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8 November, 2009 @ 09:41 pm by Beto

Hacking government databases

Posted under IT Channel

I just came back from the OpenAustralia Hackfest, which took place at the offices of Google in Sydney. Honestly I went there expecting very little (I’m quite busy at the moment finishing papers at Uni, looking for job in a few countries and planning a relocation of continents). Daniela, a good friend of mine, met me a few weeks ago trying to figure out what project to do, so at the end we thought the database of NSW Crime would be an interesting good mashup. Well you won’t believe that, but we met a few guys over there and ended up with a quite robust database and a prototype and we won the first place. Yep, just like that, everybody liked it because Raul (a Spanish-speaking, how funny is that?), the guy presenting it, suggested using the database to find the best suburb to get a girl (since now we can filter by age, income, sex, marital status, education, and population size).

There is a contest that finishes on Friday, we’re going to be working on the project now that we know we have a chance. And even if we don’t win I think is good way to start using that data for monitoring the level of security. I’m (unofficially) in charge of the data mining, I’ve been merging information lot of information in a consolidated database (more than 1.7 million records so far). So it looks good so far, keep on this frequency and I’ll keep you updated about the progress.

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