Wikipedia maintains a long list of social networking websites. The links are to other Wikipedia articles about the listed sites so that you can get a feel for what the sites might offer.
Archive for January, 2008
An excellent CI related blog, Brand Killer Robots, offers this fun comparison of the black-hat hacker and the good guy training people to protect their assets.
Why have Ethical Hacker Training companies got it so wrong?
We ask, just who are the people that you are sending on Ethical hacker training courses and why are you sending them?
So lets first look at the white hats. Continue reading ‘Why Ethical Hacker Training Fails’
I don’t know how I so skillfully miss a good blog when I’m searching. Ian Smith’s blog, aptly named Ian’s iBlog, has been going since December 2006. Ian is a graduate of Concordia University in Montreal.
His article entitled FI: Facebook Intelligence attracted my attention as it provides a good explanation of the value of searching this social network site.
The following press release came across my desk yesterday. It illustrates how CI has become the domain of large corporations, maybe it always was. It is the large businesses that can afford the specialised personnel to fill the roll of CI professional.
CHAPEL HILL, N.C., Jan. 24 /PRNewswire/ — Competitive Intelligence
groups have a tough job…Specific best practices are revealed in Managing the Competition:
Turning Competitive Intelligence into Strategy, a compelling benchmarking
study conducted by Best Practices, LLC…Download a complimentary study excerpt at http://www3.best-in-class.com/rr904.htm.
The study presents provocative sharing compiled from surveys and in-depth interviews with 29 top CI executives at such world-class companies as AstraZeneca, IBM, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Kodak, Eli Lilly and Abbott Labs…A brief sampling of harvested insights and best practices include:
One benchmarked executive explains that CI analysts at his organization must develop executive recommendations beyond pure data analysis. This kind of accountability led to more empowerment of the CI team as company members are more likely to use competitive information if it is readily available.
This is something that makes me think, “why didn’t I think of that?”. I found it on the Sources And Methods blog.
Newsroom101.com. This site has a ton of easy to do exercises to improve your grammar, spelling and punctuation. Designed for journalists (with the AP style in mind) the site is almost just as useful to intelligence analysts who have to learn to write in the concise style of a journalist. I also like the way the exercises are put together. If you get the right answer, the site doesn’t bore you with the details. If you get the wrong answer, however, the site lets you know what you did wrong and why immediately.
The Deccan Herald, one of my favorite sources of news of India, has this wonderful anecdote about bugging:
The great British statesman Winston Churchill had one standard procedure, whenever he was housed in magnificent Russian palaces during his state visits. The first thing the British Prime Minister used to do was to go through all the rooms of his suite shouting “You b@#*%#ds, I know this room is bugged and will not be fooled by you.”
On Monday, September 17, 2007, the merging of Strategis with ic.gc.ca commenced. From this date on, all Strategis information will be found on www.ic.gc.ca.
The merged site is a response to client and stakeholder requests for a simplified and unified web presence. The site navigation has been improved to enhance usability, and the information has been categorized so that you can find what you are looking for quickly and easily.
All links from Strategis will automatically be forwarded to www.ic.gc.ca. The redirects will remain in place for several months to allow you adequate time to update your bookmarks.
The layout now reflects the new look and format seen on other Government of Canada websites. The integration and conversion of all Industry Canada web products will be completed by December 2008.
Key features of the website
- Multiple views of information on Industry Canada’s programs and services
- Quick access to popular transactional services such as:
EASY TO PLANT CAMERAS IN HOTEL ROOMS
THE recent sex DVD scandal involving former Malaysian Health Minister Datuk Seri Dr Chua Soi Lek shows how easy it is to rig a spy camera and film someone without their knowledge.
Experts tell The New Paper on Sunday that it takes anyone just 30 minutes to rig a spy cam.
It takes the professionally trained even less time…
Chipwrapper is a Custom Google Search Engine that searches across the UK’s major national newspapers. For an excellent review of this visit Karen Blakeman’s Blog.
In 300 B.C. Chinese princes were told that to rule they must turn the empire into their eyes and ears. “Though he may live in the deepest retreat of his palace, at the end of tortuous corridors, nothing escapes him, nothing is hidden from him, nothing can escape his vigilant watch.” (Levi, Le grand empereur, pp.187).
Such a system relies not only on the honour of the eyes and ears, but also his subordinates whose capacity for deception and treachery is unbounded.
The weakness of any such intelligence system is the quality of the human resources employed. The problem still exists today, even with technical collection, due to the hypocritical analysts and scheming bureaucrats between the data and the decision-maker.
Michael Thomas, a recovering corporate investigator in the Washington, DC-area, who blogs at The Daily Caveat put us onto the Porter Wright SEC Actions blog. This blog is a wealth of information about issues surrounding SEC enforcement actions.
The free full text search in the EDGAR system at the SEC goes back only the past 4 years and the header information in SEC filings goes back to 1994.
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Access to Archival Databases (NARA AAD) has an index of historical Securities and Exchange Commission public companies - searchable by officer and director names and company names. These records go back to 1972 in Proposed Sale of Unregistered Securities by Individuals and back to 1978 in Trading of Securities by Corporate Insiders.
The descriptions of these two databases of SEC filings is as follows: Continue reading ‘Searching SEC Records’
Current privacy regimens are just that — they try to keep information from being disclosed. Unfortunately, the people who brought about these regimens did not understand the difference between privacy and security of the transaction.
Securing the transaction is a three part process of Identification, Authentication and Authorisation. You cannot have authentication without identification and you can’t have authorisation without authentication. Privacy regimens make Identification difficult, and Authentication nearly impossible.
In the UK, they want to create one trusted system to provide the identification in a new national Identification Card. This sounds good, but it will not work. This approach creates one point of failure that does not provide any alternative and independent methods of authentication. Once an offender has compromised or tricked the system, it will no longer be trustworthy, yet no alternative will exist to protect the transaction. This is an Identity based system not an Authentication based system. In this system, once you establish your identity no authentication is required.
It seems to me that the privacy advocates are jockeying for a position as privacy guardians who will produce your identity and eliminate the “need” for authentication. Am I the only one who sees the dangers of this?
As an Investigator, I try to find corroborating evidence and fact check everything possible, especially the identity of the people involved. How will I legally do that as this oppressive culture of privacy becomes entrenched? How will businesses conduct transactions when they are prevented from properly authenticating the identity of their customers?
Here is the updated long list of social sites at Hybridsem.
The following Chicago Tribune article about Competitive Intelligence is very interesting. I have extracted the parts I find most interesting.
You will see that most SCIP members do very little CI research and analysis. While the people interviewed are selling to the SME, it is clear that the organised efforts at CI are in large firms in established industries like the pharmaceutical industry.
Fuld also points out that CI must serve strategic planning and that most companies combine the CI and Market Research into one department. I made this point in a previous article.
Also notice that the CI researchers conducted interviews to gain information. They interviewed employees of the target firms and their family members. This is an approach any good Researcher (or Investigator) would take. Also notice that the interviews were not conducted under any form of pretext. Continue reading ‘Strategic Research - CI and Market Research’