Play Search the Game
March 25, 2016
Within the past few years, gamers have had the privilege to easily play brand new games as well as the old classics. Nearly all of the games ever programmed are available through various channels from Steam, simulator, to system emulator. While it is easy to locate a game if you know the name, main character, or even the gaming system, but with the thousands of games available maybe you want to save time and not have use a search engine. Good news, everyone!
Sofotex, a free software download Web site, has a unique piece of freeware that you will probably want to download if you are a gamer. Igrulka is a search engine app programmed to search only games. Here is the official description:
Igrulka is a unique software that helps you to search, find and play millions of games in the network.
“Once you download the installer, all you have to do is go to the download location on your computer and install the app.
Igrulka allows you to search for the games that you love either according to the categories they are in or by name. For example, you get games in the shooter, arcade, action, puzzle or racing games categories among many others.
If you would like to see more details about the available games, their names as well as their descriptions, all you have to do is hover over them using your mouse as shown below. Choose the game you want to play and click on it.”
According to the description, it looks like Igrulka searches through free games and perhaps the classics from systems. In order to find out what Irgulka can do, download and play search results roulette.
Whitney Grace, March 25, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Latest Perspectives Version from Tom Sawyer
December 29, 2015
Data visualization and analysis firm Tom Sawyer announces the latest release of their flagship platform in, “Tom Sawyer Software Releases Tom Sawyer Perspectives, Version 7.1, .NET Edition.” There is a new “timeline” view, and they promise a boost to layout performance. The press release specifies:
“Users can dynamically manipulate sliders in a timeline view to choose a specific time period. Once a time period is chosen, the elements within other views are filtered and updated accordingly to hone in on events based on time of occurrence.
“Users can now see how data progresses through time and focus on the events they are most interested in. Visualize the spread of an epidemic, the progression of crime in a city, or uncover how information disseminates across an organization’s departments.
“Tom Sawyer Perspectives, Version 7.1 also includes enhanced examples and user experience. New Crime Network, Commodity Flow, and Road Safety example applications are included, the look and feel of the tutorial applications is modernized, and neighborhood retrieval is improved. In addition, many quality and performance enhancements have been made in this release, including up to 16 percent improvement in layout performance.”
The write-up includes screenshots and links to further information, so interested readers should check it out. Founded in 1992, Tom Sawyer helps organizations in fields from intelligence to healthcare make connections and draw conclusions from data. The company maintains offices around the world, but makes its headquarters in Berkeley, California. They are also hiring as of this writing.
Cynthia Murrell, December 29, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
A Bezos Style World Domination Video
December 4, 2015
Oh, 1999, what a year that was! It was full of people afraid of Y2K, TV was still analog, email was still a novelty, and AOL still reigned as the supreme Web browser. Nobody really knew what Amazon was as many people did their online shopping on individual Web sites or on eBay. Recode takes a look at a video blast from the past in “Watch Jeff Bezos Lay Out His Grand Vision For Amazon’s Future Dominance In This 1999 Video.”
In 1999, Amazon was a four-year-old company with $1 billion in annual sales. It started out primarily selling books, CDs, and movies. The Jeff Bezos video is of a talk he gave at the Association of American Publishers annual meeting, it played on Book TV and nobody watches that, which it is why it probably has gone unnoticed for so long. While it is a good retrospect about how the company has grown, it also offers some useful information for business entrepreneurs. The entire video is fifty-five minutes long, but the article contains some of Bezos’s best quotes. Our favorite is this one about favoring growth versus profits:
“Amazon.com is a famously unprofitable company. And the question is: Are we concerned about it? The answer is, in the short term, no; and in the long term, of course. Every company needs to be profitable at some point in time … Our strategy and we’ve consistently articulated this, is that we believe that this opportunity is so large that it would be a mistake for any management team not to invest in it very aggressively at this kind of critical category formation stage. We don’t claim it’s the right strategy. We just claim it’s ours. But we do think it’s right. And that it would be a mistake to try to optimize for short-term profitability.”
Jeff Bezos’s advice about favoring growth versus short-term profit definitely worked for him. Amazon is one of the world’s retailers and it is still growing. It is set to dominate TV, software-as-a-surface, and air delivery.
Whitney Grace, December 4, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Lexmark, a Printer Supply Company, Receives Hold Rating from Analysts
October 20, 2015
The article on Dakota Financial News titled Lexmark International Given Average Recommendation of “Hold” by Brokerages (NYSE: LXK) piles on the bad news for Lexmark, a company best known for its printer supply services. It is a tough time to be in the printing business, and Lexmark has received numerous analyst ratings of “Hold” and “Sell.” The article details the trend,
“Lexmark International (NYSE:LXK) traded down 0.59% during trading on Wednesday, hitting $28.59. The company had a trading volume of 259,296 shares. Lexmark International has a one year low of $27.22 and a one year high of $47.69. The stock has a 50-day moving average of $30.27 and a 200 day moving average of $39.70. The company’s market capitalization is $1.76 billion…The company reported $0.97 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating analysts’ consensus estimates of $0.85 by $0.12. “
Certainly not a vote of confidence in Lexmark, which owns both Brainware and ISYS Search Software. The article goes into some detail about the companies other work beyond printer supplies including enterprise content and process management software and healthcare archive with integration abilities for unstructured patient information. Perhaps these extras are saving the company from falling entirely into the “sell” category and maintaining at “Hold.”
Chelsea Kerwin, October 20, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Compare Cell Phone Usage in Various Cities
October 8, 2015
Ever wonder how cell phone usage varies around the globe? Gizmodo reports on a tool that can tell us, called ManyCities, in their article, “This Website Lets You Study Cell Phone Use in Cities Around the World.” The project is a team effort from MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory and networking firm Ericsson. Writer Jamie Condliffe tells us that ManyCities:
“…compiles mobile phone data — such as text message traffic, number of phone calls, and the amount of data downloaded —from base stations in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Hong Kong between April 2013 and January 2014. It’s all anonymised, so there’s no sensitive information on display, but there is enough data to understand usage patterns, even down the scale of small neighbourhoods. What’s nice about the site is that there are plenty of intuitive interpretations of the data available from the get-go. So, you can see how phone use varies geographically, say, or by time, spotting the general upward trend in data use or how holidays affect the number of phone calls. And then you can dig deeper, to compare data use over time between different neighbourhoods or cities: like, how does the number of texts sent in Hong Kong compare to New York? (It peaks in Hong Kong in the morning, but in the evening in New York, by the way.)”
The software includes some tools that go a little further, as well; users can cluster areas by usage patterns or incorporate demographic data. Condliffe notes that this information could help with a lot of tasks; forecasting activity and demand, for example. If only it were available in real time, he laments, though he predicts that will happen soon. Stay tuned.
Cynthia Murrell, October 8, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Rundown on Legal Knowledge Management
September 24, 2015
One of the new legal buzzwords is knowledge management and not just old-fashioned knowledge management, but rather quick, efficient, and effective. Time is an expensive commodity for legal professionals, especially with the amount of data they have to sift through for cases. Mondaq explains the importance of knowledge management for law professionals in the article, “United States: A Brief Overview Of Legal Knowledge Management.”
Knowledge management first started in creating an effective process for managing, locating, and searching relevant files, but it quickly evolved into implementing a document managements system. While knowledge management companies offered law practices decent document management software to tackle the data hill, an even bigger problem arose. The law practices needed a dedicated person to be software experts:
“Consequently, KM emphasis had to shift from finding documents to finding experts. The expert could both identify useful documents and explain their context and use. Early expertise location efforts relied primarily on self-rating. These attempts almost always failed because lawyers would not participate and, if they did, they typically under- or over-rated themselves.”
The biggest problem law professional face is that they might invest a small fortune in a document management license, but they do not know how to use the software or do not have the time to learn. It is a reminder that someone might have all the knowledge and best tools at their fingertips, but unless people have the knowledge on how to use and access it, the knowledge is useless.
Whitney Grace, September 24, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Redundant Dark Data
September 21, 2015
Have you heard the one about how dark data hides within an organization’s servers and holds potential business insights? Wait, you did not? Then where have you been for the past three years? Datameer posted an SEO heavy post on its blog called, “Shine Light On Dark Data.” The post features the same redundant song and dance about how dark data retained on server has valuable customer trend and business patterns that can put them bring them out ahead of the competition.
One new fact is presented: IDC reports that 90% of digital data is dark. That is a very interesting fact and spurs information specialists to action to get a big data plan in place, but then we are fed this tired explanation:
“This dark data may come in the form of machine or sensor logs that when analyzed help predict vacated real estate or customer time zones that may help businesses pinpoint when customers in a specific region prefer to engage with brands. While the value of these insights are very significant, setting foot into the world of dark data that is unstructured, untagged and untapped is daunting for both IT and business users.”
The post ends on some less than thorough advice to create an implementation plan. There are other guides on the Internet that better prepare a person to create a big data action guide. The post’s only purpose is to serve as a search engine bumper for Datameer. While Datameer is one of the leading big data software providers, one would think they wouldn’t post a “dark data definition” post this late in the game.
Whitney Grace, September 21, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Dark Web Drug Trade Unfazed by Law Enforcement Crackdowns
September 3, 2015
When Silk Road was taken down in 2013, the Dark Web took a big hit, but it was only a few months before black marketers found alternate means to sell their wares, including illegal drugs. The Dark Web provides an anonymous and often secure means to purchase everything from heroin to prescription narcotics with, apparently, few worries about the threat of prosecution. Wired explains that “Crackdowns Haven’t Stopped The Dark Web’s $100M Yearly Drug Sale,” proving that if there is a demand, the Internet will provide a means for illegal sales.
In an effort to determine if the Dark Web have grown to declined, Carnegie Mellon researchers Nicolas Cristin and Kyle Soska studied thirty-five Dark Web markets from 2013 to January 2015. They discovered that the Dark Web markets are no longer explosively growing, but the market has remained stable fluctuating from $100 million to $180 million a year.
The researchers concluded that the Dark Web market is able to survive any “economic” shifts, including law enforcement crackdowns:
“More surprising, perhaps, is that the Dark Web economy roughly maintains that sales volume even after major disasters like thefts, scams, takedowns, and arrests. According to the Carnegie Mellon data, the market quickly recovered after the Silk Road 2 market lost millions of dollars of users’ bitcoins in an apparent hack or theft. Even law enforcement operations that remove entire marketplaces, as in last year’s purge of half a dozen sites in the Europol/FBI investigation known as Operation Onymous, haven’t dropped the market under $100 million in sales per year.”
Cristin and Soska’s study is the most comprehensive to measure the size and trajectory of the Dark Web’s drug market. Their study ended prematurely, because two Web sites grew so big that the researchers’ software wasn’t able to track the content. Their study showed that most Dark Web vendors are using more encryption tools, they make profits less $1000, and they are mostly selling MDMA and marijuana.
Soska and Cristin also argue that the Dark Web drug trade decreases violence in the retail drug trade, i.e. it keeps the transactions digital than having there be more violence on the streets. They urge law enforcement officials to rethink shutting down the Dark Web markets, because it does not seem to have any effect.
Whitney Grace, September 3, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Chinese Opinion Monitoring Software by Knowlesys
August 18, 2015
Ever wonder what tools the Chinese government uses to keep track of those pesky opinions voiced by its citizens? If so, take a look at “IPOMS : Chinese Internet Public Opinion Monitoring System” at Revolution News. The brief write-up tells us about a software company, Knowlesys, reportedly supplying such software to China (among other clients). Reporter and Revolution News founder Jennifer Baker tells us:
“Knowlesys’ system can collect web pages with some certain key words from Internet news, topics on forum and BBS, and then cluster these web pages according to different ‘event’ groups. Furthermore, this system provides the function of automatically tracking the progress of one event. With this system, supervisors can know what is exactly happening and what has happened from different views, which can improve their work efficiency a lot. Most of time, the supervisor is the government, the evil government. sometimes a company uses the system to collect information for its products. IPOMS is composed of web crawler, html parser and topic detection and tracking tool.”
The piece includes a diagram that lays out the software’s process, from extraction to analysis to presentation (though the specifics are pretty standard to anyone familiar with data analysis in general). Data monitoring and mining firm Knowlesys was founded in 2003. The company has offices in Hong Kong and a development center in Schenzhen, China.
Cynthia Murrell, August 18, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
What Watson Can Do For Your Department
July 6, 2015
The story of Justin Chen, a Finance Manager, is one of many “Stories by Role” now displayed on IBM. Each character has a different job, such as Liza Hay from Marketing, Donny Cruz from IT and Anisa Mirza from HR. Each job comes with a problem for which Watson, IBM’s supercomputer, has just the solution. Justin, the article relates, is having trouble deciding which payments to follow. Watson provides solutions,
“With IBM® Watson™ Analytics, Justin can ask which customers are least likely to pay, who is most likely to pay and why. He can analyze this information… [and] collect more payments more efficiently… With Watson Analytics, Justin can ask which customers are likely to leave and which are likely to stay and why. He can use the answers for analysis of customer attrition and retention, predict the effect on revenue and determine which customer investments will lead to more profitable growth.”
It seems that the now world-famous Watson has been converted from search to a basket containing any number of IBM software solutions. It isn’t stated in the article, but we can probably assume that the revenue from each solution counts toward Watson’s soon to be reported billions in revenue.
Chelsea Kerwin, July 6, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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