The art of hacking in a technological world is generally a negative thing. To hack into something, usually means a breach in security and some form of data altered. However, hacking, and being particularly skilled at it, can pay off – if the skills are used appropriately.

Shane Kelly, age 16, became the world’s youngest person to pass the Certified Ethical Hacker course. Because of his dedication and precision, there are some big people very interested in utilizing his mad skills.

Hacks can be used for good! Programming something to “hack” into a problem you’re encountering, like with say your website development or network. Hacking can be viewed as a positive thing, and quite frankly, the biggest networks and programs are developed by hackers. You have to know how to get into it to be able to prevent access to it, right?

Now, by no means am I saying that it is okay to hack into someone else’s property, or copyrighted works like programs and applications, but hacking should not always be viewed as illegal. Take those skills and go work for someone who can really benefit from them. Internet companies, software companies, police departments. Fight crime! Slip into your bat-suit and get involved in the criminal investigation sector of a police department. After all, they are likely to more fully utilize your hacking super-powers (and you’d get paid for it).

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TI has generously decided to release a Linux version of their c54x C and C++ compiler free for use with open source projects. This is an important first step to getting open source codecs running on the DSP of the Neuros OSD, as well as for other projects which make use of TI’s DM320 or other products containing a c54x DSP. It’s also significant because it represents a new and important level of support for open source from TI.

You can read more about it on their blog and find out why this is a pretty important development.

It’s designed by the same folks who came up with Lego Mindstorm

From their site: Scratch is designed for kids aged eight and up. The name comes from the technique used by disc jockeys to mix together existing records in creative ways.

Kids 8 and up? No way! I’m loving this too. I just made my first Scratch application (embedded below) in exactly 1 minute and 7 seconds. It’s nothing fancy, click on any of the black lines that make up my ugly smiley face and it will move, make a few sounds and say “hmmm.” But seriously, a little over 1 minute to make this. And I know virtually nothing about Scratch.  It really can be as simple as stacking blocks of code or as complex as you’d like to make it.

Learn more about this project

Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers contains everything you would need to start writing your own internet agents to perform a variety of tasks. Data aggregation, image capture, link verification and a number of other applications. Very helpful sample code from which a reader could build off of is provided along with some real world experience and advice.

The book is divided into four parts comprised of 28 chapters, three appendices and an index.

The first part, Fundamental Concepts and Techniques is a guide to just what, exactly these scripts are set to accomplish and the basics behind making successful scripts. A rational for creating them and techniques for handling such things as authentication and management of large amounts of data that can be aggregated by them.

Part two, Projects, covers a number of interesting real world projects from basic concepts through code snippets which when put together can create a usable webbot. Some projects include price monitoring scripts, link-verification, search ranking and email reading bots.

Part three, Advanced Technical Considerations brings us into the world of spiders as well as the handling of such things as procurement and sniper bots, handling authentication, cookie management and scheduling your bots and spiders to run optimally (that is to mimic a human browser as closely as possible).

Part Four, Larger Considerations addresses some of the issues that surround writing and using these various bots, spiders and scrapers. Stealth, fault tolerance, the creation of websites that are friendly to webbots, killing spiders (yours or others) and keeping yourself and your creations out of trouble.

There’s a lot of practical knowledge included in this book by way of experience, example and actual code. Knowing the basics, at least of PHP and CURL will allow you to get the most out of it. There’s another practical reason for reading this book which has not as much to do with creating these tools and that’s giving you an understanding of how they work and what they’re actually doing. As a webmaster who’s site is constantly being crawled, spidered and aggregated by various bots this book was fascinating.

It’s important to note that a portion of this book is given over to the discussion of usability and legality. Not everything you could do with this knowledge is legally acceptable or morally right. Of course, the same holds true for any book that imparts knowledge about writing code that can manipulate other people’s data – the onus is on the individual to do the right thing. Schrenk provides a number of real life examples about why this is important including one embarrassing incident involving being banned from sites by the government for overzealous use of a bot. While the story is amusing (and told well) it also serves as a warning to always consider what you’re doing with your creations and how they are affecting other people.

There’s lots of practical code to be found here which is worth it to anyone wanting to learn more about how to construct these scripts. Even if you’re familiar with PHP but haven’t developed many webbots or spiders, a reading of the code will give you some new insight and certainly provide some new and useful techniques.

It’s clear that many useful things can come out of developing your own bots. Even if you or your employer haven’t seriously considered these as useful tools in the past it’s time to take a look at them now. They’re relatively lightweight yet can be very powerful tools for monitoring the web and gathering data which would otherwise take hundreds or thousands of man hours – or may not have even been available to you prior to using them.

Webbots, Spiders and Screen Scrapers will give you a different view of the Internet, and we all know that looking at a tried and true technology in a new light often leads to incredibly useful innovations. This book is a great tool to get your mind wrapped around the sheer amount of data that exists out there and how to best aggregate, manipulate and parse that data for your needs. Sound interesting? Then what are you waiting for?

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