This year, two events indicate the federal privacy commissioner’s attempts to control private investigations in Canada may soon end. Continue reading ‘PIPEDA & The PI’
Monthly Archive for September, 2010
The MailBrowser add-in puts a sidebar to the right of your Gmail screen in Internet Explorer or Firefox, showing information about the sender of an open e-mail or any contact you search for. You can see a list of unread e-mails from the person, e-mail threads and a chart of e-mail activity.
It also lets you search through attachments and shows thumbnails to make it easier to find what you’re looking for. It works on Windows and Mac, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome.
Gmail Drive works with IE 5 or better to turn your Gmail storage space into a virtual hard drive where you can keep any sort of file. Just like a local hard drive, you can move a file there by dragging and dropping and open it by double-clicking. When you save a file to Gmail Drive, it shows up as an e-mail with attachment in your inbox. If this could mean it gets sent to your smartphone, then this could be either a nuisance.
GSpace – an add-in for Firefox on Windows, Mac and Linux – adds interfaces for pictures and music. GSpace lets you manipulate files much as Gmail Drive does, but viewer to let you flip through photos, and a music mode that will play your tunes direct from Gmail. As with Gmail Drive, your files show up as attachments to e-mails in your inbox.
There are four common ways to transfer large files:
1. Middle-man approach
2. Direct file sharing
3. FTP
4. Multi user document repository
1. Middle-man approach
Most file transfer services use the middle-man approach. They require you to upload it first onto their server and then the recipient downloads it. Depending upon your security requirements, these may be very dangerous as you are uploading important data onto someone else’s server without understanding exactly how they treat my data. Furthermore, the server may not be secure from even the most inept hacker. These services usually limit file size to 2GB and they suffer from reliability problems due to dropped connections. Continue reading ‘Secure File Transfers’
Web Worker Article Series
This is part of a series of articles about using Web-based services to get through your work day no matter where you are working — in an office, on a back road in your car, or in an airport.
Web Infrastructure & Cloud Computing
The current web infrastructure includes cloud computing which has started to change how we work and how we use the Internet.
IDC Research predicts that by 2013, 1.2 billion people (that’s about one-third of the existing global working population) will form the world’s mobile workforce.
You may have a smart phone or a Blackberry and many email addresses, but you still need one Web-accessible portal to manage your email. With a little patience and thought, you can make Google a safe haven for all your email even if you normally access it elsewhere.
We all know about Google as a search engine. We all know about Gmail. However, I am amazed at how many people fail to use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, and the other features available from a Google account.
Let’s start with creating a Google and Gmail account and look at what it can do for you. This is the best place to start becoming a Web-Worker. This may seem simplistic to some and rocket science to others. Continue reading ‘On Becoming a Web Worker — Gmail’
Every investigator, both private and public, needs to understand what factors cause misidenification as it occurs far too often.
Reasonable Doubt: Innocence Project Co-Founder Peter Neufeld on Being Wrong
How do most wrongful convictions come about?
The primary cause is mistaken identification. Actually, I wouldn’t call it mistaken identification; I’d call it misidentification, because you often find that there was some sort of misconduct by the police. In a lot of cases, the victim initially wasn’t so sure. And then the police say, “Oh, no, you got the right guy. In fact, we think he’s done two others that we just couldn’t get him for.” Or: “Yup, that’s who we thought it was all along, great call.”
It’s disturbing that misidentifications still play such a large role in wrongful convictions, given that we’ve known about the fallibility of eyewitness testimony for over a century.
In terms of empirical studies, that’s right. And 30 or 40 years ago, the Supreme Court acknowledged that eyewitness identification is problematic and can lead to wrongful convictions. The trouble is, it instructed lower courts to determine the validity of eyewitness testimony based on a lot of factors that are irrelevant, like the certainty of the witness. But the certainty you express [in court] a year and half later has nothing to do with how certain you felt two days after the event when you picked the photograph out of the array or picked the guy out of the lineup. You become more certain over time; that’s just the way the mind works. With the passage of time, your story becomes your reality. You get wedded to your own version.
And the police participate in this. They show the victim the same picture again and again to prepare her for the trial. So at a certain point you’re no longer remembering the event; you’re just remembering this picture that you keep seeing.
The following two articles are required reading for anyone who must search by company or product name.
- Not Brands but Entities: The Influence of Named Entities on Google and Yahoo Search Results
- Google Search Results Dominated By One Domain
Furthermore, the Official Google Blog post titled Showing More Results from a Domain, indicates that their algorithm is intended to show searchers more results from a single domain where evidence exits that there is a “strong user interest in a particular domain.” They also note that the last few results (on a search results page set to show 10 results) are from other domains to preserve diversity in the results.
This has serious implications for anybody doing due diligence research as many derogatory entries in the search engine database will not appear without additional search terms. It also means that search results set to 10, 20, 30, 50, and 100 per page may give radically different proportions of search results when sorted by domain.
Finding Where a Video Was Originally Posted
The Problem: Occasionally you will find a video, posted on a blog or some website that is useful for your investigation…
The Solution: It should be said upfront that this solution likely has an expiry date since YouTube, Vimeo, etc. change their coding every so often. That being said, this has been working for the last two years at least…
This is a handy guide to tracking down the origins of a posted video.
This Message Will Self-Destruct offers the ability to send an encrypted email-like message to another person either with or without a password. As a reassurance that your message is secure, it’s never stored with TMWSD. The optional password salts the encryption key for even more security.
Once you have entered your message and clicked on SAVE THIS MESSAGE, you will be given a URL to pass on to the recipient. When the intended recipient reads your message (with or without the password you may have given them) the encrypted message is deleted forever. If you lose the password your message is also lost!
Location services pose huge security risks
Geotagging adds GPS coordinates to your online posts or photos. You may be exposing this information without even knowing it. Geotagging is particularly popular with photos; many smartphones automatically geotag photos.
Photos can be plotted on a map for easy organization and viewing. But if you post photos online, and you could reveal your home address or child’s school. You’ve given a criminal a treasure map.
This is an excellent article about a group of technological services that are easy to criminally abuse. However, for the Investigator, these services are a treasure trove of information about a person’s associates and movements.
Finding EU material on companies can be tricky; Search Europa is a good starting point before starting more complicated searches.