Hey all.

We’re officially back with our first event in a while, a fresh new collaboration with PapersWeLove.

In this event, Catalin Patulea will be presenting the famous 2006 paper BigTable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data by F. Chang et al.

A brief abstract from the announcement on Meetup:

Bigtable was developed by Google from 2004 to 2006 for storing large amounts of semi-structured data in a wide range of applications, including web indexing, Google Earth, Google Finance, Google Analytics and others. Its design lies somewhere between traditional relational databases (RDBMS) and pure key-value stores, which later inspired a family of storage systems such as Apache Cassandra and Amazon DynamoDB. Modern storage systems such as Google Spanner and CockroachDB also contain design elements similar to Bigtable. Therefore Bigtable is of both historical and current interest.

In this talk, we will start with the basic data structures used by Bigtable: SSTables and log-structured merge (LSM) trees. We will show a highly simplified LSM-tree implemented in Python and demonstrate its functions. This is the basic unit of scaling in Bigtable.

Then, we will roughly follow the 2006 paper: 1) data model and client API, 2) the underlying infrastructure on which Bigtable is built, 3) how the database distributes work across many machines and achieves scaling.

We will briefly cover more advanced topics such as tuning Bigtable for specific use cases or to improve resource efficiency.

Light refreshments will be served.

Android updates for any phone that isn’t a flag-ship phone is patchy at best these days. Between that and a world of benefits for those who customize android, compiling android is a useful skill. We’ll be going over some of the basics next Thursday (the 2nd) around 8pm EST.

Since the files involved are massive, and the build times are long, we recommend a bit of prep work: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/blueline/build Getting to the stage where you have downloaded the source code is a good idea.

Workshop is free, however donations are welcome. Remote atendees can tune in here: https://meet.jit.si/CompilingAndroidWorkshop

This is an introductory, hands-on workshop for absolute beginners. We will start with an introduction to python, and work our way up by learning and applying basic programming concepts until we are able to make our own auto-correct program as an example.

Please bring your own laptop and install Python 3.6.5 here: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-365/. No programming experience required!

Tickets on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/intro-to-python-tickets-518994254787

This is an introductory, hands-on workshop for absolute beginners. We will start with an introduction to python, and work our way up by learning and applying basic programming concepts until we are able to make our own auto-correct program as an example.

Please bring your own laptop and install Python 3.6.5 here: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-365/. No programming experience required!

Tickets on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/intro-to-python-workshop-19052019-tickets-61444893330

Goals:
We will learn how to reverse engineer a basic buffer overflow vulnerability.
Part of this will be an introduction to fuzzing for the vulnerability, followed by how to write a piece of
modern exploit code that will work around Address Space Layout Randomization and Write/Execute Exclusion.

This will be a Windows10 focused tutorial.

Bringing your own laptop with Win10 installed in some fashion is required.

More advanced techniques will be seen as time permits.

Subjects covered:

• Setting up x64dbg on windows, and navigating a basic binary.
• Integrating this with unicorn engine.
• OS end execution model for Win10 overview.
• Exploit code and shellcode development.
• Basic fuzzing of input through hooking the binary using unicorn engine.
• Stretch goal: if time permits, we will leverage Z3 based SMT solvers to fuzz.

This is an advanced course.

8 hours has been assigned to the block with an hour for lunch. Finishing at 18:00.
Knowledge of at least python scripting as well as the basics of computer science is required.

A 25$ donation at the door is strongly encouraged to support FOULAB.

This will be an introductory workshop to soldering! In this workshop we will cover the basic idea behind soldering, what it’s useful for, and some hands on practice. Recommended donation of 20$, but no one turned away for want of money. We have 20 seats in this workshop, and it is first come first serve.

Tuesday, March 29th starting at 9:00PM, Gabriel De Roy will be coming in to play test Bootleg Systems, a first person retro-sci-fi-puzzle-platformer. Do you like neon? Do you like synth pop? Do you like weaponized 3D fax machines of the future? This may be your kinda game. Come hang out, play the demo, and discuss your favourite 80’s sci-fi.