The Confidential Resource

Google Public Alerts

Richard McEachin — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:00:42 +0000

A new Google service is available at http://google.org/publicalerts. This launched Wednesday, 25 Jan 12, and allows you to quickly find emergency alerts in your town or around the world. Called Google Public Alerts, the new feature draws on weather, public safety, and earthquake alerts from federal agencies to supplement Google Map searches.

If you search for “Texas tornado” in Google Maps or on the Public Alerts page, at the top of the search results beside the map you may find a link to an emergency alert from the U.S. National Weather Service concerning twister activity in Texas. We have not seen any Canadian content yet.

On the Official Blog for the site they indicate that this is a U.S. only site, “With today’s launch of Public Alerts on Google Maps, relevant weather, public safety, and earthquake alerts from US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Weather Service, and the US Geological Survey (USGS) will be accessible when you search on Google Maps.”

Top Private Investigator Blog List

Richard McEachin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:10:34 +0000

We made the list of Top Private Investigator Blogs.

Who’s Watching & Listening

Richard McEachin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:00:51 +0000

You never know who is watching. Please note that if you are Investigating someone inside your own company, and using the company network to search the Internet, at least use the encrypted search sites. However, it is becoming more common for large companies to insert an inline HTTPS proxy in the network to read and analyze this traffic by creating a man-in-the-middle. You can’t be sure that your investigation won’t be compromised because someone sees what you are searching and then tells the wrong person.

Google — Search, Plus Your World

Richard McEachin — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:00:35 +0000

If you are a Google+ user, then you now have a new search tool (the encrypted site is https://www.google.com/insidesearch/plus.html). When you are signed into your Google+ account your search engine results will be sorted for relevance in different fashion. Your search results will be sorted by what your Google+ friends say about the search term. This process assumes what your friends say is more important than other content.

This personalised search relevance is a boon for advertisers that want your attention. Google isn’t the first to do this. In 2010 Bing began ranking sites in search results based upon how many of your Facebook friends “like” the site.

The search engines and advertisers have decided that people want to search for other people and their opinions over other content. How convenient for the search engines and advertisers!

If you want a full explanation of the impact this will have for the Investigator, then read Phil Bradley’s article titled Why Google Search Plus is a disaster for search. Google is no longer my first choice, I start with Bing, then DuckDuckGo, and last but not least, I search Blekko.

FireFox V.10

Richard McEachin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:40:59 +0000

The biggest change in V.10 that most Firefox users will see is the smaller number of add-ons marked as incompatible. About 80 percent of all add-ons should now be compatible. Previously, most add-ons would break when Firefox released a major update.

V.10 seems to work much better than any V.9 iteration. No more crashing and the add-ons and extensions work properly. I guess I will be able to stay with Firefox for a while yet.

Extended Support Release

Mozilla also released the enterprise version of Firefox, called ESR (Extended Support Release), which will release updates on a slower cycle (once per year) so that businesses don’t have to worry about their internal tools and security protocols failing. This should help make Firefox more popular in the corporate world.

Getting Push-up Ready

Richard McEachin — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:00:41 +0000

The Push-up is the most basic compound exercise and it has been practiced for centuries. It engages muscle groups in the arms, chest, abdomen, hips and legs. Unfourtuately, most people can do very few with proper form. No program that offers to make you do 100 push-ups in a few weeks will work for most people. The reason for this failure is the compound nature of the exercise. It just works too much of the body for most people.

The one hundred push-ups site and the 7 Weeks to 100 Push-ups book will only work for people who are already somewhat fit and strong. My solution to this problem is to strengthen some of the muscles that are worked in the push-up. For example, I began this series with the chain-breakers and butterflies, then proceeded to abs and squats. Now the next area to strengthen is the triceps. All of these are worked in doing the basic push-up.

The Dip

If you now do 200 crunches and 200 squats 3 times per week, it is time to start getting the triceps in shape by doing dips. You don’t need a fancy machine — all you need is a chair. Get a chair and go to the one fifty dips site. Copy the set of progressions, do the test, and start the programme. Simple.

Remote File Handling

Richard McEachin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:00:07 +0000

High Risk Files

When doing IIR, I often come across files that I don’t want to handle for security reasons. These can be Word documents, PDF documents, PostScript, or even Gzipped PostScript files. These file may include a load of malicious code. I sometimes don’t want any record of viewing the file on my computer. To accomplish this I must load these files remotely and safely so they don’t touch your system (the web cache should be disabled to accomplish a true remote viewing of the file as should the swap and home partitions, if the whole system isn’t encrypted).

Unless you verify each file through checksum verification (like MD5 or GPG) there’s a chance they could’ve been trojaned or the file may contain phoning home instructions or some other type of malicious feature within the file. If I don’t want to be recorded as a recipient of the file via something like ReadNotify then the file must be verified clear of such code or it must be viewed remotely.

The Remote File Viewer

I use the site at http://view.samurajdata.se/. I have only used it with PDF and Word documents. PDF and Word files are transformed into single paged graphics which you may navigate through. Most of the time it works, occasionally a PDF does not load. It doesn’t require Flash and works without cookies or javascript enabled.

I don’t know anything about the site’s privacy policy and how that might that might affect anonymity.

The Clean Machine

Richard McEachin — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:00:42 +0000

When doing IIR, the computers must be free of malicious code (S. 31 Canada Evidence Act). We often set aside a computer for this purpose after doing some Spring-Cleaning. But how we prepare the machine for the installation of the clean version of the OS and application software is important.

We use Darik’s Boot and Nuke (“DBAN“) which is a self-contained boot disk that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which also makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction. DBAN is a means of ensuring due diligence in computer prepartation for IIR. It is also a good way to periodically clean a Microsoft Windows installation of viruses and spyware.

Real Time Bot Search Engine

Richard McEachin — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:00:56 +0000

RTBot (Real Time Bot) is a Real-time information service, where you can enter a topic title and get results from multiple sources (e.g. Wikipedia, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Books, Newspapers, Magazines) all at once. This may sound like a normal search engine, but it isn’t.

RTBot provides content only for specific topics such as concepts, subjects, personalities, events, places, companies, products, etc., but not for broader, unspecific searches.

If you use this properly, you often get a lot of video in the results that would require separate searches to find. This can be quite useful when searching by a company or person name.

Securing Firefox – Configuration Settings

Richard McEachin — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:00:56 +0000

This is about stopping the dreaded disease, Data Diarrhea. The websites you visit can leave behind a trail of data on your computer and in their server logs. All of this Data Diarrhea can identify the Investigator and this can complicate the problem he is trying to solve. Lax privacy & configuration settings may also leave the Investigator’s computer vulnerable to attack by hackers.

This article describes more advanced methods of customizing Mozilla applications, by editing the configuration files.

about:config entries

about:config is a feature of Mozilla applications which lists application settings (known as preferences) that are read from the profile files prefs.js and user.js, and from application defaults. Many of these preferences are not present in the Options or Preferences dialog. Using about:config is one of several methods of modifying preferences and adding other “hidden” ones.

Editing the user.js and prefs.js files are an alternative method of modifying preferences and recommended for very advanced users only. Unless you need a prefs.js and/or user.js file modified for a specific purpose, you should use about:config instead.

This article refers to the Firefox V. 9 edition of the browser. These entries may have adverse effects on Thunderbird and Mozilla Suite/SeaMonkey and older versions of Firefox. These settings will affect all profiles of the browser.

In Firefox, type about:config in the Location Bar (address bar) and press Enter to display the list of preferences. You may get a warning page next, just click OK and move on.

about:config > browser.display.use_document_fonts > change value to 0

0: Never use document’s fonts
1: Allow documents to specify fonts to use
2: Always use document’s fonts (deprecated)

Don’t let the site access to the fonts on your computer. That grants too much access that can be abused.

about:config > browser.sessionhistory.max_entries > change value to 2

The maximum number of pages in the browser’s session history, i.e. the maximum number of URLs you can traverse purely through the Back/Forward buttons. Default value is 50. Set it to 2 so that the site you visit can’t see where you have been during your Investigative Internet Research (IIR) assignment.

about:config > dom.storage.enabled > double click to false

dom.storage.enabled is a mechanism allowing web pages to store information with a web browser (similar to cookies) called “client-side session and persistent storage.” Although use of session storage is subject to a user’s cookie preferences, this preference allows it to be disabled entirely.

about:config > geo.enabled > double click to false

True is location aware browsing enabled. Default is true. You want to disable this. See http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/geolocation/ for details of geolocation in Firefox.