technology – Tim Boucher

Now that I’ve reduced my daily intake of images on the web, it’s become apparent to me how much better a text only internet (or one where images and videos are differently managed) – could be. It solves seeing anoying stock photos everywhere. It solves a lot of types of ads (plus ad blockers obvs). It solves hours of mindless scrolling (and not really finding anything). It solves much of the shock value of things like fake news, deepfakes, ____fakesnamedujour. No more stupid memes. No annoying pop-up autoplay videos. It solves seeing screenshots at the top of reddit threads designed to trigger some kind of emotional reaction. It simply vanishes all those things. It’s weird at first. And modern browsers don’t handle it well unless you like messing around in the Terminal (which I decidedly don’t). I couldn’t find anything except Gemini browsers for Mac (like Jimmy) – I like Gemini but I don’t know where to go to look at anything and I don’t understand how I can blog there like I do in this universe. I will keep looking I guess, but I just wanted to share this dream of like a modern text-only internet. Sounds crazy, but join me, you’ll see.

Just say no to images on the web.

Neutralizing propagation of malicious information

By Tim B.

On 19 December 2017

In Reference

United States Patent Application 20160261614.

One embodiment provides a method including identifying malicious information spreading in an information-exchange network; classifying at least one topic of the malicious information; determining a potential sub-network for future spread of the malicious information based on the at least one topic classified; and attenuating a potential future spread of the malicious information via at least one of: automatically propagating a countervailing message to the potential sub-network; and prompting manual intervention for propagating a countervailing message to the potential sub-network. Other variants and embodiments are broadly contemplated herein.

Public records databases used by Private Investigators

By Tim B.

On 16 July 2017

In Research

I’m in no way a licensed private investigator. I’m not even sure that I would want to become one. But I have been exploring a bit how this works, and sort of the lore around it.

One thing I’ve always been curious about around the PI-types as we see represented in media, is these “special” databases we sometimes see, where they can do “deep research” onto a person — or say look up license plates. ? Minor boring stuff like that.

Turns out there is a whole industry around that, which I won’t pretend to be very versed in. Around this topic, I found two main documents which referenced maybe a dozen or so variations on public record searches as a paid “information service,” and from those have basically boiled down the ones that have piqued my curiosity the most being LexisNexis Accurint and Thomson Reuters Clear.

Outside of PI-types, we see a lot of materials marketed towards also people who do legal research, some social media searching, and fraud detection and prevention and others (not to mention criminal investigation, which is outside my interest area). ?

This first video from Thomson Reuters is fun because it makes use of the “crazy wall” TV trope:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJDkoF8_oLE

And one from the many different Accurint videos out there:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0te8ER9xUw

The privacy/data protection cross-over on these videos should be pretty obvious. In another one from TLOxp, we hear the mention of public records “plus proprietary technology”:

It doesn’t seem to be the most discussed topic ever, but I would wager that for certain of the information services operating in this space, that at least a few of them must be purchasing and correlating data from other agencies, such as the dreaded data-brokers.

It’s something I’ll continue researching and publishing about, as the subject seems vast, deep, and curiouser and curiouser the further in you go…

Questionable content, possibly linked

Tag: technology

Text-Only Web Browsing Solves Most of Fake News, Taylor Swift Deepfakes, Other B.S.

Neutralizing propagation of malicious information

Public records databases used by Private Investigators