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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."
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...
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.
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
You don't need to market to 'the masses' to make (substantial) money off a product. Law enforcement is a big enough market if you get good saturation and Google + other ad networks would be a massive market.
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.
You're all insane.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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
Narus' entire customer base is pretty much government & law enforcement. Narus Insight is the toy used by the NSA to sniff Internet traffic.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
> non-farmers who are discussing fertilizer
That's pretty much the whole internet; a lot of non-farmers talking a bunch of shit.