Career Fair Shenanigans
Over the last day or two I have been preparing for the career fair over at Drexel on Oct. 12th. My old resume was terribly boring and did a poor job at highlighting my past experiences and current academic and professional goals so I did decided to redo it. I’m not exactly looking for work yet since I have plans on attending graduate school, but I’m certainly not against possible offers. My main reason for going is because I want to make connections and speak to recruiters/employers about internship opportunities for the coming summer. I heard that the NSA is going to be there speaking and doing some recruiting of there own; as some of you may know, getting a security job through the NSA is one of my main professional goals.
Anyways, this is my first career fair so I’m a little nervous, I don’t quite know what to expect. Hopefully I can avoid being awkward!
Camden Church of the Nazarene: Web Presence V2
- Custom Redesign
- Built on Catalyst Theme Framework
- Added Multilingual Support
- Advanced SEO enhancements
- Coming Soon: Mobile Optimized Version
- http://www.camdennaz.org
Understanding Web Advertising Privacy Through Browser Instrumentation
My blog posts have been littered with me talking about my research at Stanford Security Lab, but I neglected actually posting the final research paper — here it is!
Abstract
A growing number of websites serve tracking content from third party advertisers, advertising networks, advertising exchanges, advertising data providers, and more. Most consumers are unaware of what information is gathered and how it is used. We conducted web crawls with a new browser instrumentation tool to better understand the privacy-related business practices of the largely unregulated and unstudied online advertising ecosystem.
Keywords
Online Privacy, Browser Instrumentation, Fingerprinting, Tracking Cookies.
Summer Wrap up
It has been a very fun and enlightening experience working at the Stanford Security Lab this summer. I’ve learned tons of different things, and noted various topics in which I have to become better versed in with security and privacy as a whole. I can only hope that the drive I currently have sticks with me as I wrap up this last year of undergrad and prepare myself for grad school.
Just as a quick summary, here are various articles in which I either did research on, wrote, or was featured in along with project websites in which the work was related to (most notably, the Tracking the Trackers series):
- Tracking the Trackers: Early Results
- Tracking the Trackers: To Catch a History Thief
- Tracking the Trackers: The AdChoices Icon
- Tracking the Trackers: Microsoft Advertising
- FourthParty: A New Approach to Web Measurement (1, 2)
- Do Not Track Universal Web Tracking Opt Out
- Consumer Watchdog: Unfair and Deceptive online tracking
- Wall Street Journal: Latest in Web Tracking: Stealthy ‘Supercookies’
Just wanted to give a shout-out to Jonathan Mayer, Stanford C.S. PhD candidate, for being an awesome mentor this summer. Also shout-outs to John Mitchel for being my sponsoring faculty along with the NSF funded Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technologies (TRUST) in Cyber Security and Trustworthy Systems for granting me this wonderful opportunity.
Hopefully I will be able to update this blog with news of grad schools that I get into!
Stay Away From FatCow Hosting!
The title says it all! I picked up this hosting company after serious consideration of many online reviews I found, and boy what a mistake that was! All the reviews I read must have been contrived because the quality of service has been a disgrace.
In the last two weeks, all customers hosted on FatCow have experienced 3 sessions of downtime, one session lasting for almost 6 hours before being fixed. On top of the terrible up-time, the hosting is just plain out SLOWWWWWWWWWW. I’ve tried contacting FatCow support various times, only to get the same sorry excuse, “Everything looks fine on our end, you don’t know what your talking about.”
Save yourself the hassle and use hostgator. I have used their VPS and shared hosting for a rather large client of mine and have not been disappointed with their service. Think I’m making exaggerated claims about how lousy FatCow really is? Check out their Facebook page to see all of the disgruntled customers:
https://www.facebook.com/FatCow
I certainly can’t wait for my contract with them to be over so I can switch over to a more reliable service. In the meantime, please bare with me here 
Fourth Party
This website was part of project I was assisting with while interning @ the Stanford University Security Lab. It was designed using static HTML and CSS, and boy has it been a long time since I’ve stepped away from a CMS! Minor structural and color changes were later refined by website the project lead. Designing for academic based work is very different (think: plain), I’m not sure if I like the blandness yet; maybe it will sink in…
Maid In Heaven
This is a project I worked on and finished about 4 months ago for a local cleaning services. The client opted in for a basic, custom design built on WordPress Content Management system. For this project, I incorporated the use of Catalyst Framework for the page structure. This gave me increased flexibility and allowed for quicker production and release while enhancing the markup structure and providing minor built in SEO features.
- Custom Design
- WordPress Integration
- Minor SEO (Google, Yahoo!, Live)
- Social Media Integration (In progress)
- Content Creation
- http://www.maidheaven.com
