Brudvik.org » privacy

Is your neighbour a pirate?

Kjell Arne Brudvik — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 16:13:15 +0000

Thankfully, in terms of privacy – thats a question we don’t need to answer – but this new service that The Pirate Bay now offers at least gives us a glimpse into what countries do have a large group of pirates. Sure – the map only show some part of the truth, but still – it does give an idea on how the current situation is today. Due to the techincal fact that a client only connect to a tracker every 15-20 minutes, then it’s not possible to get it 100% accurate. This service however, is nothing compared to what Nexicon Inc. has developed and is currently implementing in the United States.

First of all, let me apologize for the bad quality of these screenshots, as you might understand it’s not that easy to find sources on the internet with screenshots taken from this system. The system is designed to monitor a big range of different p2p networks as well as webpages around the globe – and it then tracks the IP of the user that does the downloading/uploading, and creates rather impressive reports and pin-points the activity directly to a map. As you can see from the screenshots, they then are able to determine your address, your ISP, what you are downloading and when you did this. From a programmers perspective it’s quite a nifty and well-done system, and it would have been nice to see this in live action.

Links:

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Maltego – Putting it all together

Kjell Arne Brudvik — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:59:06 +0000

The past few days I’ve written a few posts regarding advanced search engines that find information and combine it. If you thought that those search engines were scary, then welcome Maltego. The general concept of Maltego is datamining and with the various types of “transformers” you have – for instance a email transformer – you can quickly map up a lot of information connected to that email address. With that simple address you can then quickly figure out whom it belongs to, where it’s been used and such. Now, combine this with other transformers and you can map up quite a bit of information.

The application comes in a community edition which is rather limited, and a commercial edition. I’ve tested the community edition, and as that version blew me away, I can only start imagining what is possible to achieve with the full version. Again I must admit that this is a type of application I would rather not see being used by people with the wrong intentions; combine it with the other resources I’ve written about the past few days, and soon you have a tool powerful enough to map up your entire life. But then again, this tool wasn’t made for just that, it was made to perform deep-down datamining, a task it performs quite well; and it can be used for a variety of uses; e.g. finding out what other websites speaks about your product, or map up your business network.

Check the webpage to see videos of it and get more information.

http://www.paterva.com/maltego/

Pipl.com – Do you know that guy? As a followup to yesterdays post regarding QuarkBase I give...

Spokeo – End of privacy

Kjell Arne Brudvik — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:55:35 +0000

While researching a bit about Pipl.com I stumbled upon a service, not publically available – but available upon signup and payment. This service combines an even more in-depth search covering a lot of social networks. Not only does it then search for given people, but it also then build a personal profile of you, what you do, friends, photos and similar. Sure – it might be nice to have it all at one place, but I am starting to feel more and more that we’re heading towards a world where “big-brother” knows all.

What networks does spokeo include?

Well it can track you over 30 different services, as well as any blog and/or website that has a RSS feed. Some of the supported services are as follows:

Amazon Wish List
Bebo
Blogger
Buzznet
DailyMotion
DeviantArt
Digg
Facebook
Flickr
Fotolog
Friendster
Hi5
iMeem
LinkedIn
Last.fm
Livejournal
MySpace
Netlog
Pandora
Photobucket
Picasa
PictureTrail
Slide
Twitter
Veoh
Vox
Webshots
Windows Live Spaces
Wretch
Xanga
Yahoo Videos
Yelp
Youtube

Are you spooked yet?

http://www.spokeo.com/

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Pipl.com – Do you know that guy?

Kjell Arne Brudvik — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:43:40 +0000

As a followup to yesterdays post regarding QuarkBase I give you Pipl.com. So what is Pipl? It’s a search engine devoted to finding information about a certain individual and displays it all organized. It’ll find personal profiles on social networks like Bebo, Facebook and similar (that is, if you haven’t made your profile unreachable for search engines). It’ll find publications you’ve written, webpages that contains references to you – and blogposts done by you or containing your name. Even pictures taken by you that can be referenced to you will appear. Goodbye privacy!

http://www.pipl.com/

Update

It’s interresting to see that now even larger newspapers in Norway are writing about this though if they think Pipl is scary, then they should read up on Spokeo that I wrote about a bit earlier today which takes this even further.

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