We are moving to another Web Host. The Confidential Resource may disappear for a short while as we move over to the new server and there won’t be any new articles posted until next week.
Monthly Archive for April, 2009
An excellent article about the “recent discovery of Chinese cyber warfare attacks on foreign computers, on communication computers of visiting dignitaries, and espionage activities to assist a friendly country is building weapons of mass destruction (WMDI)” entitled China’s Silent Warfare at BLOg Source INTelligence reveals a lot about China’s espionage and cyber attack strategy.
Camcorders & Investigators
A great deal of research is done by investigators to select just the right camcorder to get the highest quality for the best money.
Sony’s new HDR-TG5V, a high-definition (HD) camcorder with 10x optical zoom, is equipped with a GPS receiver that can geotag recorded videos and still photos. This is also the smallest HD camcorder. It has built in support for Navteq digital maps. Maps can be viewed on the camcorder’s 2.7-inch LCD and you may also find geotagged locations on a map. Sony includes software to view geotag information on a map.
Is GPS and geotagging a feature we can look forward to or just an expensive novelty?
Your mobile phone can become a slave bracelet if it is compromised by malicious software.
Canada is part of Country Code 1 and participates in the North American Number Plan (NANP) with the USA and 17 Caribbean nations. The NANP structure consists of a single digit Country Code followed by a 10 digit number containing a 3 digit Number Plan Area (called an NPA or Area code), a 3 digit Central Office (CO) Code, and a 4 digit Line Number.
Canada has been adding area codes and Central Office codes. It is not unusual for me to come across an unfamiliar area code. To keep-up with these changes, I regularly download a CSV file (requires ZIP decompression utility) containing information for all NPAs in Canada.
If you don’t want to download the file you can go to the the CNA website (Canadian Number Administrator) to search out an area code or identify the carrier associated with a CO code which will identify those used by cell phones.
Honey Laundering: A sticky trail of intrigue and crime
A far cry from the innocent image of Winnie the Pooh with a paw stuck in the honey pot, the international honey trade has become increasingly rife with crime and intrigue.
2 April, 2009 – The Fisheries Council of Canada (FCC) and U.S.-based Better Seafood Bureau (BSB) are praising the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s (CFIA) letter to seafood importers urging them to comply with the country’s labeling requirements.
Aardvark emerges: Social search that works
Aardvark is social search meets instant messaging, which is a clever marriage. You send a query to Aardvark via your instant-messenger client. The system figures out which people in your network (friends and friends of friends) might be able to answer it for you, sends them messages, and then forwards you the replies.
In its early stage of development, it connects to AIM, GTalk, and Windows Live Messenger, but not to Yahoo IM. It also connects to Facebook…
Aardvark will open to the public “in a few months.”
Web history and geographic origin affects search results
Google search results are based on your web history and geographic origin. If you want to see how this can distort the search results you get, then do a Google search using your normal ISP connection, then do the same search using TOR, then again with Xerobank. Each search will return different results.
Google isn’t the only search engine where this happens.
I noticed a post on The Daily Caveat about Investigators lying in the reports they submitted to the US Office of Personnel Management, which handles the background inquiries for more than 100 US government agencies. It is alleged that Investigators lied about interviews they didn’t conduct to earn more money. Some of the Investigators were working for contractors U.S. Investigation Services and Kroll.
For more details go to the The Washington Post article.
Google’s Goals For Search Results
- Google is in the business of monetizing search results by returning most popular sites
- Google obeys the robots.txt file (robots.txt tells search engines not to crawl the site, preventing the search engine from indexing the site)
- Google search results are ranked by popularity
- Google search results are based on your web history and geographic origin
My Goals For Search Results
- Only my search statement directs the search
- Results not based on rank of page
- Results not based on paid advertising
- Results only based upon relevance to search statement
- Search engine database built by a crawler that ignores robots.txt
A UK company, Twit4hire, can be hired to post as many as 20 tweets a day on your behalf. I guess somebody figures I don’t have enough inane junk to read through each day.
Two excellent posts on detecting deception:
Recently, I did battle the Great MicroSatan.
Two of our workstations have been going for about 4 years without a fresh install of the OS. One machine started to act-up and it corrupted all the MSWord templates it touched. The documents it created were everlasting problems on other machines. The offending machine would hang-up, crash, and generally make everyone’s life miserable. The Great MicroSatan was wreaking havoc upon our little company.
It wasn’t hardware. It wasn’t the drives. Took out the drives and ran checkdisk on them using another machine, everything was OK. Diagnostics found no problems. It was the work of the Great MicroSatan!
Spybot-Search & Destroy found thousands of temporary files, but nothing untoward.
Norton found nothing.
Using CCleaner, I removed all the temporary files.
Using Little Registry Cleaner and then CCleaner I removed all the dross in the registry.
Nothing helps — oh, despair, woe is me — the Great MicroSatan is too powerful!
Then salvation appears in MSWord, Help>Detect and Repair. Great MicroSatan, get thee behind me, you are defeated!
Autodidact (au·to·di·dact , ȯ-tō-ˈdī-ˌdakt, noun) is a person who has learned a subject without the benefit of a teacher or formal education; a self-taught person.A private investigator, is a person who can be hired by individuals or groups to undertake investigations.
The economic downturn has left a lot of Private Investigators moaning about a lack of work. That’s an economic hardship, if you haven’t planned for it, but it is also an opportunity. Now is the time to learn some new skills. Here are two great blog articles on how to go about it:
A Firefox add-on called Greasemonkey allows you to customize the way a web page displays using small bits of JavaScript. With Greasemonkey, Twitter Search Results on Google adds real-time results from Twitter to the top of the Google search results screen—so you can see what people are talking about while researching a subject.
When you search for any term in Google, you will see the 5 most recent tweets matching your keywords above the search results.
Once you have installed Greasemonkey, got to Mark Carey’s userscript.org page and click in the install button on the top right corner of the page to add this functionality to you Google searches.
This is a very useful tool.