I’m not a David Bowie fan, but in the song Space Oddity, there’s this amazing line:

This is Ground Control to Major Tom

You’ve really made the grade

And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear

Now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare

Sandwiched between congratuations to Major Tom and telling him that he has to progress to the next step of his mission, we find out what actually matters to the press (and the regular people): “And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear”. In other words, they don’t really care. This event is the first so everyone is excited because of that, but they don’t actually care about it really. They care more about Major Tom’s choice of fashion than about him or his mission.

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.

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.

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.