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Maltego 3 “Leaked”…well, sort of

January 22, 2010 By Paul (Founder, WorkAtHomeTruth) Leave a Comment

If this sounds more like a marketing ploy than a social engineering ploy or actual “leak”…you’re probably right.

But for anyone who’s used Maltego at any level (even people like me fumbling around in the dark with the community edition) it is an incredible time-saver and continued development of the product is exciting.

Anyhow, you can see the “leaked” video here:

Maltego 3 leaked video at Social-Engineer.org

You can read the Social-Engineer.org team profiles here, including Andrew Mohawk who is Social-Engineer.org’s Paterva rep and created a special edition of Maltego Mesh for Social-Engineer.

I used to do a lot of research that looks like this manually – Maltego hasn’t automated everything I need, but it sure speeds up a vast number of processes.

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Skype is down…Skype is down…C’Mon Skype + Real Time Search

January 21, 2010 By Paul (Founder, WorkAtHomeTruth) 2 Comments

My first exhilirating experience with real-time search came today using Collecta.com to search “Skype down”.

Sure there are sites like downforeveryoneorjustme.com that will throw up a message like:

“It’s not just you! http://skype.com looks down from here.”

But what fun is that?

Much more fun to commiserate with all the fellow “Skype-Down” sufferers – PLUS you have the possibility of getting additional information.

Collecta.com is a great real-time search engine for this, but there are plenty of others. Here’s what I found out that was MUCH more helpful than the simple (yet still useful) downforeveryoneorjustme.com:

collecta-Skype-Is-Down

 

Now I see that one guy is saying Skype is down in Brazil a couple times. It looks like it’s working sometimes in parts of Europe.

And the nice thing is rather than trying to keep connecting to Skype I could just keep this running in a separate minimized window – or better yet, some players in the real time search arena such as Google (a late-comer) will be offering real-time search interfacing on the desktop.

You can read about Google’s plans here.

Nambu (still in private beta) also announced early in 2009 that they would provide a desk-top application.

Being a late-comer to real-time search myself I’m sure there is all kinds of useful functionality already built in that I’m completely aware of.

 

Short List of Real Time Search Engines:

Of course there are also the old “Twitter Real-Time Search” engines which seem quaint by current standards.

  • Wowd.com
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Many E-Tailers caught in post-transaction processing scandal blame customers

January 20, 2010 By Paul (Founder, WorkAtHomeTruth) Leave a Comment

According to a November 23rd story at CNET.com many of the recent E-Tailers that were caught in the post-transaction processing scandal  blamed customers for not reading the terms of service.

According to the CNET article here’s what many of the companies said:

“Orbitz “does not pass on any personally identifiable customer information to third party vendors without their permission,” the travel site said in a statement.

United Online, parent company of FTD and Classmates.com, a company that the government said banked $70 million via the three marketers said: “We believe that our marketing practices provide clear disclosure. We do not transfer our customer’s credit or debit card information to third parties without our customer’s consent.”

Priceline said the terms of the deal have “been clearly and fully explained.”

This should play out quite interestingly, especially given the recent educational alliance between the FTC, VISA, and the BBB as well as the fact that the FTC and credit card companies are cracking down on deceptive billing practices which has resulted in many companies losing their merchant accounts.

There are easy solutions on both the business side and the customer side in situations like this.

On the business side you can:

  • Blame the customer
  • Take responsibility (assuming you did something wrong)

On the customer side you can:

  • Stop doing business with companies that violate your trust

Related:

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