dfworks

We were actually considering doing some object detection in a next run.

It feels like there could potentially be some town planning applications like finding the distribution of rubbish bins vs litter on the floor

There are around 50 results for Crystal Palace, Ill have a look through the logs to see what might have gone wrong

Sadly no R Soles though (A shoe shop formerly in Chelsea but now online) - however, just searching for profanities does bring back some graffiti

Hi Author here,

This doesnt really answer your question but hopefully gives some insight into our process.

The main bottlenecks were breaking the fisheye-style panoramas into different perspectives (so text was more readable), passing it to OCR and acquiring the panoramas as there isn't an official API.

Because of the above, we constrained ourselves from the outset. For example, the spacings between panoramas was 50m, we didnt traverse residential roads that were less likely to have signage, we only used the most recent panorama for a location etc

If I interpret global as without those constraints (5m spacings, every road, all historic panoramas) then I think the first problem you'll run into is being rate limited by Google. Compute may be able to solve the other problems but it would be very expensive.

It’s perhaps a bit better now, but back when trip-sharing features were first added to third-party mapping and delivery platforms, there was a real tendency to overshare. Many early implementations generated public URLs with sequential or low-entropy IDs that could be guessed or brute-forced. Anyone who knew the pattern could enumerate live or historical “shared trips,” exposing routes, addresses, and other metadata that were never meant to be public.

I documented a few examples of this a while ago, which demonstrate how easily these systems could leak journey data.

https://dfworks.xyz/blog/online_stalking_citymapper/ https://dfworks.xyz/blog/pizza_order/

I made this - https://london publicinsights.uk as well as operate a public records aggregator that has indexed, amongst other things, planning applications. I wonder if it could be of use?

I have a London one also if anyone is interested!

https://london.publicinsights.uk

After recently reading several concerning articles about MAID data, I decided to simulate some device activity (because buying it is too expensive!).

I then modelled how these fictional devices might vote to demonstrate how harmful/useful aggregated and analysed MAID data can be.

If anybody found this interesting and would like some further reading, the paper below employed a similar strategy to analyse inauthentic content/disinformation on Twitter.

https://files.casmconsulting.co.uk/message-based-community-d...

If you would like to read about my largely unsuccessful recreation of the paper, you can do so here - https://dfworks.xyz/blog/partygate/

There was a very recent "bug" in Search where the site: operator stopped working for a little bit and everybody in the OSINT community had a bit of a meltdown - https://www.digitaldigging.org/p/search-alert-google-filetyp...

The date operators from: to: I think have been unsupported for a while and replaced with a dropdown in the UI

filetype: is a fave and has been working for as long as I can remember

AROUND(number) is pretty useful too although I find that might be a bit buggy sometimes

There is a good list here https://www.exploit-db.com/google-hacking-database showing how dorks can be used for pentesting and/or generally finding insecure stuff

Yep, British for my sins, as a US soldier once described to me, we are your least worst enemy

Every day is a learning day!

If anyone found the above interesting, I wrote a short article mapping plane activity on FlightRadar's 'blocked' list (i.e FlightRadar had agreed to remove the ADBS data from their dataset following probable legal pressure).

https://dfworks.xyz/blog/hnwi-osint-private-jet/

Slightly tangential so feel free to remove if irrelevant

Planning applications in the UK are publicly available and many have architectural drawings/site plans attached with varying degrees of detail.

There are millions of applications and each local authority has a different database so it may take a bit of digging to find what you are searching for.

Application example - https://publicaccess.tewkesbury.gov.uk/online-applications/a...

Drawings example - https://publicaccess.tewkesbury.gov.uk/online-applications/f...

https://blog.reversepp.com/ for an incredibly niche blog about UK planning application data

As I understand Slough and West London more broadly are a sweet spot for both connectivity to international fibre cables as they come out of the ground and available electricity at a reasonable rate (although they might have saturated that particular aspect if the article is true). Slough trading estate has a dedicated Biomass Power Station.

With less confidence, I vaguely remember a discussion with a datacentre technician at one of these sites who said something about the curvature of the cabling which can impact latency/speed for high frequency trading outfits located in the datacentres. I'm not sure in which direction this would worsen but perhaps another factor.

There was a similar situation in the UK where 'Spider Crab' was renamed 'Cornish King Crab'. As I understand, much of the 'Spider Crab' was exported to Spain but as this became less economically viable post Brexit the rebrand was aimed at encouraging domestic consumption.