Apache Spark aims to solve the problem of working with large scale distributed data and with access to over 500 million leaked passwords we have a lot of data to dig through. If you spend any time with the password data set, you’ll notice how simple most passwords are. This is why we’re always thinking about how to encourage stronger passwords and recommend turning on Two-factor authentication everywhere it’s available.

While tools like Excel and Python are great for data analysis, Spark helps solve the problem of what to do once the data you’re working with gets too large to fit into the memory of your local computer.

This tutorial will show you how to get setup for running Spark and introduce the tools and code that allow you to do data manipulation and exploration. Read on to find out how to spot the most common ...

Earlier this year Troy Hunt released version 2 of his popular Pwned Passwords API service. The new version comes with even more compromised passwords and a more secure way to query the password API that doesn’t require sending plain text passwords over the network.

The API update comes at a good time. When NIST updated its password guidelines in 2016, it included a new recommendation to check “memorized secret verifiers”, or passwords, against known data breaches:

When processing requests to establish and change memorized secrets, verifiers SHALL compare the prospective secrets against a list that contains values known to be commonly-used, expected, or compromised. For example, the list MAY include, but is not limited to passwords obtained from previous breach corpuses.

Since the API release, the community has created API wrappers in many of our favorite programming languages. In this post, I round up the libraries in 7 languages ...

I travel a lot for both work and pleasure. My mom loves to know where I’m jetsetting off to and I was failing to keep her properly updated. I could share my location via Find my Friends, but that doesn’t solve the problem of upcoming travel events. I could create a shared document or calendar, but she isn’t always in front of a computer.

Enter the Where’s Kelley bot.

Using Twilio SMS, I hooked up a phone number to my Google calendar and created a simple text message bot that my mom can ask about my current location and upcoming travel schedule.

This post will walk through how to build one for yourself! Check out the final code here or follow along with this tutorial to build your own Text Travel Tracker from scratch.

Google Calendar API and Service Accounts

First things first, you’ll need ...

We have a big problem when it comes to password security.

People reuse passwords. And they use passwords that are short and easy to guess. This is a problem because even if you don’t care if your Myspace account gets hacked, if you were using the same password there as you are for your email or your bank account, you’re gonna have a bad time.

That’s because hackers will use those leaked credentials to gain access to your other accounts in a process known as credential stuffing. It’s still common practice because bad actors can make a lot of money doing this.

You may hope people have moved past using short, easy to crack passwords like 123456, but of course there are people that still use them.

In fact this password, 123456, has been seen over 20 million times according to the site haveibeenpwned, a project ...

If you’ve ever wanted to create an SMS bot with Scala, you’re in the right place. Perhaps you’re looking for an interactive way to learn Scala or trying to build some automation into your customer interactions. Your SMS bot can be informational or just pure fun. We’ll be building a bot that will respond with your fictional bank balance. In this post, you will learn how to:

1. Sign up for Twilio and get your first SMS-enabled Twilio phone number
2. Set up your development environment to send and receive messages
3. Receive inbound text messages
4. Reply to incoming messages with an SMS

Installation

Let’s make sure we’re set up with the necessary dependencies.
Requirements:

• Java JDK 8
• SBT, I’m using version 0.13.6
• Ngrok
• A Twilio account (you can sign up for a free account if you don’t have one)
• A Twilio phone ...

We’ve all been there – you just need to send an email from your application. Maybe it’s password resets or a product notification. You’re probably reading this because you’ve hit that point. Whatever your use case, this post will walk through how to send an email in code using a plain ol’ Gmail account. I’ll also show you how to fix some common errors you’ll see along the way.

What you’ll need

To code along with this post, you’ll need:

• Python (I’m using Python 3.6.4)
• Pip for installing dependencies
• Virtualenv
• A Gmail account

In a new folder create a requirements.txt file. This file will help you manage your dependencies in a Python project. We only have one dependency for this project; add the following to your requirements.txt file:

You can read more about Flask-Mail in their ...

Security is at the top of everyone’s mind and phone verification is a super simple way to secure your application. Confidence in your users’ phone numbers decreases fraud and increases reliability of notifications. Let’s take a look at how to verify phone numbers using Python, Flask, and the Twilio Verify API.

What you’ll need

To code along with this post, you’ll need:

• A Twilio account
• An Verify App which you can create in the Twilio console
• Python (I’m using Python 3.6.4, but this will work with Python 2.x too)
• Pip for installing dependencies
• Virtualenv

Setting up

Navigate to the Twilio Console and grab your Authy App API Key (found under Settings).

In a new project folder, I named mine phone_verification, create a config file called config.py and add your API Key like so:

Create a requirements.txt file. This ...

It’s functional, it’s object-oriented, it’s everything you never knew you wanted and more! In this post we’ll introduce Scala and give you the tools to build a Scala application that can send text messages using Twilio from the command line.

Scala is a JVM language that is notable for its combination of Object Oriented and Functional programming styles. Over the last fifteen years it’s gained popularity with use cases ranging from web programming to data engineering to distributed systems. Companies like Twitter, Stripe, and Twilio have all built large systems on top of the language.

Hello World

Let’s dive in. Here’s what you’ll need:

• Java JDK 8
• SBT, I’m using version 0.13.6
• Text editor (I highly recommend using an IDE like IntelliJ, the community edition is free and fully supports Scala)
• A Twilio account (you can sign up for ...

The recession hit while I was in undergrad and my incredibly pragmatic and risk-averse self prioritized finding a job, any job, above all else. Given my business school background I was lucky to land a job on Wall Street, more specifically clearing trades for listed derivatives like Live Cattle.

Working on the operations side of the business, employees were rewarded for automating their jobs away. But this was a large, highly regulated, public bank and many internal resources were tightly controlled — I distinctly remember being denied Sharepoint developer access when I wanted to automate something like Gantt chart updates 😢.

The one tool that was universally available was Microsoft Excel. You would be shocked by the amount of the financial industry that’s being held together by fragile spreadsheets developed and maintained by 20 year old investment banking interns.

We had Excel programs that would calculate hundred-million-dollar cross broker payments with ...