Apache Tika Could Be the Google of Dark Web?
January 16, 2017
Conventional search engines can effectively index text based content. However, Apache Tika, a system developed by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) can identify and analyze all kinds of content. This might enable law enforcement agencies to track all kind of illicit activities over Dark Web and possibly end them.
An article by Christian Mattmann titled Could This Tool for the Dark Web Fight Human Trafficking and Worse? that appears on Startup Smart says:
At present the most easily indexed material from the web is text. But as much as 89 to 96 percent of the content on the internet is actually something else – images, video, audio, in all thousands of different kinds of non-textual data types. Further, the vast majority of online content isn’t available in a form that’s easily indexed by electronic archiving systems like Google’s.
Apache Tika, which Mattmann helped develop bridges the gap by analyzing Metadata of the content type and then identifying content of the file using techniques like Named Entity Recognition (NER). Apache Tika was instrumental in tracking down players in Panama Scandal.
If Apache Tika is capable of what it says, many illicit activities over Dark Web like human trafficking, drug and arms peddling can be stopped in its tracks. As the author points out in the article:
Employing Tika to monitor the deep and dark web continuously could help identify human- and weapons-trafficking situations shortly after the photos are posted online. That could stop a crime from occurring and save lives.
However, the system is not sophisticated enough to handle the amount of content that is out there. Being an open source code, in near future someone may be able to make it capable of doing so. Till then, the actors of Dark Web can heave a sigh of relief.
Vishal Ingole, January 16, 2017
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
