A few months ago, I wanted to try to practice my OSINT skills by looking up missing people by checking out the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children website. One of the people that I was checking on was a 14 year old girl who had been missing for about a week.

I started by looking her up on Facebook and found 2-3 Facebook and Instagram accounts a piece. Nothing of them showed much activity. Then I spread out by looking at the friends that this person took selfies with first. One of the friends had a few pictures with this girl that were fairly recent and within the time that this girl was missing.

The 2020 OSINT Handbook published by i-intelligence is the latest edition that is currently on their website. i-intelligence is a training and intelligence advisory firm.

The 2020 OSINT Handbook is a 509-page list of web links in PDF format. If you were expecting anything more, then you would be mistaken. It covers topics including social media, message boards, people search sites, and government and real estate sites.

Are these links useful? Absolutely! While you have to expect any PDF from 3 years prior to have many dead links, especially when it comes to ever-changing social media related tools, there are many resources here that might prove invaluable that you might never think of using. However, a PDF is probably one of the worst ways of sharing this information. If these links were in bookmark html format, they could easily be searched and added to a browsers bookmark file. However, having them in PDF format makes them kludgy to use and requires that you copy and paste the links directly in a browser.

I want to get back into OSINT now that I’ve had a chance to step away for a while and gather my thoughts a bit. I guess I should start by saying that I’ve never worked in OSINT. What I did do is read and dabble in OSINT and I also took a couple of courses and then worked through about 50% of another (very long) course before stopping. Before I talk about how I’m going to get back into it, I should talk about why I stopped.

The Magic of Recluse is a 1991 Epic Fantasy novel by L.E. Modesitt Jr. It was recently for sale as a Humble Bundle. I picked up the bundle because I recognized the author’s name, but I hadn’t read any of his works.

The Magic of Recluse centers around the story of Lerris from the land of Recluse who is often bored with the demanding perfectionism of his land. Every craft and trade must live up to the level of “perfection”. Lerris is sent to live with his uncle, a woodworker because he considers his mother’s pottery trade to also be boring. Within a few months, his skills grow and he learns to be proficient with woodworking as an apprentice, but he doesn’t care about perfection in woodworking because it too is boring.

Yesterday, I was watching some old episodes of The Computer Chronicles. I noticed that the earlier seasons had a lot more levity during the roundtable discussions, with a stronger focus on business and industry topics. This contrasts with the later seasons, which shifted almost entirely to personal computing.

My guess is that sometime in the late ’80s, the producers realized that viewers were more interested in what they could actually buy and use themselves, rather than what was happening in boardrooms and high-tech labs.

I also watched the special episode dedicated to Gary Kildall. It was exceptionally well done, and Gary came across as a genuinely awesome person. RIP Gary.

As one of my favorite philosophers like to say, let’s begin by defining our terms?

What is Seamonkey?

From Wikipedia:

SeaMonkey is a free and open-source Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code,[6] which itself grew out of Netscape Communicator and formed the base of Netscape 6 and Netscape 7.

SeaMonkey was created in 2005 after the Mozilla Foundation decided to focus on the standalone projects Firefox and Thunderbird. The development of SeaMonkey is community-driven, in contrast to the Mozilla Application Suite, which until its last released version (1.7.13) was governed by the Mozilla Foundation. The new project-leading group is called the SeaMonkey Council

Geoguessr is an online geography game. That may sound like the most boring thing you’ve ever hear but it’s actually very interesting if you’re a newbie in OSINT. A big part of OSINT is GEOSINT, that is, being able to look at a photo a understanding where it was taken using different techniques.

Geoguesser drops you into a Google street view session but without any of Google’s normal map aids such as links, bookmarks, etc and you have a time limit to find yourself on their map. If you can do it within a certain number of meters/feet, then you get more points.

Hmmm, it’s been a while. I started a new job. It’s DevOps, not OSINT, but I am in a better place in my life.

I want to do more learning and more writing. I know a lot about things that OSINT courses never touch upon. Too many times they only focus on the mainstream because it’s easiest. I think I can help people learn about the parts of the internet that are not well known or understood.

The past year has been difficult. About a year ago, I was so burned out on my job that I started looking for a way out. I couldn’t just leave without an exit strategy and I knew that it would take more than a year to complete. I’m an American citizen who has spent the last several years living in Europe. We made the decision to get a green card for my wife and then move back to the US.

I love the old days of the Internet and Usenet in particular. Life on Usenet was considerably different than it is today. Moderated groups were rare and the huge majority of them were unmoderated and yet they worked for the most part. Moderation was something that people did and not moderators. If you didn’t want to see something, then you added that person or a keyword to your “killfile” and they wouldn’t show up again. It was a simple and mostly affective block.