I've been fortunate in being able to speak at DEFCON seven times (including
the upcoming DEFCON XXIII). I've also covered DEFCON for Computer World Magazine.
DEFCON X, Las Vegas NV, Aug 2002 “An Introduction to Writing Webbots and Spiders”
You can have a lot of fun with the Internet by ditching your
browser in favor of writing special purpose programs that look
for or do very specific things on the Internet. This session
will equip you with techniques to extract and interact with
data from web sites without a browser, parse and filter data,
follow links, deal with encryption and passwords, and
manage terabytes of information. You'll also learn why writing
these programs is a useful activity, and walk away with ideas
and abilities to write useful spiders or web agents of your own
design.
From the DEFCON X program
Follow the link for more information on Michael Schrenk's DEFCON 10 Talk.
You can have a lot of fun with the Internet by ditching your
browser in favor of writing special purpose programs that look
for or do very specific things on the Internet. This session
will equip you with techniques to extract and interact with
data from web sites without a browser, parse and filter data,
follow links, deal with encryption and passwords, and
manage terabytes of information. You'll also learn why writing
these programs is a useful activity, and walk away with ideas
and abilities to write useful spiders or web agents of your own
design.
