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whoisjoe

My name is Joe Basirico, by day I help people build secure software. I lead a team of the most talented security experts in the world to perform security assessments and help our customers reduce their risk against the ever-present threat of hackers and other ne'er-do-wells.

I started a non-profit, Technically Learning, a few years ago with the help of a few friends to help kids, particularly girls and minorities, get excited about the STEM fields.

On this site you'll find links to all of my projects, programming projects, research, a blog and more.

My Github Page | Stackoverflow CV | My Photos Home | Blog | Projects | Site Map | LinkedIn | Twitter | RSS

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Joe_CMS

This site runs the Joe_CMS (the name is still a work in progress), which I wrote after trying to get some of the "big" CMS's working for weeks. The intent of this CMS is simplicity. You can create new pages easily, link within the site easily and manage a blog easily. You can even make changes to the CSS and templates online (if you're so inclined), you guessed it, easily. For more examples of where this CMS is used check out Technically Learning, my non-profit to help kids learn science and mathematics and Katherine Sather's website.

Check it ou on github at: http://joebasirico.github.com/Joe_CMS/

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Technically Learning

Technically Learning was founded over four years ago by a small group of friends tired of complaining about the lack of women and minorities in their fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). The founders, most of whom are still board members, believed (and still do) that every child, regardless of their gender, race or socio-economic background, should have the opportunity in the STEM fields.

By improving the quality of STEM education through fun, exciting and engaging activities, projects and curriculum, we believe that more children will choose higher education and pursue careers in these fields.

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WikiRater

I created WikiRater as a project to help me create an algorithm to automatically rate the quality of a Wikipedia article. I'd love to be able to request a random, high quality article from Wikipedia, read the top 100 best articles or to help the Wikimedia foundation out by highlighting the bottom 100 articles that need help. If you register and rate articles you'll be helping me do that. Each time you rate an article I'll let you know what WikiRater would have rated, so sign up and join the fun!

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Blog

Anatomy of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack
4/3/2013 - Posted by joe

The recent wave of DDoS attacks on banking web sites, and the Spamhaus DDoS attack (which was three to five times greater than the biggest attacks against U.S. banks) is reinforcing that, while the attacks aren't particularly sophisticated, they do warrant our attention. If targeted the attacks can be extremely disruptive to online operations. To protect against DDoS attacks, it's important to understand their root cause.

DDoS's take many forms but at the core, they're essentially a battle of resources. The attackers will attempt to exhaust resources on the server through "reasonably" valid requ ...

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NASA Forced to Suspend All Public Outreach & Education Programs
3/23/2013 - Posted by joe

Yesterday was a sad day for NASA who were forced to halt all education and public outreach activities including public engagement out outreach events, programs, activities and products. These spending cuts, enacted by congress through inaction will directly affect the education, inspiration, prosperity and competitiveness of our future generations of the USA (India and China are both investing heavily in space exploration programs). We just reduced our investment in space exploration from 1/2 of one cent!

We need more education and more roll models for our kids like our astronauts, scientists and educators and fewer who provide no improvement to our society like our "reality" tele ...

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Joe_CMS Open Source!
11/8/2012 - Posted by joe

I'm happy to say that tonight I'll be publishing JoeCMS as a free and open source (GPL), as evidenced by the little "Fork me on GitHub" banner in the upper right corner of this page. JoeCMS runs this website and a couple of others and I've been really happy with its simplicity and feature set. I created JoeCMS after trying to shoehorn a few of the bigger CMS's into my needs. They were all complicated, had a ton of dependancies and most of all were confusing for the users of my websites.

If you want to get started with the CMS head on over the the github page or just dive into the quic ...

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