Finding EU material on companies can be tricky; Search Europa is a good starting point before starting more complicated searches.
Dropbox allows you to work on and synchronise documents from many computers. However, it does have a significant security weakness. Continue reading ‘Dropbox’
Concealing one’s activities on the Web is something every Investigator should understand. You should understand this for your own use and to understand how these techniques may deny you needed information. Yet using these techniques may also target you as an undesirable in some circumstances.
The following are methods used to obscure Internet traffic and avoid IP blacklists and content filters.
Leadership and the language of lying
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Executives who paint a rosier picture than the numbers suggest speak differently, new research suggests
WALLACE IMMEN
If you hear your boss use the phrase “what an incredible year the company has had,” when reporting the latest results, it might be time to dust off your résumé, a new study suggests.
Using inflated language and third-person phrases such as “the team” and “the company” rather than “I” and “we” can be cues that an executive is lying or covering up a bad situation, according to research by David Larcker, director of the corporate governance research program at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and doctoral student Anastasia Zakolyukina.
They published their findings in a paper called “Detecting Deceptive Discussions in Conference Calls”.
Deceptive bosses tend to make more references to general knowledge and refer less to shareholder value. They also use fewer “non-extreme positive emotion words”. Instead of describing something as “good”, they call it “fantastic”. The aim is to “sound more persuasive” while lying.
Warning: Fake LinkedIn E-Mail Could Infect Your PC
Don’t look now, but that “LinkedIn” invite you just received from a “colleague” may in fact be yet another cleverly disguised piece of spam…
Other LinkedIn spam isn’t so obvious or so benign though. I also received fake invites that lacked the Viagra Houdini image but still lead to weird sites (like one called “Cernoma”)…
This is not the first time social media has been abused by spammers, and it appears to be a rising trend. (I’ve also written about bogus Amazon spam here.)
This is an excellent article with lots of links to more accounts of social media being used as a vector for spam and malicious code.
Every company or individual person who files a disclosure with the SEC receives an unique ID, the Central Index Key (CIK). You can use the CIK to search for company or fund filings on EDGAR .
The CIK Look-up has only one input field in the interface entitled Company, however, it will work for a person’s name also.
Google introduced encrypted search which gives the user the option to use SSL (Secure Socket Layer) to prevent packet sniffing which in turn could reveal user’s searches on the site. The encrypted search service moved to https://encrypted.google.com.
Only Google web search is available over SSL. Other search products like Google Images and Google Maps are not currently available over SSL.
“scofflaw swimming pools” is the search phrase for this week…
Google Earth Used To Find Unlicensed Pools
A town on New York’s Long Island is using Google Earth to find backyard pools that don’t have the proper permits.
Counties exist as an administrative unit in 48 of the 50 states. Louisiana is divided into parishes and Alaska into boroughs. If parishes and boroughs are considered to be the equivalent of a county, then there are 3140 counties in the 50 states.
Downloading videos from sites like YouTube to your computer is something every Investigator will need to do from time-to-time.
An easy way to do this is with the Firefox Fast Video Download plug-in. While watching the video select the Tools menu, Fast video download, and then select the video you want to save. The videos may have the name of the video or a generic name. The extension may be .flv or .mp4, or there may be one or more of each. Select the format that you want , such as.mp4, and save the file, renaming it if you need to.
To playback the videos VLC Media Player is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The combination of the Fast Video Download plug-in and the VLC Media Player give you a free way to handle this type of material.
Cops love iPhone data trail – Evidence Never Deleted
Every time an iPhone user closes out of the built-in mapping application, the phone snaps a screenshot and stores it. Savvy law-enforcement agents armed with search warrants can use those snapshots to see if a suspect is lying about whereabouts during a crime.
“Competitive Intelligence means looking behind the news and doing an analysis to find the truth. That is not the role of newspapers. Their role is simple: to sell and make profits for their owners. If that means subjective reporting, then so be it.” Continue reading ‘The News and Critical Thought’
It never ceases to amaze me how gullible people are. Let’s look at two examples recently in the news.
First, the case of Shirley Sherrod, the black U.S. Department of Agriculture official accused of racism. The evidence of her racism was a short, edited video clip offered up by a partisan web gadfly, Andrew Breitbart, who has a small empire of web sites. This guy knew such a controversial and inflammatory out-take would drive millions to his web sites. This huge burst of site traffic is money in Brietbart’s pocket.
What surprised me was that the NAACP and the Obama administration swallowed this hook, line, and sinker. They didn’t review the full video, interview people present at the event, or evaluate Breitbart’s motives for publishing the edited video.
Second, the leaked military documents that now appear on the WikiLeaks site need closer examination.
The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is what a judge would describe as an unreliable witness. He pleaded guilty to 25 charges of hacking in Australia; and according to the National Post, “Before he set up the website in 2006, Julian Assange spent years hacking into government and company computers, including those of the U.S. Department of Defense, as part of a group calling themselves the International Subversives.”
With Assange’s talk about “war crimes” and his background, it isn’t hard to understand that this guy has an agenda. How his agenda distorts the picture of events depends upon what documents he publishes from this large volume of previously classified material. We will never know what he didn’t publish and this creates a very similar situation to the selectively edited video clip published by Breitbart.
To avoid ID, more are mutilating fingerprints
Police say scarring can thwart detection
So desperate was one man to conceal his identity that he began biting his fingers and drawing blood while being booked.
Some have used eyedroppers filled with acid or pressed their fingers onto burning metal to blot their fingerprints. Others have spent thousands of dollars to hire shady doctors to surgically alter their fingertips, hoping to scar them beyond recognition.