Monthly Archive for April, 2008

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Propaganda

Published on April 14, 2008 in News Media. 0 Comments Tags: , .

“Four hostile newspapers, are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.” Napoleon Bonaparte to his generals.

Propaganda may be defined as the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.

I’ve been reading about propaganda lately. A reviewer correctly observed that one book about the evils of propaganda stated that only conservatives engage in it, and they are always “wrong.” This was a rather comical bit of propaganda in a book warning about the dangers of propaganda. Many of the books I read contained this type of nonsense.

Today, a friend brought a National Post column to my attention. It is about a Wikipedia editor using the popular service as a platform for propaganda. The article alleges that, “By patrolling Wikipedia pages and ensuring that her spin reigns supreme over all climate change pages, she has made of Wikipedia a propaganda vehicle for global warming alarmists. But unlike government propaganda, its source is not self-evident.”

Be careful out there, and don’t believe everything you read.

People, Places, & Things are Related

Published on April 14, 2008 in Methods, Search Engines and Search Strategies. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Searching for data on a person certainly involves searching by name, but limiting your searches to only name references is shortsighted.

If you know the person’s home address, then search for references to that, you may find a business, association, or other organisation at his home. You may find that his home address is associated with another person.

You should search his business address the same way, but add an address search in Dun & Bradstreet and other credit reporting databases. Lien filings, corporate filings, and other public filings should be searched by name and address as permitted by the relevant jurisdictions.

Associations and affiliations tell you a great deal about a person — remember what your mother told you about the company you keep…

On-line Fences

Published on April 11, 2008 in Intellectual Property Rights, Methods, Private Investigator, Reputation Management and Security. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

The US Government Accountability Office says that stolen sensitive military items have been purchased by undercover government officials on Craigslist and eBay. However, this is like the kettle calling the pot black. The same subcommittee determined that the Defense Department sold chemical protective suits and biological warfare laboratory equipment to the public.

While it is easy to see an element of fear mongering in this, it does remind us that private sector businesses should be checking eBay and Craigslist for their own product and counterfeits. Doing so may reveal a problem with theft, grey marketing, or counterfeiting.

You Can’t Boil the Ocean

Published on April 11, 2008 in Competitive Intelligence. 0 Comments Tags: .

What Do You Do with RSS?

AlacraBlog asks an interesting question: what do you do about integrating blog content and RSS feeds in your info delivery system?

First seen on: Competitive Intelligence

An Early Competitive Intelligence Failure

Published on April 10, 2008 in Competitive Intelligence. 2 Comments Tags: .

The inventor of the thermometer, René Antoine de Réaumur (1683-1757), thought he had found the secret to making crucible steel. He added sulfur to the inferior French iron.

His failure was two fold. To begin with, if he had looked, he would have seen the English buying their iron ore from Sweden and asked why. Secondly, he would have honestly compared his steel to that of the British and Germans.

Even after Jars’s espionage and Alcock’s warning that making steel was easy, but making good steel was hard, the French continued their patriotic efforts to make good steel from inferior French iron.

Sixty years after Réaumur, the French steel industry was still primitive and unproductive. Finally, in 1820, a British expatriate named James Jackson, showed the French how to make crucible steel ten years after the Germans learned how to do it on their own and fifteen years after the Swiss.

Patriotism seemed to prevent the French from asking, what are the successful producers doing that we are not doing?

The French didn’t ask the big question.

Craigslist Crooks

Published on April 10, 2008 in Dirty Tricks and Fraud. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

We have seen our share of weird cases involving Craigslist, but nothing like these: Continue reading ‘Craigslist Crooks’

Forum Search

Published on April 9, 2008 in Google-Free Wednesday and Search Engines. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Google-Free Wednesday

Twing purportedly offers the ability to search many forums more thoroughly than traditional search engines. Forums offer a soap-box to both the worst and best denizens of the Internet.

I won’t be replacing the large search engines with Twing for searching forum posts, but Twing found many items that the large search engines missed or place extremely low in the search results. However, it also failed to find some large forums.

Searching for Hidden Files

Published on April 8, 2008 in Methods and Search Engines. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Searching for a File Type

Make use of the file format search available in Google, Yahoo, Live and Exalead. The following tells you how to search for specific file formats, such as PowerPoint (ppt) presentations; Adobe PDF for government and private industry documents; xls for Excel spreadsheets containing lists, statistical, and accounting data; and rss or xml to locate RSS feeds. Continue reading ‘Searching for Hidden Files’

Google & Reckless Personal Information Handling

Published on April 8, 2008 in Canada, Espionage, Privacy, Private Investigator and Security. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

I previously wrote about Bill C-27 and how it will make it an offence in Canada to recklessly make available or sell personal information knowing it will be used to commit fraud.

Google, and others, offer tools such as on-line word processing but your data is housed by that entity, usually in the USA, and is thus subject to the US Patriot Act, and other laws that allow government surveillance of your data.

In my view, using these Web-based collaborative tools amounts to Reckless Personal Information Handling.

Web-based Collaborative Tools

The Globe and Mail recently published an interesting article about this:

Patriot Act haunts Google service

by SIMON AVERY, Globe and Mail March 24, 2008

Some other organizations are banning Google’s innovative tools outright to avoid the prospect of U.S. spooks combing through their data. Security experts say many firms are only just starting to realize the risks they assume by embracing Web-based collaborative tools hosted by a U.S. company, a problem even more acute in Canada where federal privacy rules are at odds with U.S. security measures.

Polygraph Test Results Inadmissable In Ontario

Published on April 6, 2008 in Canada and Courts. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

The Ontario Divisional Court, ruled in Petti v. George Coppel Jewellers Ltd. that polygraph test results are inadmissible as evidence in Ontario civil court proceedings:

Justice Quinn reviewed the law. He said that evidence that a person has offered to submit to polygraph testing can be admissible, but that was a neutral factor here, since both parties had made such an offer. Secondly, the questions and answers from the testing can be admissible, if they constitute admissions against interest. But the test results themselves are not admissible because they usurp the jurisdiction of the trier of fact. As His Honour said, “the court should not delegate its jurisdiction, even on consent”. Hence, a new trial was ordered.

Polygraphy was disallowed in criminal proceedings in a 1987 ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada.

John J. Furedy, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, maintains a site opposed to the polygraph that has links to research articles on the efficacy of polygraph tests.

Industrial Espionage in History II

Published on April 4, 2008 in Competitive Intelligence and Industrial Espionage. 0 Comments Tags: , .

As in other forms of espionage, people usually act against their country’s interests, or that of their employer’s, for a combination of financial gain and ideology. During the Industrial Revolution era, European governments paid people to set-up businesses, but some made the move due to sentiment.

John Holker, a disaffected Jacobite, was recruited by France and became a manufacturer of textile machinery.

Michael Alcock was an interesting case. He moved to France to avoid embezzlement charges along with his mistress, leaving his wife and business partner to face bankruptcy. However, it turns out that his wife was part of the highly profitable scheme. She rejoined him, whereupon they lived ménage à trois on the upper Loire River where Alcock ran a forge and manufactured hardware.

The World’s Most Dangerous Sit-Down Job II

Published on April 3, 2008 in Fitness and Lifestyle Management. 0 Comments Tags: .

When I started this series of articles, I’d bet you thought I would begin by telling you to loose weight and join a gym. That’s not necessarily the best place to start in your quest for improved fitness and a better lifestyle.

It is better to start by making your work life easier, less stressful, and less time consuming. I started that process by getting rid of the office and the employees. Working from a home office reduced costs and travel time, while allowing me to be more productive. This had a major beneficial impact on my fitness and lifestyle. But that change has created its own challenges as my work became more dependent upon computers and telecommunication technology.

Our hands are the fundamental to our success as a species. They support our creativity. They bring to life what our minds imagine. My dangerous job is hell on the hands and forearms. Writing and typing put an enormous repetitive strain on the hands. I tried limiting how much I wrote and typed, but my efforts were inconsistent with making a living. My solution to this problem relies on old technology, mature technology, and a relatively unused technology. Continue reading ‘The World’s Most Dangerous Sit-Down Job II’

Hedge Fund Dirty Tricks

Published on April 2, 2008 in Dirty Tricks and Private Investigator. 0 Comments Tags: , .

A good look at how modern crooks operate from Michael Thomas at The Daily Caveat.

Hedge Fund Dirty Tricks and the HBOS Implosion

You’ll love this article from The Daily Telegraph – an inside look at the “dirty-tricks unit” of a London-based hedge fund. This story has all the good stuff – PIs, hacking, the obligatory sub-prime mortgage crisis connection, rogue traders, market manipulation – it’s one stop shopping.

The Investigator’s Internet Tool Kit

Published on April 2, 2008 in Private Investigator, Reputation Management and Search Engines. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

An article about Online Reputation Monitoring for Competitive Intelligence has let the cat out of the bag — there are investigative tools to get more from the Internet than you will find with simple search strings.

There are tools for searching Google to uncover details about your company that you would never think of publishing freely, tools for searching social networks to locate competitive intelligence information from employees or ex-employees, tools for digging into content to locate copyright materials and tools for conducting linguistic scans for flagging up dirty words associated with your products or derogatory associations with your brand.

Google-Free Wednesday Catches-on

Published on April 2, 2008 in Google-Free Wednesday and Search Engines. 0 Comments Tags: .

Mary Ellen Bates’s excellent article in FUMSI, Life Beyond Google: Some of the Best of the Rest, reviews some of the search engines I reported on here and a few I haven’t. This is a good read if you want to try search resources other than Google.

“FUMSI publishes articles, tools, and a monthly magazine, to give you practical help with information skills.” Subscribing to this is definitely worthwhile.