Dark Web Marketplaces Are Getting Customer Savvy
November 17, 2016
Offering on Dark Web marketplaces are getting weirder by the day. Apart from guns, ammo, porn, fake identities, products like forged train tickets are now available for sale.
The Guardian in an investigative article titled Dark Web Departure: Fake Train Tickets Go on Sale Alongside AK-47s reveals that:
At least that’s the impression left by an investigation into the sale of forged train tickets on hidden parts of the internet. BBC South East bought several sophisticated fakes, including a first-class Hastings fare, for as little as a third of their face value. The tickets cannot fool machines but barrier staff accepted them on 12 occasions.
According to the group selling these tickets, the counterfeiting was done to inflict financial losses on the operators who are providing deficient services. Of course, it is also possible that the fake tickets are used by people (without criminalistics inclinations) who do not want to pay for the full fares.
One school of thought also says that like online marketplaces on Open Web, Dark Web marketplaces are also getting customer-savvy and are providing products and services that the customers need or want. This becomes apparent in this portion of the article:
The academics say the sites, once accessed by invitation or via dark-web search engines (there’ll be no hyperlinks here) resemble typical marketplaces such as Amazon or eBay, and that customer service is improving. “Agora was invitation-only but many of these marketplaces are easily accessible if you know how to search,” Dr Lee adds. “I think any secondary school student who knows how to use Google could get access – and that’s the danger of it.
One of the most active consumer group on Dark Web happens to be students, who are purchasing anything from fake certificates to hacker services to improve their grades and attendance records. Educational institutions, as well as law enforcement officials, are worried about this trend. And as more people get savvy with Dark Web, this trend is going to strengthen creating a parallel e-commerce, albeit a dark one.
Vishal Ingole, November 17, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Black-Hat SEO Tactics Google Hates
November 16, 2016
The article on Search Engine Watch titled Guide to Black Hat SEO: Which Practices Will Earn You a Manual Penalty? follows up on a prior article that listed some of the sob stories of companies caught by Google using black-hat practices. Google does not take kindly to such activities, strangely enough. This article goes through some of those practices, which are meant to “falsely manipulate a website’s search position.”
Any kind of scheme where links are bought and sold is frowned upon, however money doesn’t necessarily have to change hands… Be aware of anyone asking to swap links, particularly if both sites operate in completely different niches. Also stay away from any automated software that creates links to your site. If you have guest bloggers on your site, it’s good idea to automatically Nofollow any links in their blog signature, as this can be seen as a ‘link trade’.
Other practices that earned a place on the list include automatically generated content, cloaking and irrelevant redirects, and hidden text and links. Doorway pages are multiple pages for a key phrase that lead visitors to the same end destination. If you think these activities don’t sound so terrible, you are in great company. Mozilla, BMW, and the BBC have all been caught and punished by Google for such tactics. Good or bad? You decide.
Chelsea Kerwin, November 16, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
AI to Profile Gang Members on Twitter
November 16, 2016
Researchers from Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing (Kno.e.sis) are claiming that an algorithm developed by them is capable of identifying gang members on Twitter.
Vice.com recently published an article titled Researchers Claim AI Can Identify Gang Members on Twitter, which claims that:
A deep learning AI algorithm that can identify street gang members based solely on their Twitter posts, and with 77 percent accuracy.
The article then points out the shortcomings of the algorithm or AI by saying this:
According to one expert contacted by Motherboard, this technology has serious shortcomings that might end up doing more harm than good, especially if a computer pegs someone as a gang member just because they use certain words, enjoy rap, or frequently use certain emojis—all criteria employed by this experimental AI.
The shortcomings do not end here. The data on Twitter is being analyzed in a silo. For example, let us assume that few gang members are identified using the algorithm (remember, no location information is taken into consideration by the AI), what next?
Is it not necessary then to also identify other social media profiles of the supposed gang members, look at Big Data generated by them, analyze their communication patterns and then form some conclusion? Unfortunately, none of this is done by the AI. It, in fact, would be a mammoth task to extrapolate data from multiple sources just to identify people with certain traits.
And most importantly, what if the AI is put in place, and someone just for the sake of fun projects an innocent person as a gang member? As rightly pointed out in the article – machines trained on prejudiced data tend to reproduce those same, very human, prejudices.
Vishal Ingole, November 16, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
French Smart Software Companies: Some Surprises
November 15, 2016
I read “French AI Ecosystem.” Most of the companies have zero or a low profile in the United States. The history of French high technology outfits remains a project for an enterprising graduate student with one foot in La Belle France and one in the USA. This write up is a bit of a sales pitch for venture capital in my opinion. The reason that VC inputs are needed is that raising money in France is — how shall I put this? — not easy. There is no Silicon Valley. There is Paris and a handful of other acceptable places to be intelligent. In the Paris high tech setting, there are a handful of big outfits and lots and lots of institutions which keep the French one percent in truffles and the best the right side of the Rhone have to offer. The situation is dire unless the start up is connected by birth, by education at one of the acceptable institutions, or hooked up with a government entity. I want to mention that there is a bit of French ethnocentrism at work in the French high tech scene. I won’t go into detail, but you can check it out yourself if you attend a French high tech conference in one of the okay cities. Ars-en-Ré and Gémenos do not qualify. Worth a visit, however.
Now to the listings. You will have to work through the almost unreadable graphic or contact the outfit creating the listing, which is why the graphic is unreadable I surmise. From the version of the graphic I saw, I did discern a couple of interesting points. Here we go:
Three outfits were identified as having natural language capabilities. These are Proxem, syJLabs (no, I don’t know how to pronounce this”syjl” string. I can do “abs”, though.), and Yseop k(maybe, Aesop from the fable?). Proxem offers its Advanced Natural Language Object Orient Processing Environment (Antelope). The company was founded in 2007.) syJLabs does not appear in my file of French outfits, and we drew a blank when looking for the company’s Web site. Sigh. Yseop has been identified as a “top IT innovator” by an objective, unimpeachable, high value, super credible, wonderful, and stellar outfit (Ventana Research). Yseop, also founded in 2007, offers a system which “turns data into narrative in English, French, German, and Spanish, all at the speed of thousands of pages per second.”
As I worked through a graphic containing lots of companies, I spotted two interesting inclusions. The first is Sinequa, a vendor of search founded in 2002, now positioned as an important outfit in Big Data and machine learning. Fascinating. The reinvention of Sinequa is a logical reaction to the implosion of the market for search and retrieval for the enterprise. The other company I noted was Antidot, which mounted a push to the US market several years ago. Antidot, like Sinequa, focused on information access. It too is “into” Big Data and machine learning.
I noted some omissions; for example, Hear&Know, among others. Too bad the listing is almost unreadable and does not include a category for law enforcement, surveillance, and intelligence innovators.
Stephen E Arnold, November 15, 2016
Oh No! The Ads Are Becoming Smarter
November 15, 2016
I love Christmas and subsequent holiday season, although I am tired of it starting in October. Thankfully the holiday music does not start playing until Thanksgiving week, as do the ads, although they have been sneaking into the year earlier and earlier. I like the fact that commercials and Internet ads are inanimate objects, so I can turn them off. IT Pro Portal tells me, however, that I might be in for a Christmas nightmare; “IBM’s Watson Now Used In Native Advertising” or the ads are becoming smarter!
While credit card expenditures, browsing history, and other factors are already used for individualized, targeted ads, they still remain a static tool dependent on external factors. Watson is going to try be tried in the advertising game to improve targeting in native advertising. Watson will add an aesthetic quality too:
The difference is – it’s not just looking at keywords as the practice was so far – it’s actually looking at the ad, determining what it’s about and then places it where it believes is a good fit. According to the press release, Watson “looks at where, why and how the existing editorial content on each site is ‘talking about’ subjects”, and then makes sure best ads are placed to deliver content in proper context.
Another way Watson’s implementation in advertising is “semantic targeting AI for native advertising.” It will work in real-time and deliver more individualized targeted ads, over your recent Amazon, eBay, and other Web site shopping. It is an interesting factor how Watson can disseminate all this information for one person, but if you imagine that the same technology is being used in the medical and law fields, it does inspire hope.
Whitney Grace, November 15, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Most Dark Web Content Is Legal and Boring
November 15, 2016
Data crunching done by an information security firm reveals that around 55% is legal and mundane like the clear or Open Web.
Digital Journal, which published the article Despite its Nefarious Reputation, New Report Finds Majority of Activity on the Dark Web is Totally Legal and Mundane, says that:
What we’ve found is that the dark web isn’t quite as dark as you may have thought,” said Emily Wilson, Director of Analysis at Terbium Labs. “The vast majority of dark web research to date has focused on illegal activity while overlooking the existence of legal content. We wanted to take a complete view of the dark web to determine its true nature and to offer readers of this report a holistic view of dark web activity — both good and bad.
The findings have been curated in a report The Truth About the Dark Web: Separating Fact from Fiction that puts the Dark Web in a new light. According to this report, around 55% of the content on Dark Web is legal; porn makes 7% of content on Dark Web, and most of it is legal. Drugs though is a favorite topic, only 45% of the content related to it can be termed as illegal. Fraud, extremism and illegal weapons trading on the other hand just make 5-7% of Dark Web.
The research methodology was done using a mix of machine intelligence and human intelligence, as pointed out in the article:
Conducting research on the dark web is a difficult task because the boundaries between categories are unclear,” said Clare Gollnick, Chief Data Scientist at Terbium Labs. “We put significant effort into making sure this study was based on a representative, random sample of the dark web. We believe the end result is a fair and comprehensive assessment of dark web activity, with clear acknowledgment of the limitations involved in both dark web data specifically and broader limitations of data generally.
Dark Web slowly is gaining traction as users of Open Web are finding utilities on this hidden portion of the Internet. Though the study is illuminating indeed, it fails to address how much of the illegal activity or content on Dark Web affects the real world. For instance, what quantity of drug trade takes place over Dark Web. Any answers?
Vishal Ingole, November 15, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Lawyers Might Be Automated Too
November 14, 2016
The worry with artificial intelligence is that it will automate jobs and leave people without a way to earn income. The general belief is that AI will automate manufacturing, retail, food service, and other industries, but what about law? One would think that lawyers would never lose their jobs, because a human is required to navigate litigation and represent a person in court, right? According to The Inquirer article, “UCL Creates AI ‘Lawbot’ That Rules on Cases With Surprising Accuracy” lawyers might be automated too.
On a level akin to Watson, researchers at University College London, led by Dr. Nikoalos Aletras, created an algorithm that peruses case information and can predict accurate verdicts. The UCL team fed the algorithm litigation information from cases about torture, degrading treatment, privacy, and fair trials. They hope the algorithm will be used to identify patterns in human rights abuses.
Dr. Aletras does not think AI will replace judges and lawyers, but it could be used as a tool to identify patterns in cases with specific outcomes. The algorithm has a 79% accuracy rate, which is not bad considering the amount of documentation involved. Also the downside is:
At a wider level, although 79 percent is a bit more ED-209 than we’d like for now, it does suggest that we’re a long way towards being able to install an ethical and moral code that would allow AI to … you know, not kill us and that. With so many doomsayers warning us that the closer that we get to the so-called ‘singularity’ between humans and machines, the more likely we are to be toast as a race, it’s something of a good news story to see what’s being done to ensure AI stays on the straight and narrow.
Automation in the legal arena is a strong possibility for when “…implementation and interpretation of the law that is required, less so than the fact themselves.” The human element is still needed to decide cases, but perhaps it would cut down on the amount of light verdicts for pedophiles, sex traffickers, rapists, and other bad guys. It does make one wonder what alternative fields lawyers would consider?
Whitney Grace, November 14, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Project Tor Releases the Browser Manual
November 14, 2016
Tor Browser, the gateway to Dark Web has got its user manual that tells users a step-by-step procedure to download, install use and uninstall the browser in the most efficient manner.
On the official Tor blog titled Announcing the Tor Browser User Manual it says:
The community team is excited to announce the new Tor Browser User Manual! The manual is currently only available in English. We will be adding more languages in the near future, as well as adding the manual to Transifex.
Web users are increasingly adopting secure browsers like Tor that shields them from online tracking. With this manual, users who are not well-versed with Dark Web and want to access it or want to surf the web anonymously will get detailed instructions on doing so.
Some of the critical areas (apart from basic instructions like download and install) covered in the manual include – circumventing the network restrictions, managing identities, securely connecting to Tor, managing plugins, and troubleshooting most common problems.
The manual was created after taking feedback from various mailing lists and IRC forums, as the blog points out:
During the creation of this manual, community feedback was requested over various mailing lists / IRC channels. We understand that many people who read this blog are not part of these lists / channels, so we would like to request that if you find errors in the manual or have feedback about how it could be improved, please open a ticket on our bug tracker and set the component to “community”.
The manual will soon be released in other major languages that will benefit non-English speaking users. The aim is to foster growth and adoption of Tor, however, will only privacy-conscious users will be using the browser?
Vishal Ingole, November 14, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Battle of the Mid Tier Pundits: Smartwatch Sales
November 13, 2016
I love it when mid tier outfits do battle. Most blue chip consulting firms carve out unique niches and then create MBA lists and data designed to underscore the firms’ prescience and, dare I say it, brilliance. Not so with the mid tier outfits. These folks do the me to thing. Need to know what’s hoppin’ in 2017, just look at the flow of prognostications.
I read “Is the Smartwatch Market Tanking or on a Long, Slow Climb.” What makes this wonderful is that one of the mid tier outfits is or was affiliated with IDG, owner of Network World, the publication pointing out the discontinuities in estimates.
Hey, I love discontinuities. Think Brexit polls.
The write up points out without much irony or concern that
In late October, market research firm IDC said smartwatch shipments in the third quarter declined by 51% from the same quarter of 2015. The total shipped in the third quarter was 2.7 million, IDC said. By comparison, research firm Canalys on Thursday said smartwatch shipments were up 60% for the third quarter of 2016 compared with the same quarter a year ago. That resulted in 6.1 million units shipped in the latest quarter, Canalys said.
Hmmm. Separate universes or an example of bad sampling, lousy data, and former English majors getting into technology analysis? Who knows.
Now about that data about Apple smartwatches, which I think are sort of wonky. The write up revealed:
IDC said Apple shipped 1.1 million units, a decline of 71%. But Canalys said Apple shipped 2.8 million Apple Watches, nearly three times as many as IDC reported.
There you go. But the write up does not focus on:
- Verification
- Vetting
- Management quality control.
My hunch is that most professionals don’t care. The time constrained folks will just choose the result that supports their position. I love the brave new world of mid tier consulting firm data. Waves and hype cycles are another kettle of fish because they are so “metaphorical,” which is appropriate for a student of Chaucer.
Stephen E Arnold, November 13, 2016
Are Silicon Valley Problems Affecting Palantir Technologies?
November 11, 2016
I read “Silicon Valley Has Much Bigger Problems than Peter Thiel, Tech Investor Says.” The write up tackles Peter Thiel’s endorsement of a presidential candidate. Mr. Thiel is one of the founders of Palantir Technologies, and the company’s headquarters—the Shire—are in Palo Alto, the Delphi of Silicon Valley. I wondered if the maven upon which the write up pivots is talking less about Mr. Thiel and more about one of his companies; specifically, Palantir Technologies, vaquisher of the US Army.
I noted this passage:
Many entrepreneurs are now financially motivated, rather than by an optimism to take risks and improve the world, McNamee [Elevation Partners] said.
The write up reports:
“I think people in Silicon Valley are still open to change,” McNamee said. “But the things that they’re working on aren’t as valuable as the things people used to work on. And sadly, we’ve seen far more fraud in the past couple of years than I can remember any time in the 34 years I’ve been here. And so I think people just want to get rich now, and scams have become part of what goes on in Silicon valley and that troubles me deeply.”
The article includes this statement by the McNamee:
“People have stepped back, if anything,” McNamee said. “The Valley has a real misogyny problem …
If the Elevation Partners’ statement is accurate about Silicon Valley, is Palantir a company which has greed and misogyny problems? One can interpret the Elevation Partners’ comment as identifying systemic flaws affecting many companies in Silicon Valley.
The US Department of Labor has raised questions about Palantir’s hiring practices.
Stephen E Arnold, November 11, 2016
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