Starting two projects and other news

Over the last few weeks I’ve been pretty busy working on two new projects. In this post I’ll explain each project in more detail and the progress I’ve made so far.

The first is a project to collate a list of tweet IDs relating to the next UK General Election, whenever that is next held (legally before May 2024, but perhaps sooner). The hope is that this will lead to a really good dataset that can be used by researchers in considering misinformation, bot networks and election predictions. I intend to run my election prediction model that I used for my MSc. thesis on the dataset and determine if it performs as well with multi-party elections. So far, the progress has been focused on the planning, of which hashtags and users to follow in order to ensure unbiased coverage. I’ll speak more about that progress in the future in a later post.

My second project is slightly different. I’ve spent roughly 15 years using PHP to build websites and I wanted to create a user management program that I can use for other projects. While I know I could use a framework, I am really interested in learning how to do it myself and learning more about the security pitfalls. In addition to that, there are so many websites and tutorial sites with user management systems that are old and horrendously insecure (I won’t name and shame but there are many still using MD5 or SHA-1 hashing algorithms to “encrypt” passwords despite the existence of rainbow tables and the repeated warnings not to use them for password hashing). The project will hopefully produce a user management system that implements OWASP recommendations and does things the correct way. During this project I want to write a bit about my thoughts on topics such as passwords, sessions, etc. etc.

Aside from the two projects, I’ve uploaded my MSc. thesis (warts and all, so there’s a couple of spelling errors I missed), which can be found on my publications page.