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Talk at BACON 2008

[termo]

Hi, I am promoting my talk at conference BACON 2008, 30-September/1-October, Buenos Aires, Argentina:

LeakedOut: the Social Networks You Get Caught In
http://ba-con.com.ar

I will explain some of my ideas on open source intelligence and social networks crawling and I am intending to release some working code. In an accompanying paper and on the presentation I will also cite Paterva and Maltego as interesting working software and research tank on the area

termo.

[RT]

Awesome - wish i was there...
Would you link to your slides when the con is done?
If you need any help setting up some custom stuff - just shout!
RT

[termo]

Hey, surely i will link the slides here.

At this moment I haven''t implement any Transforms compatible with Maltego, actually I call them Expanders and also haven''t implemented any client/server arquitecture, but may be in the future is the best to interact with Maltego to insert my work in the community/business, possibly in the line of the gruq because I am also working in Python.

BTW, I am getting in trouble if I release code to automatically query a search engine and 2 very social/business networks services??? What was your experience???

cheers,
jose.

[RT]

Hi there...
1) If we get 2.1 out it will support local transform written in Python. It would work perfect with your code. The only thing you''ll need to do it provide some kind of wrapper - should be XML between the client and your code. Shouldnt take longer than 25 minutes to implement. So - that''s good news! Now the bad news.

2) In terms of search engines and social networks. I am going to take a guess here and say you''ll be looking at Google, Facebook and Linkedin. I am no lawyer, but I can tell you that we received a cease and desists letter from a very aggressive lawyer representing a social network. Was not pretty. It almost sank the entire project. This is why:
*] we use the Yahoo API. It''s slow and limited, but it''s legally OK. We have code for MS Live and Google, but cannot release it (or use it ourselves..cough cough). MS Live is about 3 times faster than Yahoo and Google is about 5 times faster. You also get better results and have more operators to play with (on both MS Live and Google). The MS Live API does not allow any commercial use and the Google API has dissapeared. I have asked Google several times if I can reach some agreement with them in terms of scraping (even offered to show their ads somehow) or if they would perhaps make their API available again - all to no avail.
*] we use Rapleaf and similar services for resolving social network membership. Again - we have code to speak to most of the social networks (and a lot better and more effective than most other providers) - but we cannot release it, or use it. In terms of reaching an agreement with social networks...don''t bother. It''s because of people that scrape for millions (literally) emails and store results that they hate scrapers so bad. And I can fully understand it - I''d be pissed if someone was abusing my system in that way. We never stored results and we only sent requests when a user use the GUI - it''s less than a drop in the ocean compared with what other do / have done. But ... we had an article in Linux.com, and they noticed and we received a little letter in the mail. Bottom line - we did break the terms of use and we did scrape.

Of course - the question becomes - how do these providers do it and how come they are not dragged to court? Well I dont know and I really don''t care. Life isn''t fair. In the end we are passionate about tech - not law and we''ll keep on turning out other interesting stuff.

The Internet has become a funny place...actually. In fact - don''t get me started.
RT

[mubix]

Hey, surely i will link the slides here.

Any luck on those slides? ;-)

[Abigail10]

Talk at BACON 2008? hmm... Something mysterious... By the way, thanks for the information that you have been shared.




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