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Writing & patents

Book: Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers
No Starch Press, San Francisco CA
The Internet is bigger and better than what a mere browser allows. Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers is for developers and business managers looking to unlock the competitive advantages of nontraditional online approaches. The book first outlines the deficiencies of browsers, and then explains how these deficiencies can be exploited in the design and deployment of task-specific webbots. Readers will learn how to write stealthy webbots that read email, emulate online forms, auto-authenticate, manage cookies, and handle encryption. Sample projects reinforce these new skills so that readers can create more sophisticated webbots and spiders to track online prices, create anonymous browsing environments, bid on auctions in their closing moments, and more.
Interview with the author (YouTube.com)
Languages: English (2nd printing), Italian,
Russian (pending) Chinese (pending)   Official Book Site.

Article: php|architect
Webbots and Spiders, An Insider's Guide, Jul 2007
This article explains the basics of writing webbots while solving a common business problem.

Patent: #6418346, Jul 9, 2002
Apparatus and method for remote therapy and diagnosis in medical devices...
This patent describes a method to enhance remote monitoring of implanted medical devices to deliver clinical therapy in real time and to store and forward information to PCs and similar peripheral equipment. This concept was developed while I was a member of Medtronic's Advanced Concepts Group.

Patent: (pending) #20040117293, April 1, 2001
Automated auction sales management tool
An automated tool for submitting items to an auction site is presented that allows multiple users to share a single seller identity. The present invention maintains confidentiality from sales person to sales person, and allows a sales manager to input details about an auction that are hidden from the sales persons.

Article: Web Techniques Magazine
Writing Intelligent Web Agents, Mar 2000
This article describes methods for designing and writing intelligent web agent software, which use information available on the Internet in some very „non-browser-like„ ways. Read the story (now maintained by Dr. Dobbs).

Article: Computerworld Magazine
Fear and Hacking in Las Vegas, Aug 4 1997
In 1997, I covered DEFCON for Computerworld Magazine. DEFCON is the annual hacker convention held in Las Vegas for members of the computer underground, and those of us with an interest in data security.

This article is no longer on the ComputerWorld website.

Speaking

Workshops: European Investigative Journalist Conference, Brussels Belgium
"Domain Games", "Personal Search Engines" & "The 500 Euro Project" (with Henk Van Ess)
Nov, 21-22 2008
Mike Schrenk from Minneapolis (USA) speaks at the
European Investigative Journalism Conference. Schrenk along with VVOJ Board Member Henk van Ess describe the latest information technology to facilitate investigation on the chaotic, messy web pages and obscure databases.

Presentation: DEFCON XV, Las Vegas NV
The Executable Image Exploit
Aug 3, 2007

Convert <img src='image.jpg'> into a program that executes when browsers download web 2.0 websites. These executable images are capable of anything a regular program can do, including: reading and writing cookies, manipulating databases, sending email, etc.

Read more at www.defcon.org or watch the entire video executable image exploit talk on Google Video.
 
As reviewed in The Register: "Even more fun, but still not illegal, is Michael Schrenk's idea of configuring your server to create executable images. That is, programs that, among other possible things, load images. Looks like an image, quacks like an image, but in fact it could be a PHP or Perl script doing�almost anything."

Presentation: DCPHP, Washington DC
Developing Webbots with PHP, Oct 20, 2006
This presentation at DCPHP highlighted the benefits of writing webbots in PHP/CURL. In addition to explaining how to capitalize on flaws in the current client/server model used by the web, attention was paid to methods for downloading and parsing media.

Presentation: DEFCON XI, Las Vegas NV
Online Corporate Intelligence, Aug 1, 2003
This was my second consecutive year to speak at DEFCON. I built on the previous year's web agent theme by discussing ideas for automating Corporate Intelligence gathering.

Presentation: DEFCON X, Las Vegas NV
Introduction to Writing Spiders and Agents, Aug 5, 2002
During the summer of 2002, I was honored to be a speaker at DEFCON X, the definitive computer security conference. Attendees of my session learned the basics of writing web spiders, which--unlike browsers--are special purpose programs that do very specific things on the Internet.

More importantly than basic knowledge of how to write spiders, people attending my lecture learned the capabilities of web spiders and left the conference armed with ideas for creating spiders and web agents of their own designs.

Contact Schrenk to speak at your next confrence or event.

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