Well, it’s been a while since I wrote the last post in this blog.
The good news is that it’s because i’ve been pretty busy: exams at university are now over.
It’s time to look for my thesis now, but this is another story and is actually a week-old one, since it happend last friday. Where have I been in the last week ? This is actually what this post is about.
Here is the short answer, unfortunately in italian language, by uniroma.tv
Ladies and gentleman, the Innovation Camp introduction video:

Shortly, you have just seen some scenes from the new research center “La Faggeta” of Roma Tre University, an ex NATO-base now renovated, where 20 lucky students like me just had the opportunity to enjoy a full-immersion week on themes such as innovation, business models, market trends, business team building and startups knowledge.

Read more

The last finals at university are flowing and time to choose the subject for my thesis is approaching.
Anyway, today was the turn of the presentation of the final project for the “Web Information Management” class. I and a couple of colleagues developed a search engine on the vertical domain of realties advertisement. Here are the slides sketched for the presentation.

Does this look like a successful team ?
I spent the last days ( or weeks ? ) working with these guys at the business idea we submitted for this great chance. Even if we started with another completely different idea that we discarded in the middle of the timeline, the current idea has been in my mind for a couple of years, and my hope was to put it into a concrete form. We really worked hard on it, think about that: we spent last sunday and yesterday night till midnight at a MacDonald because in that period of time it was the only place with an internet connection we can stay and work

Anyway, the Innovation Lab 2010, that yesterday hitted wired news (it) is close to its grand final: tomorrow is the big day! Everyone interested is welcome from 9:30 for the Green Brand and from 14:30 for the Innovation Lab speeches and presentations. The place is the Business College “Federico Caffè” in Rome ( here ). Will follow the upstart drink by Upstart Roma.

In the context of the Information Management for the Web class i’m currently attending, students are occasionally asked to review some related or interesting scientific publication. This time, since we had been introduced to the ROADRUNNER project mantained by the database group at Roma Tre University, I and a couple of colleagues offered ourselves to review an approach for Extraction of Structured Data from Web Pages developed at Stanford University by Arvind Arasu and Hector Garcia-Molina. Here is the presentations we wrote down for the speech.

The original paper on this work can be reached here.

As a form of term paper for the Computers and Networks Security class at Roma Tre University, students have been asked this year to contribute to a wiki. I obviously picked the class and I’ve been assigned to a group in charge to write a threats analysis over the SSL / TLS protocol. Since I already had a look at presentations by independent researcher Moxie Marlinspike, I wrote an hopefully detailed report of the attacks he presented at Defcon17 last August. I discussed this report few days ago and since the wiki will be probably kept private for students, i’m going to publish this relation here, that follows.

SSL / TLS

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and its successor Transport Layer Security TLS are cryptographic protocols that aim to provide security for data transmitted over networks.
While the SSL wording refers to the original specifications developed by Netscape Corporation , TLS is an IETF standard, last updated in rfc2546, that anyway is based on the SSL specification, explaining why the word ”SSL” is often used to indicate the actual TLS protocol.
While the protocol is widely used to secure overlaying application level insecure protocols, such as HTTP, FTP, SMTP or VoIP applications, it may be used to secure tunneling virtually any other protocol.

Read more

And here is the presentation of the speech about LVM i took at the advanced linux class organized by LUG Roma Tre.