n|u Puliya, really short courses for skill bridging.

Puliya means culvert or a small bridge in Hindi.

We have been getting constant feedback about our null Humla and null Bachaav sessions. The feedback is both ways and almost all the champions are of the opinion that there are some essential non-security skills that are sorely lacking in a lot of attendees.

To "bridge" this gap in skills of our members attending the sessions we are starting null Puliya. The idea is to bridge the skill gap and get our members ready to take on advanced topics covered in null Humla and null Bachaav.

Proposed sessions for this event:

• Writing Web Bots with Python by Tabish Imran

Note: The session details including schedule are available below.

Writing Web Bots with Python

Introduction

• Introduction to internet bots, What they are and what they can do?
• Applications of internet bots from a security point of view.
• Writing your first bot

Bypassing restrictions

• How websites prevent web scraping.
• How Robots.txt works.
• User-Agent checks and how to beat them.
• Captchas

Requirements

• Attendees should have a laptop with either a Linux distro installed or running on a Virtual Machine.
• They must know the basics of python (We will be using Python2.7.x for the session). Download Python 2.7 here: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-2713/
• Attendees must have the packages "Mechanize" and "Beautiful Soup 4" installed. Run the following comments to install:

pip install mechanize
pip install beautifulsoup4

or

sudo apt-get install python-bs4
sudo apt-get install python-mechanize

• Basic understanding of current web technologies (HTML , CSS , JS)

Legal Aspects

• Scenarios where web scraping without prior permission can land people in trouble.
• Case Study - The QVC web scraping ruling.
• Case Study - The Ebay Bidders Edge case.
• Case Study - U.S. V Auernheimer.
• Conclusion.