The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) is warning taxpayers to beware of a recent scam where some Canadians are receiving a letter fraudulently identified as coming from the CRA and asking for personal information. The letter is not from the CRA. A PDF version of the letter is available on the CRA Web site at www.cra.gc.ca/alert.
SlideFinder.net offers a search engine powered by Slide Executive, a PowerPoint software and tools company.
Searching “McEachin” in Google I get 37 hits. Doing the same search in SlideFinder, I get one hit. In the Google results, the SlideFinder result appears third from the bottom with a different file name than found by SlideFinder.
According the SlideFinder blog, they concentrate on indexing presentations from university websites as these “will often contain high quality content.” The blog is worth following if you regularly search for PowerPoint presentations.
This thing works very well for finding references to company names and Web sites. The person who prepared the presentation usually knows things that interest me. It’s usually easy to find the person who made the PowerPoint file. Write-out my questions, make a telephone call, get answers, write report, and move on to the next job.
Beginning 1 January 2010, the new limit for claims has increased from $10,000 to $25,000. This makes it worth searching for Small Claims Court actions when doing due diligence research. However, the Small Claims Court is often in a building some distance from the Superior Court.
FindThatFile
Previously, I wrote about file searches using OSUN.ORG.
findthatfile.com provides a file search encompassing Web, FTP, Usenet, Metalink and P2P resources (ed2k/emule) including 47 file types and 554+ file extensions including over 167 file upload services. It also offers an alert service sent to your email.
However, not all information in the search database has every property you might be searching for, therefore, you have to explore the different ways to search for the file in the advanced search screen.
In my experience, this is not a good search engine to use to search by a person’s name or a company name. The files are not well indexed in this fashion. One must also be careful to select the “All Files” button in the “Adult Filter” to be sure all the files found appear in the search results.
I usually search by a file name for other versions of a file that I already know about. In some cases, findthatfile.com will give me an understanding of how widely circulated a file may be, or turn-up different versions of the same file.
American journalists meeting with Soviet dissidents in Russia used Magic Slates as a way of communicating without being overheard by bugging devices. Low cost, low tech, and effective — what more can you ask for?
Better off with Bing
This excellent article by Lawrence Solomon illustrates why a researcher or investigator must use more than one search engine.
Googlegate: The search engine may be standing up to Chinese censors. What about Google’s own censors?
Search for “Googlegate” on Google and you’ll get a paltry result (my result yesterday was 29,300). Search for “Googlegate” on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine competitor, and the result numbers an eye-popping 72.4 million. If you’re a regular Google user, as opposed to a Bing user, you might not even know that “Googlegate” has been a hot topic for years in the blogosphere — that’s the power that comes of being able to control information.
… Google began to minimize the Climategate scandal by hiding Climategate pages from its users.
Bing, in contrast, didn’t make climategate pages disappear. As you’d expect from a search engine that wasn’t manipulating data, search results on Bing climbed steadily until they peaked at around 51 million…
Searching for specific terms in indexed documents on the Web is something many searchers fail to do. It is amazing what you can find when you go looking for it. I’ve written about searching by file type before. Now I have found a search engine for .pdf, .doc, and .ppt files.
OSUN.ORG
OSUN.ORG provides a simple interface for searching PDF documents, MSWord documents, and PowerPoint files. The large search engines allow one to search more file types and you must search one file type at a time using OSUN.ORG as you do in Google. I don’t know what database this search engine uses, but it doesn’t compare very well with Google. A search for my name in PDF files give 52 results in Google and only 9 in OSUN.ORG. This is not a good performance.
Sometimes it’s really hard to find an alternative to the big three search engines.
According to WowJobs.ca, the average salary of $38,307 for private investigators obtained from job postings nationwide are less than the nationwide average salary by 19%.
This indicates the average salary stated in job postings is $45,500 nationally and that on a national basis, Private Investigators earn about $7200 less than that average.
DevilFinder
According to the site, DevilFinder began as a project to display results from search engines like Google and Yahoo without setting cookies while presenting fewer pages of results. It does not collect search data from users and no invasive cookies or JavaScript is used.
DevilFinder seems to rank the search results on the search term alone, rather than a combination of relevance and the popularity of the site. This is why relevant results from less popular sites may appear at the top. It is might also be the reason the result set is so small. DevilFinder shows the results arranged 100 per page and I rarely get more than 2 pages.
The Image search works quite well. The images are much larger than other search engines. The Video search only returned hits from Youtube for any search I have done - not exactly useful. To be fair the Video search seems to be a new feature. The News tab is just a crude collection of feeds that aren’t searchable.
Search Strategy
This has become a favorite choice for searching the names of people and companies. The results often provide more useful sites in the first page than Google and I don’t have to go to the last page of results to find out what wasn’t searched, as I do with Google.
For long, complex search statements, I still rely on Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, but for searching names and some other common short search statements, DevilFinder does an excellent job and sometimes a better job than the big guys.
Sherlock Holmes with his deerstalker hat and magnifying glass is the most familiar image of the Investigator. However, this is a narrow-minded representation of the Investigator.
The investigative process does not belong to the police or private detective. Investigation is at the heart of every human activity. Scholars investigate. Antique dealers and appraisers investigate. Investors investigate. Medical Doctors investigate. In one way or another, we all investigate something or other. To investigate is to seek a solution. It is the application of information collection skills, logic, and analytical skills.
This is the last article of 2009. The next article will appear on Google-Free Wednesday, 6 January 2010.
Facebook: The truth is out there
… Facebook is a good source for data mining.
But one problem is that information gathered is not verified independently.
“These are not facts, just hearsay,” the former Criminal Investigation Department trainer said. “For digital photos, you can’t prove they are original as photos can be manipulated and put on the Web. You can’t authenticate them unless you get the original files from the photographer.”
He added: “This way of getting information is more trendy…but the information should be verified by conducting a proper investigation.”
Only when it is backed up will it be admissible as court evidence, he said.
… [it is] not inconceivable for someone to falsify their whereabouts on such sites.
“There really is no way of proving who was at the computer, which is the problem with any Internet-based investigation,” he said. “Today, one can update Facebook status or tweet Twitter from any device at any location.”
This is an excellent article on the value of searching social sites.
I have written previously on taking notes using audio, images, and handwritten notes. Quite a while back I wrote about video notes using a simple camcorder called the FlipUltra.
Kodak Zi8
Now the Kodak Zi8 seems like a better pocket-sized point-and-shoot video camera. The digital image stabilization provides better video than the Flip. It has some hardware and software advantages over the Flip. It needs SD or SDHC memory cards which I see as an advantage even if it makes the Zi8 cost more.
Pdf It! is more than PDF
The Pdf It! extension is designed for FireFox running on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. The Pdf It! menu item appears in the Tools menu as well as context menu.
The Pdf It! extension features are as follows:
- Convert current page(Whole Page or Visible Part) to Image(PNG or JPEG)
- Add title to generated image (Firefox 3 only)
- Specify the color/position/font size for title
- Apply up to 16 filters while converting page to Image
ImageVenue
I don’t have much use for the PDF function of this addon (based on an online service) . The PDF function does not provide a full colour rendition of the Web page. It is the ability to create a JPEG of a web page that can be emailed or put up on a site like ImageVenue.
If you use ImageVenue, then you only need to send a link to the image, which must be either JPEG or JPG with a maximum size of 3 meg. For example, an image of our web page is easier to send as a link than as an image file. Of course this is not secure from outside viewing but it is handy for some things.
Gazopa allows you to upload an image from your computer, enter an image URL, search for keywords, or even draw one yourself. The similarity is based on a color and shape match. This actually works on occasion.
In my experience, Gazopa is much better in matching pictures than BYO Image Search which searches for color palette similarity.
I’m naturally skeptical, especially of what is reported in the news. The Toronto Star keeps putting a bodiless hand in a picture of the Mississauga Mayor, Hazel McCallion, and her son.
Photoshop
This Photoshop disaster hasn’t gone unnoticed, but it highlights the issue of how Investigators and Researchers use such pictures and how they cite collected images.
I don’t have the technical skills to verify the authenticity of every image I collect and use in reports, but I can, and do, report the source of the image and the date it was collected. For example, in this case, several versions of this image are in the public domain. If I use the image in a report, I must state its source and the date collected, as it may later be revealed as a fake or altered image.
TinEye
I also use TinEye on such an image to see if an alternative version exists and to see where else the image might have appeared. For example, using TinEye on the cropped Toronto Star image I get a reference to the obviously Photoshopped image with the bodiless hand.