHP Runtime System. It has been an adventurous experience dusting off my C / assembly programming skills and enjoying occasional segfaults.
The DNA of an Internet Forum
Data Visualization
January 16th 2012
In my job I constantly find myself confronted with huge volumes of data that I need to quickly familiarize myself with. Occasionally I come across internet forums. Quickly getting an idea of the content of such a forum can be challenging. There may be tens of thousands of messages spanning hundreds of subjects. Sometimes the messages are in Russian. No, in Russian slang. No, in Russian slang in cyrillic script mixed with some cyrillic that is actually phonetic English with an odd accent. You get the picture?
