Slashdot Mirror
Narus Develops Social Media Sleuth
maximus1 writes "Narus is developing a new technology code-named Hone that can be used to identify anonymous users of social networks and Internet services. Hone can do some pretty 'scary' things, says Antonio Nucci, chief technology officer with Narus. Hone uses artificial intelligence to analyze e-mails and can link mails to different accounts, doing what Nucci calls topical analysis. 'It's going to go through a set of documents and automatically it's going to organize them in topics — I'm not talking about keywords as is done today, I'm talking about topics,' he said. That can't be done with today's technology, he said. 'If you search for fertilizers on Google ... it's going to come back with 6.5 million pages. Enjoy,' he said. 'If you want to search for non-farmers who are discussing fertilizer ... it's not even searchable.' Nucci will discuss Hone at the RSA Conference in San Francisco Friday."
Like to know if it finds out who I am.
More ridiculous terrorism scare tactics used for attention.
"If you want to search for non-farmers who are discussing fertilizer..." No, I don't. Most likely you'll find a bunch of harmless pot growers and housewives trying to grow pretty flowers. People smart enough to really harm a well run society aren't posting details on the Internet. For the rest of us, these people will just take all the money you can from selling other people's (previously) private data.
No matter how hard we try, we will not stop determined individuals from attacking any society unless we effectively remove all freedoms from the citizens. I choose freedom over safety every time. The solutions to terrorism are NOT more or better surveillance, better technology, or more war. Real solutions include primarily the creation of a society that people don't WANT to attack. The reasons people have for suicide bombing and terrorism are usually pretty damn clear: they have nothing left to lose, and someone took advantage of them to direct their hate toward the easiest, most hated target.
Well, you want to fix terrorism, then address the real reasons for hating your society; it's pretty simple, and the only thing that really works.
Stories like this, about "scary" technology advances, remind me that as technology moves forward, the essential nature of the rights and freedoms that the US used to stand for and defend are more important now than ever before.
Here's what I'd like to find: A non-tax-cheat who is also a congress member. Oh, oh, how about a politician that still has a moral compass at all? A single honest politician? Even one? Let's find non-doctors charging Medicare. Corrupt cops. Meth distributors. Human traffickers. Murderers. People who built technology just to make money using other people's personal data, and try and frame it using terrorism scare tactics. Oh wait...
I'm not sure what the customer base is here outside of law enforcement. Google maybe, or some of the other online ad networks? Who else could possibly a) have the capability to figure out the various network connections without wiretapping, and b) be interested to know that blogger John is Facebook user Jane when John and Jane don't disclose common information?
Either they're talking trivial data mining, or they're talking spooky invasion of privacy. If it's the former, I'm not impressed. If it's the latter.... I better make sure I don't offend whoever is in power.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
would they have access to my emails in the first place.
The captcha is dignity, which is fitting considering this world seems to have lost it's.
People making bombs are hardly going to talk about it on Faceshit or other worthless social sites. They are already using encryption - probably one time pads, steganography, shared secret encryption with infinite-length keys and the like and will always be able to continue doing so.
This will more likely be used to convict people for sharing mp3's, using 'stolen' wifi, people who built a small extension to their house in the middle of nowhere without straight away notifying the local government so they can pay their new and increased rates of property tax. This will be used to implement an ultra-controlled very rigidly regulated society which most people if you talk to them seem to approve of.
Man's greatest addiction is controlling other people's lives
".... should be banned because it didn't work out so well for one person"
".... should not be allowed because it affects the view from my house"
".... should be taxed to death. Put those damn rich people back where they belong."
".... is evil, could lead to any number of bigger problems and should be banned."
".... cannot be installed by anyone other than a highly trained professional because one person died trying"
".... is bad for the environment and should not be allowed."
".... should not be allowed to sit in a playground by himself because he might be a future paedophile"
We have nobody to blame but ourselves for overregulation, we desire control, order and security so much that the government is scrambling to find ways to enforce the presently unenforceable. First the church was used as an excuse for ruining people's enjoyment, now its 'de children', the environment and the notion that 'mere humans' cant handle much freedom without losing the plot
Hah! I get 94 results! And... the first result is Slashdot. And there are no results that don't have the word 'for' in front of 'non-farmers'...
It sounds like what he's talking about is semantic parsing of data. If his system is predicated on automated semantic data parsing, that seems like a pretty big step in the project. It's a problem that CS has been working on for decades. It's not exactly a minor thing that they'll get out of the way early on.
Man what a scam. One paragraph, a cheezy search algorythm
and approach the department of defence.
Put in the title protect children from terrorists
and they wont even read past the front page.
The automated categorization of text by topic is not new. Latent Semantic Indexing has been in use for just this purpose since 1992. Perhaps Narus is taking a new approach, but the concept itself is far from the revolutionary breakthrough they would have you believe.
I would really, really like to take people who are promoting "security" and who say "the Internet is an easy place to hide", to someplace private and then continuously bitch-slap them until they admit that they are either stupid or dishonest.
If they want to investigate a place where it's "easy to hide", I suggest they try their data-mining tools on the mails, or UPS or Fed-Ex. And good f**ing luck to them.
Dude needs to learn how to use Google before he takes on a task of this magnitude. Or, more aptly, before TALKING about taking on a task of this magnitude, which is all he's doing at the moment.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
'If you want to search for non-farmers who are discussing fertilizer ... it's not even searchable.'
This sounds an awful lot like the semantic web. Specifically, this sounds exactly like what WebFountain does (and has done since 2003).
The
PBS' Frontline released a documentary called "Spying on the Home Front" all the way back on May 15th, 2007. The entire documentary is available for viewing online (I believe it's even accessible in Canada; I'm not sure about access from other countries) at that Frontline site. If you're short on time, click the "Watch the Full Program Online" link on the right-hand side of the page, and then click on Chapter 3 in the new window that appears (it's titled "The NSA's Eavesdropping at AT&T"). The whole chapter only lasts about 10 minutes, but again, if you're short on time fast-forward through the chapter to about 4:30. That's the point where Mark Klein describes when he first became aware that a Narus STA system had been installed inside a secret room at a major AT&T facility. Shortly thereafter Brian Reid elaborates on exactly what its presence meant.
Even better, at about 5:05 an interview with Steve Bannerman, VP of Narus Marketing begins, at which point he begins describing just how deeply into network traffic their hardware can probe.
And beautifully, at about 6:35, Steve Bannerman suddenly becomes aware of exactly how deep a whole he's dug for himself, and becomes visibly flustered, starts stammering, and eventually trails off with a couple of classic lines like, "as far as I know, no one's ever proved [sic] anything!"
That part's worth rewinding and replaying a few times over.
Please forgive my obvious schadenfreude, but in the face of entities like the NSA and Naurus, who together apparently have complete access to anything of mine -- and that of my friends, and my family -- that travels over the Internet, schadenfreude is all I've got left.
Mod parent up insightful. Or funny. Or scary ... as apparently even Narus itself will describe some of its own capabilities that way.
Personally I think this guy and his company can be compared (unfavorably most likely) to a steaming pile of hot, fresh organic fertilizer.
P.S. I'm not a farmer.
Ian Ameline
A lot of the people who think you can reason with terrorists follow the logic that if only women didn't upset men, they wouldn't be raped.
It takes two to tango, it takes one to start a war.
If you say "I have no problem with X", then you are both extremely arrogant and sticking your head in the sand. You suggest that you are the only one who matters in this relationship. That if you don't hate them, how can they possibly hate you? It is "If I can't see them, they can't see me". A very childish way to deal with fear.
Oh, and btw, if you defend that all sorts of Muslims can strike against the US for perceived wrongs in the past, then you have given every Jew in the world the right to kill any European. Can Israel fire missiles at Germany for obvious reasons? Can native-americans start bombing American immigrants (that is you whitey) for the occupation of their homeland?
Nope, didn't think so.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
They know your looking at IM, forums, google ect. http://wikileaks.org/ google cache has a link to
http://indect-project.eu/files/deliverables/public/INDECT_Deliverable_4.1_v20090630a.pdf/at_download/file
Anybody of interest knows to keep a very low profile.
Never buy too much of anything thats a direct step to a listed watched chemical.
Never talk to strangers online about political ideas.
Stay out of web 2.0. If mainstream US cable news and the US mil is talking up twitter, never use twitter.
Learn how to protest, learn how 1 person can change the system and then just melt back to be replaced by another random stranger.
If 10 or 100 or 10000 random strangers turn up the US mil is going to have a really bad day.
Do they allow a protest to grow, beat it down or try to re shape it.
They seem to be hoping Narus will allow them to pick out leaders and arrest/smear/turn them.
Someone needs to tell the US gov, the world has moved beyond leaders and cointelpro has been reverse engineered - people expect and enjoy infiltration, film it and lol at it.
The US is on the edge of 1980's Europe. They think the tech will save them.
Millions of online searches, chat and ip's will allow them to filter out the bright connected ones and somehow stop unrest.
The only winners are the people selling the Narus like tech and the people who know to never surface.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
He wants to compare similar data from social networks to identify people. So, a person who has something to hide is going to give his real birthday on all sites he uses to hide on? Why?
It would be like me creating a false passport, with my real data. How about getting a fake id, with your real age to get into bars?
How about a fake University diploma, that shows you failed... A fake doctors license, that has 'revoked' stamped on it? How about stealing the bank details, from a homeless person.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
'If you search for fertilizers on Google ... it's going to come back with 6.5 million pages. Enjoy,' he said. 'If you want to search for non-farmers who are discussing fertilizer ... it's not even searchable.'
Sure it is. 6,499,996 of those 6.5m are non farmers discussing fertilizer. With mega farms taking over farming, there are only, what, four actual farmers in America. </joke>
Even if we assume there are huge numbers of farmers on the internets, discussing fertilizer all day... He's implying 6.5m is too large a set to go through but the non farmer set is small enough to manually browse through. Really? So there aren't millions of home owners with gardens in America? There aren't tens of thousands of HOAs handling their own landscaping? There aren't armies of landscapers? And that's before you get in to the 106,000 results Google gives you for "fertilizer + bomb". Even if you weed out every last farmer, every landscaper, every HOA, every home owner... you still have over 100,000 entries to go through of people simply discussing fertilizer and bombs. To turn his own words back on him, "Enjoy."
Anyone who's used Narus equipment (I'm willing to bet that the numbers are very small, even here on /.) can attest to the fact that its implementation is rarely done for the purposes of securing a network. Rather, in every case I've seen, it's done in the name of securing a society. The technology that Narus has (and has had for some time) is incredible. I have seen it implemented in some of the most despot countries in the world for the sole purpose of catching 'evildoers' (you know, folks who dare speak out against the regime). Thank goodness Narus has come up with a reliable way to catch those pesky anonymous ones.
Apologies, I'm reposting this from a few months ago, but I thought it was appropriate:
The faded gold lettering on the door says "Philip Marlowe." My digs aren't in the greatest part of town, but that suits me just fine. I'm a blogger-one of the few honest ones out there. Work was a little slow-I was spending some time on important research-reading Slashdot. I was just about to hit the submit button on a post entitled "Frosty Piss!" when the dame shrugged her way through my door. If I'd have known what was going to happen next, I would have stuck to trolling.
She was tall for an Oriental, but not unappealing. She wore a black silk dress cut in traditional Chinese manner, studded with soft pink roses. Her eyes were black and silky as the dress. They didn't stay still. "Are you Marlowe?" she asked, scanning the room.
"Sure," I replied diffidently.
"Your blogging reputation proceeds you. The Chinese government has a job for you."
"Nuts to that. I don't work for commies."
"I could make it worth your while, Mr. Marlowe."
"If I sold out to every fancy-pants who walked through that door, would I be working in this place?"
"I understand your position, Marlowe, but listen. There's a 24-year-old kid who got beaten to death while in police custody. The police say it was from playing hide-and-seek. We need an official investigation, and you're the best investigational blogger we know."
"Sure it wasn't from 'ring around the rosie'?" I smirked nastily. She took a sharp breath.
"Listen, Marlowe, don't you want to help improve the situation? I know you've had certain...shall we say...run-ins with hyperactive authority figures in the past. Surely this could help your reputation."
"MY reputation?" I practically yelled. "Lady, I've been called a troll, a spammer, and an astroturfer more times than you can count on your abacus. I've been modded down, banned, accused of violating TOSs, but I'm still here. So don't think you can tell me about my reputation. I'll do it for $100/day plus expenses."
"Very good, Mr. Marlowe," she purred.
"Oh, and one more thing," I stood up and got my hat. "I'd better be on the official Chinese government blogroll by sundown, or you're gonna have to find yourself a new patsy."
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
> non-farmers who are discussing fertilizer
That's pretty much the whole internet; a lot of non-farmers talking a bunch of shit.
... are going to ruin us all!
Narus products have always been about telling you who is doing what with you, when and for how long on your network. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70914 http://www.scribd.com/doc/27629223/All-About-NSA-s-and-AT-amp-T-s-Big-Brother-Machine-The-Narus http://www.xchangemag.com/articles/631feature06.html http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/4/8/14724/28476 There has even been speculation that their products are at the core of "Carnivore" and/or "ESCHELON" http://www.texaskaos.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2496 Their primary customers are three letter agencies and the biggest of the big IP backbone providers. If you put devices capable of tracking every IP stream, encrypted or not, with source, destination, duration, size and QOS and you can start associating every stream with an identifiable person, adding to that the ability to extrapolate based upon types of user communities, net anonymity will certainly becaome lless possible. Now the question is, who watches the watchmen?
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
Just for that, I'd mod you up if I had mod points. Thank you.
I searched "non farmers novice newbie fertilizer forum -game" and got 6,590 hits on google.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"