Google Dorking: It Is Search, Folks
March 29, 2016
I received a call from a former client this morning (March 28, 2016). The question? Google dorking. Relax. Google dorking is another way to say advanced search. In those How to Search with Google seminars I used to do for an outfit where the metros are unreliable and trust is a weird concept, I covered a number of Google dorking methods.
I don’t make those lectures’ content available for free in this blog, but you can round up some basic info at these links:
- The Science of Google Dorking
- How to Use Google to Hack(Googledorks)
- Untangling the Web which maybe is available at this link. No promises, gentle reader.
The dear, dear Alphabet Google thing kills or breaks useful search functions. This weekend, the FILETYPE: instruction performed like the University of Virginia men’s basketball team. You will have to do some thinking.
By the way, as Google shifts to its magical artificial intelligence methods, finding information via Google is getting more and more difficult.
We do webinars on how to deal with the Alphabet Google thing. Write seaky2000 at yahoo dot com and inquire about a 75 minute webinar. Yep, the same one I do for government types.
Stephen E Arnold, March 29, 2016
Expert System Does a Me Too Innovation
March 29, 2016
Years ago I was a rental to an outfit called i2 Group in the UK. Please, don’t confuse the UK i2 with the ecommerce i2 which chugged along in the US of A.
The UK i2 had a product called Analysts Notebook. At one time it was basking in a 95 percent share of the law enforcement and intelligence market for augmented investigatory software. Analysts Notebook is still alive and kicking in the loving arms of IBM.
I thought of the vagaries of product naming when I read “Expert System USA Launches Analysts’ Workspace.”
According to the write up:
Analysts’ Workspace features comprehensive enterprise search and case management software integrated with a customizable semantic engine. It incorporates a sophisticated and efficient workflow process that enables team-wide collaboration and rapid information sharing. The product includes an intuitive dashboard allowing analysts to monitor, navigate, and access information using different taxonomies, maps, and worldviews, as well as intelligent workflow features specifically designed to proactively support analysts and investigators in the different phases of their activities.
The lingo reminds me of the early i2 Group marketing collateral. The terminology has surfaced in some of Palantir’s marketing statements and, quite recently, in the explanation of the venture funded Digital Shadows’ service.
I love me-too products. Where would one be if Mozart had not heard and remembered the note sequences of other composers.
Now the trick will be to make some money. Mozart, though a very good me too innovator, struggled in that department. Expert System, according to Google Finance, is going to have to find a way to keep that share price climbing. Today’s (March 22, 2016) share price is in penny stock territory:
Stephen E Arnold, March 29, 2016
Elasticsearch for Text Analysis
March 29, 2016
Short honk: Put your code hat on. “Mining Mailboxes with Elasticsearch and Kibana” walks a reader through using open source technology to do text analysis. The example under the microscope is email, but the method will work for any text corpus ingested by Elasticsearch. The write up includes code samples and enough explanation to get the Elastic system moving forward. Visualizations are included. These make it easy to spot certain trends; for example, the top recipients of the email analyzed for the tutorial. Worth a look.
Stephen E Arnold, March 29, 2016
Slack Hires Noah Weiss
March 29, 2016
One thing you can always count on the tech industry is talent will jump from company to company to pursue the best and most innovating endeavors. The latest tech work to jump ship is Eric Weiss, he leaps from Foursquare to head a new Search, Learning, & Intelligence Group at Slack. VentureBeat reports the story in “Slack Forms Search, Learning, & Intelligence Group On ‘Mining The Chat Corpus.’” Slack is a team communication app and their new Search, Learning, & Intelligence Group will be located in the app’s new New York office.
Weiss commented on the endeavor:
“ ‘The focus is on building features that make Slack better the bigger a company is and the more it uses Slack,” Weiss wrote today in a Medium post. “The success of the group will be measured in how much more productive, informed, and collaborative Slack users get — whether a company has 10, 100, or 10,000 people.’”
For the new group, Weiss wants to hire experts who are talented in the fields of artificial intelligence, information retrieval, and natural language processing. From this talent search, he might be working on a project that will help users to find specific information in Slack or perhaps they will work on mining the chap corpus.
Other tech companies have done the same. Snapchat built a research team that uses artificial intelligence to analyze user content. Flipboard and Pinterest are working on new image recognition technology. Meanwhile Google, Facebook, Baidu, and Microsoft are working on their own artificial intelligence projects.
What will artificial intelligence develop into as more companies work on their secret projects.
Whitney Grace, March 29, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Surfing Safely on the Dark Web
March 29, 2016
The folks at Alphr want us to be safe if we venture onto the Dark Web, so they offer guidance in their article, “Is the Dark Web Safe?” The short answer, of course, is “parts of it.” Writer Thomas McMullan notes that, while the very act of accessing hidden sites through Tor is completely legal, it is easy to wander into illegal territory. He writes:
“‘Safe’ is a bit of a vague term. There is much of worth to be found on the dark web, but by its nature it is not as safe as the surface-level internet. You can only access pages by having a direct link (normally with a .onion suffix) and while that makes it harder to accidentally stumble across illegal content, you’re only a click away from some pretty horrible stuff. What’s more, the government is cracking down on illegal material on the dark web. In November 2015, it was announced that GCHQ and the National Crime Agency (NCA) would be joining forces to tackle serious crimes and child pornography on the dark web. Director of GCHQ Robert Hannigan said that the new Joint Operations Cell (JOC) will be ‘committed to ensuring no part of the internet, including the dark web, can be used with impunity by criminals to conduct their illegal acts’.”
The article goes on to note that plugins which can present a false IP address, like Ghostery, exist. However, McMullan advises that it is best to stay away from anything that seems questionable. You have been warned.
Cynthia Murrell, March 29, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google and Reverse Engineering
March 28, 2016
I don’t want to make a big deal out of the information presented in “Google’s Reverse Engineering Software BinDiff Now Free for Researchers.” The write up reports that Zynamics’ code is now free. The write up explained:
What’s the code’s application? The write up reports:
BinDiff is a comparison tool for scrutinizing disassembled binary files and finding both similarities and differences in code through reverse engineering. The software can be used to identify and isolate flaws and bugs in software, namely, “fixes for vulnerabilities in vendor-supplied patches and to analyze multiple versions of the same binary,” according to Blichmann. Binary files for x86, MIPS, ARM/AArch64, PowerPC, and other architectures can be analyzed with the software.
Are there other uses for this software? The write up identifies a number of benign uses; for example port function names.
The article concludes:
Interested parties can download the software directly from Zynamics.
Stephen E Arnold, March 28, 2016
Alphabet Google Wants to Spell GE
March 28, 2016
I read a whizzy MBA-in-Silicon-Valley type analysis of the GOOG, which is now Alphabet. After working through the write up, I focused on one statement as interesting:
One way to understand Alphabet is as a vehicle to build essential physical infrastructure in the real world. What if you were to build a next-generation GE today?
GE had Neutron Jack, whom I had the pleasure of meeting. My employer (which shall remain nameless) screwed up a project and GE refused to pay a six figure bill. My boss took me to a meeting to learn how to get the bill paid AND to sell more work to Neutron Jack. To cut to the cob, my boss sold a $1 million job and got the unpaid bill settled in full.
What’s the difference between the new Google as described in “Learning Larry Page’s Alphabet”?
The answer is not Neutron Jack, although he was a canny manager. The answer is, “My boss.”
The Alphabet Google thing is riding high. It has more money in the bank than the current president of the University of Louisville. (Keep trying, Dr. Ramsey. Keep trying.)
For Alphabet Google to become more than an online advertising outfit, the company is going to have to do more than cook up science club projects. A person who can look adversity in the eye (Neutron Jack) and then manage the situation into a big payday has to have his or her hands on the steering wheel. Sorry, an autonomous auto kill switch won’t do the job.
The article pivots on the assumption that many motor boats can maneuver more quickly than an aircraft carrier. How has that worked out at Google. After more than 15 years of effort, Alphabet Google’s stallion remains saddled with Steve Ballmer’s insight:
Google is a one trick pony.
I noted this passage in the write up:
Here’s another way to view the company’s costly moonshot habit: as a marketing expense.
Isn’t that evidence for the one trick pony observation by a person who owns a basketball team?
What’s the strategic vision? I highlighted this passage as a possible answer to the question:
This is why Alphabet is more than just a spectacular corporate reengineering. Page picked the perfect time to reset his company—at the very moment that analysts were heralding Peak Google. He knew that traditional corporate structure limits innovation at the pace he wants and needs. He broke his business into smaller pieces to make them simpler and focused them more narrowly to discourage drift and distraction, while trying to maintain the advantages of scale and resources and a compelling culture to recruit talent. Page isn’t ready to settle for status quo. He wants to make the world a better place—with electric cars and smart cities and universal Internet access and no more disease—and also find lucrative new businesses that keep the company part of the present and future. He wants everything, from A to Z.
The friction building in the Alphabet Google machine may cause the rocket ship to veer off course. Alphabet Google has to traverse the air space of the EC, Russia, and China. The US does not have a “no fly zone” in place to bedevil Google…yet. And there is the pesky annoyances doing business as Amazon and Facebook.
Stephen E Arnold, March 28, 2016
Watson Weakly: Another Game. This Time I Spy. Huh?
March 28, 2016
I survived the Go games. In case you have been on an extended vacation, Google’s smart software beat a human at the game of Go. I assume that this smart software did not drive the car which ran into a bus, but that’s another issue.
I then noted “IBM Watson Could Soon Use Artificial Intelligence to Beat You at a Game of I Spy.” I love the use of the word “could.” I prefer supposition to reality. Contrast the satisfaction of “I could go to the gym” with “I am eating potato chips.” Which does IBM prefer? If you answered, “Generate substantial revenue”, you are incorrect.
The write up in question reports that IBM has “updated” Watson. I noted this statement about the updated Watson:
IBM has created a ‘Visual Recognition Demo’ to showcase Watson’s latest trick, which allows users to feed Watson an image before it tells you what it believes it sees. For example, supplying Watson with the image of a tiger throws up the result 77 per cent tiger, 26 per cent wild cat and 63 per cent cat.
In my experience, determining if an animal is a real live and possibly hungry tiger, that error could be darned interesting. On my last trip to Africa, I learned that a hapless trekker discovered that confusing “cat” with “tiger” can have interesting consequences.,
Sigh. IBM appears to be making news out of some image processing capabilities which I have seen in action before. How long “before”? Think more years than IBM has been reporting declining revenues. Watson, what can one do about that? Hello, Watson. Are you there?
Stephen E Arnold, March 28, 2016
Reputable News Site Now on the Dark Web
March 28, 2016
Does the presence of a major news site lend an air of legitimacy to the Dark Web? Wired announces, “ProPublica Launches the Dark Web’s First Major News Site.” Reporter Andy Greenberg tells us that ProPublica recently introduced a version of their site running on the Tor network. To understand why anyone would need such a high level of privacy just to read the news, imagine living under a censorship-happy government; ProPublica was inspired to launch the site while working on a report about Chinese online censorship.
Why not just navigate to ProPublica’s site through Tor? Greenberg explains the danger of malicious exit nodes:
“Of course, any privacy-conscious user can achieve a very similar level of anonymity by simply visiting ProPublica’s regular site through their Tor Browser. But as Tigas points out, that approach does leave the reader open to the risk of a malicious ‘exit node,’ the computer in Tor’s network of volunteer proxies that makes the final connection to the destination site. If the anonymous user connects to a part of ProPublica that isn’t SSL-encrypted—most of the site runs SSL, but not yet every page—then the malicious relay could read what the user is viewing. Or even on SSL-encrypted pages, the exit node could simply see that the user was visiting ProPublica. When a Tor user visits ProPublica’s Tor hidden service, by contrast—and the hidden service can only be accessed when the visitor runs Tor—the traffic stays under the cloak of Tor’s anonymity all the way to ProPublica’s server.”
The article does acknowledge that Deep Dot Web has been serving up news on the Dark Web for some time now. However, some believe this move from a reputable publisher is a game changer. ProPublica developer Mike Tigas stated:
“Personally I hope other people see that there are uses for hidden services that aren’t just hosting illegal sites. Having good examples of sites like ProPublica and Securedrop using hidden services shows that these things aren’t just for criminals.”
Will law-abiding, but privacy-loving, citizens soon flood the shadowy landscape of the Dark Web.
Cynthia Murrell, March 28, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Retraining the Librarian for the Future
March 28, 2016
The Internet is often described as the world’s biggest library containing all the world’s knowledge that someone dumped on the floor. The Internet is the world’s biggest information database as well as the world’s biggest data mess. In the olden days, librarians used to be the gateway to knowledge management but they need to vamp up their skills beyond the Dewey Decimal System and database searching. Librarians need to do more and Christian Lauersen’s personal blog explains how in, “Data Scientist Training For Librarians-Re-Skilling Libraries For The Future.”
DST4L is a boot camp for librarians and other information professionals to learn new skills to maintain relevancy. Last year DST4L was held as:
“DST4L has been held three times in The States and was to be set for the first time in Europe at Library of Technical University of Denmark just outside of Copenhagen. 40 participants from all across Europe were ready to get there hands dirty over three days marathon of relevant tools within data archiving, handling, sharing and analyzing. See the full program here and check the #DST4L hashtag at Twitter.”
Over the course of three days, the participants learned about OpenRefine, a spreadsheet-like application that cane be used for data cleanup and transformation. They also learned about the benefits of GitHub and how to program using Python. These skills are well beyond the classed they teach in library graduate programs, but it is a good sign that the profession is evolving even if the academia aspects lag behind.
Whitney Grace, March 28, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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