has recently launched a brand new version 7.0, which has turned out to be the most revolutionary upgrade in the past two years, with not only a more user-friendly UI, but also some of the advanced features make web scraping even easier. In this post, I will walk through some of the new features/changes made available in this new version, with respect to how a beginner, even one without any coding background, can approach this web scraping tool.
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SquidProxies review
Today we want to share with you about SquidProxies. It is a service offering anonymous HTTP/HTTPS proxies.
SquidProxies offers 2 types of data-center proxy packages, private proxies and shared proxies. The proxies are designated for just about any legal use, and work great to surf to every website. The proxies’ main use are web scraping/web crawling and SEO tools.
General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR: enforcement date – 25 May 2018. The GDPR covers the matter of online user data privacy rules for electronic communication and data protection. The regulation includes modern communication messengers and services, eg. Skype, Viber, Gmail, etc., that have not been previously mentioned in the former EU e-communication directives.
“Privacy is guaranteed for content of communication as well as metadata (e.g. time of a call and location) which have a high privacy component and need to be anonymised or deleted if users did not give their consent, unless the data is needed for billing.”
See the main elements of GDPR in EU (wiki).
The hierarchical data storage problem is a non-trivial task in relational database context. For example, your online shop has goods of different categories and subcategories creating tree spans for 5 levels. How should they be stored in a database?
Luckily, there are several approaches (design patterns) that will help the developer to design database structure without both odd tables and code. As a result, the site will work faster and any changes, even on database layer, won’t cause troubles. We will study these approaches below.
Last month a legal case took place in a US court where four professors plus a media organization sued the US Government. The District Court for the District of Columbia conclusion stated that moderate scraping, even when against ToS, is legal.
A district court in Washington, D.C. has ruled that using automated tools to access publicly available information on the open web is not a computer crime — even when a website bans automated access in its terms of service (document). The court ruled that the notoriously vague and outdated Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) — a 1986 statute meant to target malicious computer break-ins — does not make it a crime to access information in a manner that the website doesn’t like if you are otherwise entitled to access that same information.
Before we put down all the legal statement fine details, we better give you a conclusion derived from the law case.
If you do not read all the legal statement fine points, jump right to the conclusion.
Last month a legal case took place in a US court where four professors plus a media organization sued the US Government. The District Court for the District of Columbia conclusion stated that moderate scraping, even when against ToS, is legal.
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Big Data Basics
Power of Big Data: capabilities and perspectives
As everyone knows, technological development is evolving flash like. At the same time software requirements, approaches and algorithms are growing with equal speed. In particular, relatively recently, developers have faced the problem of huge data volume processing – making it necessary to create a new, effective approach, a new paradigm of data storage. The solution was not long in coming – in 2011 huge companies all over the world started using the Big Data concept. In this article we will talk about this engaging approach.
SQL (Structured Query Language) is a powerful language for working with relational databases, but quite a few people are in fact ignorant of the dark side of this language, which is called SQL-injection. Anyone who knows this language well enough can extract the needed data from your site by means of SQL – unless developers build defenses against SQL-injection, of course. Let’s discuss how to hack data and how to secure your web resource from these kinds of data leaks!
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Web parsing php tools
Almost all developers have faced a parsing data task. Needs can be different – from a product catalog to parsing stock pricing. Parsing is a very popular direction in back-end development; there are specialists creating quality parsers and scrapers. Besides, this theme is very interesting and appeals to the tastes of everyone who enjoys web. Today we review php tools used in parsing web content.
Sometimes when you are developing a project, it might be necessary to do a parsing of xls documents. To give an example: you do a synchronization between xls worksheets and a website database, and you need to convert xls data to the Mysql and want to do it completely automatically.
If you work with Windows it is simple enough – you just need to use COM objects. However, it is another thing if you work with PHP and need to make it work under the UNIX systems. Fortunately there are many classes and libraries for this purpose. One of them is the class PHPExcel. This library is completely cross-platform, so you will not have problems with portability.