In the last post on the Evince Blog I was writing about Google Street View coming to Canada. I wrote that “the probability of a specific subject of an investigation being in a given location at the exact time that the Google Street View people were driving by is pretty low. In other words, a reliable surveillance tool this ain’t.”
Sometimes its okay to be proven wrong.
According to a Reuters article “Dutch muggers caught on Google street view camera” a pair of twins that mugged a Dutch teenager were caught by Dutch police after the teen recognized himself from a Street View image at the place and approximate time where he was mugged.
I wonder if this means that criminals are likely to also “virtually” return to the place where they committed the crime. Something to think about for the computer forensics professionals out there.
Google Street View is a useful tool for investigators to gain context about a given geographical location such as what is around it, what the dominant features of the location are, whether or not it looks expensive, what its proximity to other things is, etc.
Of course there are concerns that the Google Street View team might accidentally catch someone in their birthday suit or some other compromising position; but the probability of a specific subject of an investigation being in a given location at the exact time that the Google Street View people were driving by is pretty low. In other words, a reliable surveillance tool this ain’t.
Interestingly Canpages has begun to use “street-view-type-technology” for its directory service in some parts of the country. It also allows businesses to post images of themselves on line so that users can see what the location looks like. Finally, in some locations it has feeds from local traffic cameras. All of which would be great for gaining background information on a given location.
If you’re a reader interested in tools and resources for social network analysis (the traditional kind and the web 2.0 kind) then you’ll want to give Digital Bear a look. This site has a lot of cool stuff.
According to Dusan Writer’s Metaverse the FBI is now using Second Life to post pictures of its 10 most wanted, to connect to the FBI’s job board and to connect to the Internet Crime Complaint Center. Its good to see another example of policing agencies adopting new technologies to reach a broader audience.
This is an interesting development in the world of online payment methods. PayByCash is now offering PayByCash Codes to facilitate payments from online vendors such as MMOs and auction sites.
The benefit for the consumer is that they have another alternative to credit cards for making payments to gaming sites. The benefit for the vendor is (I assume) that they pass on the charge-back risk to PayByCash. According to an article in The Financial Express from India, it also allows vendors to access markets where teens and college aged students are less likely to have access to a credit card or where they may be “unbanked” as described by the article.
Attaching monetary value to a code is nothing new, but because of the flexibility of a payment platform like PayByCash this is much more like a direct code-to-cash-relationship as opposed to a code-to-unlock-features relationship.
One interesting feature is the PayByCash address option that allows the user to retain some anonymity by using an address supplied by PayByCash rather than their own address. This may be a source of frustration for some regulatory and law enforcement bodies.
I wonder if a secondary market will develop for these codes? The expiry date and the one time use might stimey the development of a secondary market a little bit but I’m guessing we’ll see them start popping up on auction sites. My wish for PayByCash is that we do not see the codes on the carder forums.
