UN Addresses Dark Web Drug Trade
December 16, 2016
Because individual nations are having spotty success fighting dark-web-based crime, the United Nations is stepping up. DeepDotWeb reports, “UN Trying to Find Methods to Stop the Dark Web Drug Trade.” The brief write-up cites the United Nation’s Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC’s) latest annual report, which reveals new approaches to tackling drugs on the dark web. The article explains why law-enforcement agencies around the world have been having trouble fighting the hidden trade. Though part of the problem is technical, another is one of politics and jurisdiction. We learn:
Since most of the users use Tor and encryption technologies to remain hidden while accessing dark net marketplaces and forums, law enforcement authorities have trouble to identify and locate their IP addresses. …
Police often finds itself trapped within legal boundaries. The most common legal issues authorities are facing in these cases are which jurisdiction should they use, especially when the suspect’s location is unknown. There are problems regarding national sovereignties too. When agencies are hacking a dark net user’s account, they do not really know which country the malware will land to. For this reason, the UNODC sees a major issue when sharing intelligence when it’s not clear where in the world that intelligence would be best used.
The write-up notes that the FBI has been using tricks like hacking Dark Net users and tapping into DOD research. That agency is also calling for laws that would force suspects to decrypt their devices upon being charged. In the meantime, the UNODC supports the development of tools that will enhance each member state’s ability to “collect and exploit digital evidence.” To see the report itself, navigate here, where you will find an overview and a link to the PDF.
Cynthia Murrell, December 16, 2016
Comprehensive Search System Atlas Recall Enters Open Beta
December 1, 2016
We learn about a new way to search nearly everything one has encountered digitally from TechCrunch’s article, “Atlas Recall, a Search Engine for Your Entire Digital Live, Gets an Open Beta and $20M in Backing.” The platform is the idea of Atlas Informatics CEO, and Napster co-founder, Jordan Ritter, a man after our own hearts. When given funding and his pick of projects, Ritter says, he “immediately” chose to improve the search experience.
The approach the Atlas team has devised may not be for everyone. It keeps track of everything users bring up on their computers and mobile devices (except things they specifically tell it not to.) It brings together data from disparate places like one’s Facebook, Outlook, Spotlight, and Spotify accounts and makes the data available from one cloud-based dashboard.
This does sound extremely convenient, and I don’t doubt the company’s claim that it can save workers hours every week. However, imagine how much damage a bad actor could do if, hypothetically, they were able to get in and search for, say, “account number” or “eyes only.” Make no mistake, security is a top priority for Atlas, and sensible privacy measures are in place. Besides, the company vows, they will not sell tailored (or any) advertising, and are very clear that each user owns their data. Furthermore, Atlas maintains they will have access to metadata, not the actual contents of users’ files.
Perhaps for those who already trust the cloud with much of their data, this arrangement is an acceptable risk. For those potential users, contributor Devin Coldewey describes Atlas Recall:
Not only does it keep track of all those items [which you have viewed] and their contents, but it knows the context surrounding them. It knows when you looked at them, what order you did so in, what other windows and apps you had open at the same time, where you were when you accessed it, who it was shared with before, and tons of other metadata.
The result is that a vague search, say ‘Seahawks game,’ will instantly produce all the data related to it, regardless of what silo it happens to be in, and presented with the most relevant stuff first. In that case maybe it would be the tickets you were emailed, then nearby, the plans you made over email with friends to get there, the Facebook invite you made, the articles you were reading about the team, your fantasy football page. Click on any of them and it takes you straight there. …
When you see it in action, it’s easy to imagine how quickly it could become essential. I happen to have a pretty poor memory, but even if I didn’t, who wants to scrub through four different web apps at work trying to find that one PDF? Wouldn’t it be nice to just type in a project name and have everything related to it — from you and from coworkers — pop up instantly, regardless of where it ‘lives’?
The main Atlas interface can be integrated with other search engines like Google and Spotlight, so users can see aggregated results when they use those, too. Interested readers may want to navigate to the article and view the embedded sales video, shorter than two minutes, which illustrates the platform. If you’re interested in the beta, you can sign up here (scroll down to “When can I start using Atlas?”). Founded in 2015, Atlas Informatics is based in Seattle. As of this writing, they are also hiring developers and engineers.
Cynthia Murrell, December 01, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
National Geographic Quad View
October 13, 2016
Google Maps and other map tools each have their unique features, but some are better than others at helping you find your way. However, most of these online map tools have the same basic function and information. While they can help you if you are lost, they are not that useful for topography. National Geographic comes to our rescue with free topographic PDFs. Check them out at PDF Quads.
Here are the details straight from the famous nature magazine:
National Geographic has built an easy to use web interface that allows anyone to quickly find any quad in the country for downloading and printing. Each quad has been pre-processed to print on a standard home, letter size printer. These are the same quads that were printed by USGS for decades on giant bus-sized pressed but are now available in multi-page PDFs that can be printed just about anywhere. They are pre-packaged using the standard 7.5 minute, 1:24,000 base but with some twists.
How can there be twists in a topographic map? They are not really that surprising, just explanations about how the images are printed out. Page one is an overview map that, pages two through five are standard topographic maps sized to print on regular paper, and hill shading is added to provide the maps with more detail.
Everyone does not use topography maps, but a precise tool is invaluable to those who do.
Whitney Grace, October 13, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Scholarship Evolving with the Web
July 21, 2016
Is big data good only for the hard sciences, or does it have something to offer the humanities? Writer Marcus A Banks thinks it does, as he states in, “Challenging the Print Paradigm: Web-Powered Scholarship is Set to Advance the Creation and Distribution of Research” at the Impact Blog (a project of the London School of Economics and Political Science). Banks suggests that data analysis can lead to a better understanding of, for example, how the perception of certain historical events have evolved over time. He goes on to explain what the literary community has to gain by moving forward:
“Despite my confidence in data mining I worry that our containers for scholarly works — ‘papers,’ ‘monographs’ — are anachronistic. When scholarship could only be expressed in print, on paper, these vessels made perfect sense. Today we have PDFs, which are surely a more efficient distribution mechanism than mailing print volumes to be placed onto library shelves. Nonetheless, PDFs reinforce the idea that scholarship must be portioned into discrete units, when the truth is that the best scholarship is sprawling, unbounded and mutable. The Web is flexible enough to facilitate this, in a way that print could never do. A print piece is necessarily reductive, while Web-oriented scholarship can be as capacious as required.
“To date, though, we still think in terms of print antecedents. This is not surprising, given that the Web is the merest of infants in historical terms. So we find that most advocacy surrounding open access publishing has been about increasing access to the PDFs of research articles. I am in complete support of this cause, especially when these articles report upon publicly or philanthropically funded research. Nonetheless, this feels narrow, quite modest. Text mining across a large swath of PDFs would yield useful insights, for sure. But this is not ‘data mining’ in the maximal sense of analyzing every aspect of a scholarly endeavor, even those that cannot easily be captured in print.”
Banks does note that a cautious approach to such fundamental change is warranted, citing the development of the data paper in 2011 as an example. He also mentions Scholarly HTML, a project that hopes to evolve into a formal W3C standard, and the Content Mine, a project aiming to glean 100 million facts from published research papers. The sky is the limit, Banks indicates, when it comes to Web-powered scholarship.
Cynthia Murrell, July 21, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden Web/Dark
Web meet up on July 26, 2016.
Information is at this link: http://bit.ly/29tVKpx.
Open Source Academic Research Hub Resurfaces on the Dark Web
March 11, 2016
Academics are no strangers to the shadowy corners of the Dark Web. In fact, as the The Research Pirates of the Dark Web published by The Atlantic reports, one university student in Kazakhstan populated the Dark Web with free access to academic research after her website, Sci-Hub was shut down in accordance with a legal case brought to court by the publisher Elsevier. Sci-Hub has existed under a few different domain names on the web since then, continuing its service of opening the floodgates to release paywalled papers for free. The article tells us,
“Soon, the service popped up again under a different domain. But even if the new domain gets shut down, too, Sci-Hub will still be accessible on the dark web, a part of the Internet often associated with drugs, weapons, and child porn. Like its seedy dark-web neighbors, the Sci-Hub site is accessible only through Tor, a network of computers that passes web requests through a randomized series of servers in order to preserve visitors’ anonymity.”
The open source philosophy continues to emerge in various sectors: technology, academia, and beyond. And while the Dark Web appears to be a primed for open source proponents to prosper, it will be interesting to see what takes shape. As the article points out, other avenues exist; scholars may make public requests for paywalled research via Twitter and using the hashtag #icanhazpdf.
Megan Feil, March 11, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Latest Global Internet Report Available
October 30, 2015
The Internet Society has made available its “Global Internet Report 2015,” just the second in its series. World-wide champions of a free and open Internet, the society examines mobile Internet usage patterns around the globe. The report’s Introduction explains:
“We focus this year’s report on the mobile Internet for two reasons. First, as with mobile telephony, the mobile Internet does not just liberate us from the constraints of a wired connection, but it offers hundreds of millions around the world their only, or primary, means of accessing the Internet. Second, the mobile Internet does not just extend the reach of the Internet as used on fixed connections, but it offers new functionality in combination with new portable access devices.”
It continues with this important warning:
“The nature of the Internet should remain collaborative and inclusive, regardless of changing means of access. In particular, the mobile Internet should remain open, to enable the permission-less innovation that has driven the continuous growth and evolution of the Internet to date, including the emergence of the mobile Internet itself.”
Through the report’s landing page, above, you can navigate to the above-cited Introduction, the report’s Executive Summary, and Section 2: Trends and Growth. There is even an interactive mobile Internet timeline. Scroll to the bottom to download the full report, in PDF, Kindle, or ePub formats. The download is free, but those interested can donate to the organization here.
Cynthia Murrell, October 30, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
dtSearch Chases Those Pesky PDFs
September 7, 2015
While predictive analytics and other litigation software are more important than ever for legal professionals to sift through the mounds of documents and discover patterns, several companies have come to the rescue, especially dtSearch. Inside Counsel explains how a “New dtSearch Release Offers More Support To Lawyers.”
The latest dtSearch release is not only able to search through terabytes of information in online and offline environments, but its documents filters have broadened to search encrypted PDFs, including those with a password. While PDFs are a universally accepted document format, they are a pain to deal with if they ever have to be edited or are password protected.
Also included in the dtSearch are other beneficial features:
“Additionally, dtSearch products can parse, index, search, display with highlighted hits, and extract content from full-text and metadata in several data types, including: Web-ready content; other databases; MS Office formats; other “Office” formats, PDF, compression formats; emails and attachments; Recursively embedded objects; Terabyte Indexer; and Concurrent, Multithreaded Searching.”
The new PDF search feature with the ability to delve into encrypted PDF files is a huge leap ahead of its rivals, being able to explore PDFs without Adobe Acrobat or another PDF editor will make pursuing through litigation much simpler.
Whitney Grace, September 7, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Set Data Free from PDF Tables
April 13, 2015
The PDF file is a wonderful thing. It takes up less space than alternatives, and everyone with a computer should be able to open one. However, it is not so easy to pull data from a table within a PDF document. Now, Computerworld informs us about a “Free Tool to Extract Data from PDFs: Tabula.” Created by journalists with assistance from organizations like Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, the New York Times and La Nación DATA, Tabula plucks data from tables within these files. Reporter Sharon Machlis writes:
“To use, download the software from the project website . It runs locally in your browser and requires a Java Runtime Environment compatible with Java 6 or 7. Import a PDF and then select the area of a table you want to turn into usable data. You’ll have the option of downloading as a comma- or tab-separated file as well as copying it to your clipboard.
“You’ll also be able to look at the data it captures before you save it, which I’d highly recommend. It can be easy to miss a column and especially a row when making a selection.”
See the write-up for a video of Tabula at work on a Windows system. A couple caveats: the tool will not work with scanned images. Also, the creators caution that, as of yet, Tabula works best with simple table formats. Any developers who wish to get in on the project should navigate to its GitHub page here.
Cynthia Murrell, April 13, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
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