learning – Wild Rain

The power of knowing your rights

There is power in knowing your rights. Not many bother. Or they think they know them already. They purchase goods or services believing that certain protections are in place, only facing reality when they try to enforce them later.

There’s a lack of education in schools around consumer rights, or even human rights. If we are being honest there isn’t really much education around finance. Most school leavers don’t know the difference between a debit and credit card, or how to balance a bank account. Mathematics, reading and writing, a partial second language if you are lucky, and some science is all most leave school with.

You can educate yourself. The likes of Martin Lewis and Rob Moore offer free education on finance and your rights as a consumer. It’s worth taking the time to learn all you can. If nothing else you’ll learn how to make better purchases and how to look after your own financial health.

Knowing your rights is a very powerful tool that we should all acquire.

Has AI killed Google Dorking?

When performing OSINT research I often utilise Google keywords and advanced features, also known as Google Dorking. It’s a great way to find content and data that a basic search may fail to retrieve. Recently however, I discovered that AI, namely GPT, can retrieve the same results, and sometimes even more, faster than I can dork, prompting me to speculate whether AI has replaced the need to learn advanced OSINT techniques at all. Maybe OSINT 2.0 is learning to master AI prompts to conduct OSINT research faster and better than manually?

I put this to the test. I was recently asked to research a company. I like to use mind-mapping to join up the data that I find. Using Google Dorking and various sites that offer data on public companies I compiled a lot of information in around an hour, all linked together with reference points and a timeline. I then asked GPT to research the same company specifying the parameters. In five seconds it not only retrieved all the information that I had found, but it had additional information that I had not.

I’ll admit that at first I was annoyed that it was faster than me but after thinking about it I realised that it was also very useful. It provided links and evidence along with its findings, which I could follow to verify. The outcome was new sources that I could add to my own playbook. I also decided that I could use AI to assist with the process but that you have to follow a trust but verify rule. Check everything it tells you and back it up with evidence as it may have hallucinated some or all of its findings. It helps to think of AI as a virtual OSINT assistant in this case. You can give it something to research, but make sure you yourself check everything it returns.

As for whether AI has killed Google Dorking, I still use dorking to verify what AI returns as it may of missed something, possibly considering it irrelevant or out of scope.

My top 5 books

I was recently asked what books I had found the most useful over the years, that I had gifted the most, and recommended many times. There were about 17 titles. I do like to read.

I reviewed each title with the aim of condensing the list down to a top 5. Here they are:

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

This book to me is all about adventure. It’s the book that instilled in me the desire to travel and explore the world. As a young child I would read this book every year at least once. That and R.L Stevenson’s Treasure Island. I was determined that one day I would travel the world, and I did. Every child should read about the adventures of Ratty, Mole, and Toad.

Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki

This book more than any other taught me how the world works. It showed me that no matter how many hours I worked, that I could only ever earn a finite amount of money. I learned about the magic of passive income, compounding, employee vs business owner vs investor. Every young adult should be given a copy of this book before they leave school.

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

It’s surprising how little time we have on this earth when we think about it. Yet we waste what time we have in silly ways. This book is a wake-up call that will jolt you into enjoying every precious moment that you have for it is not a given that there will be a tomorrow.

Money by Rob Moore

Another book that every young adult should be given before leaving school. Its contents should be taught in school so that less people get into debt or think that a credit card means you can just buy whatever you want. You will learn all about money and how it flows from you to others and how to make it work for you.

How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie

An oldie but a goodie. A set of rules entwined in a series of stories. Not just useful for making friends but also for just being a good human.

Tracing a purchase

There was a suspicious entry on my credit card bill.

I check all my statements. It has proved to be a useful exercise in the past. Erroneous entries, double entries, and incorrect sums, to name but a few things I’ve spotted over the years.

In this case it was an unrecognised entry for a bar in another county. A bar I’ve never been to, and a county I haven’t visited in many months.

Now a few years ago I would have just picked up the phone and called the credit card company and asked them to explain the transaction. But I’ve become pretty nifty with the old OSINT knowledge. So I put on the deerstalker and started investigating…

First I looked up the company. They had been trading for a decade and their business was listed as bars and restaurants. Plural.

Next I looked at my diary and emails to work out where I was on the date of the entry and several days before, as it can take a couple of days for a payment to be processed. I had visited one reastaurant for a spot of lunch. I checked the restaurants web site but nothing obvious revealed a connection to the bar listed on my statement.

Next I downloaded a PDF of the restaurant’s example lunch menu and worked out what I had ordered including drinks and the estimated bill with taxes etc. We had a match. But still I had to prove it.

I started searching for both the restaurant and the bar’s trading names together, and found one article on Facebook about the bar’s owners venturing further afield and branching out into smaller venues in nearby counties. Eventually I located an article that linked both the bar and restaurant.

I now knew that this was a valid purchase. But how many other people that ate there and paid by card and looked at their statements like I do would think, hang on a minute, what’s this? There was nothing on the menu or in the restaurant that informed me that my bill payment will show up on my statement as X. Nothing. And they were paperless in that they did not do printed receipts.

At least I now know that the transaction wasn’t fraudulent. And I found yet another use for my ever growing OSINT skills.

Just ask it

Humans can be lazy. My thinking is that AI is becoming more popular because it helps us find information faster. If we have a question and we search for an answer using a search engine, we then have to browse the links that it offers ourselves. We have to read and digest data and then review what we’ve read and determine if we can answer our question.

With AI it’s as if someone has already done all the hard work for you, the reading, digesting, and analysing. We just have to ask it our question and it will attempt to answer it as best as it can. We then have to trust (but verify) the answer provided and we are done. Much faster. Lazy but efficient.

AI and OSINT

With OSINT a lot of the fun is in uncovering the information, finding connections, uncovering useful data that leads to the next node and so on. Assuming you know where to look, or how to analyse the data in the first place that is.

Using AI in OSINT investigations isn’t cheating if it helps unblock you, or helps you make progress where you were stuck. It may suggest alternative sources, or recommend tools. It can be like having a virtual OSINT investigator with you whenever you need it. You still have to drive, to direct, to be able to think and ask the right questions in order for it to be of use. It’s not cheating if you are learning.

When is rock bottom?

You hear the term a lot: reaching rock bottom.

When do you know you’ve hit rock bottom? There always seems further that you can fall. So when is it the actual rock bottom?

“I hit rock bottom and turned my life around“. Maybe it’s the point at which you can’t take any more or mentally make the decision to stop falling and to do something about it? Maybe everyone’s rock bottom is different. It’s when you decide to stop falling and to move in the opposite direction.

I need to stop falling.

Refining RSS feeds

I’ve written my own RSS feeds, by hand. A long time ago now. I still like the idea of not having to visit a website to look for articles of interest, to have everything from your favourite sites all in one place, updated in near real time fed straight into my phone.

There can be too much noise though. I find myself refining often, like an OCD minimalist. Sorting, organising, refining. Ensuring that there is less noise and more signal. Until nothing gets through and you miss stuff. So you add it all in again and start refining once again. Repetitive.

Interests change, so you have to cull what was once interesting but is now dull. You add new content. Browse today’s trending topics. Anything worth adding? Adding and refining.

RSS. Refining Signal Streams.

Thinking about Agentic AI

I’ve been thinking about Agentic AI.

Essentially it’s similar to other AI but with a focused knowledge area, capable of making its own decisions based on the knowledge it has and the ability to learn and reason without human intervention. It gathers data, processes it, makes decisions based on that data and its assumptions, then learns from feedback. Try try and try again and mae changes based on your failures.

It is generally tasked towards a specific function such as event planning, task scheduling, predicting something, etc.

It’s used in self-driving cars, supply chain management, cybersecurity, healthcare, financial services, and anything that can be automated.

Concerns range from data handling, privacy, to replacing humans.

Speed reading

I have this rule with books; If it’s boring and doesn’t entertain, inform, or grip you in the first 5 chapters or around 30 pages, bin it. That is to say don’t continue reading just for the sake of it. Just because your favourite aunt bought it for your birthday or your sister bought it for you for Christmas. Sell it, donate it to charity, or re-gift it to someone you think is more likely to appreciate it.

That was my rule.

I’ve slightly modified this rule for where the book contains content or information that you need to know, or you have been asked to read it for work, a book club, or another reason whereby you will be asked questions later. In this scenario I speed-read it.

Speed-reading is an artform in itself and each individual undertakes it differently. For me it depends on whether the book is fiction or non-fiction.

For fiction I kind of stare at the page unfocused picking out key-words and following the gist of the story. I look for any change in pace or emphasis on something important in the text. I take around 5-seconds a page this way, taking longer when I find something worth reading. I can guarantee that after some considerable practice I can finish most fiction books in an hour or two max.

For non-fiction I’ll read the back-cover, the inside jackets, and scan the table of contents. Then I’ll flick through each page only stopping if anything of interest catches my eye. I’ll have already noted sections or pages that I want to take a little more time with from reading the TOC. This way I’ll have gotten what I wanted from the book.

Not every book should be read from cover-to-cover. True, you may have your favourites, well worn copies that you’ve read many times. But you will encounter tomes that are just dull, badly written, with no life in them. And the older you are the less time you are willing to waste on bad prose. In fact feel free to speed-read these posts or skip them all together. I’m not writing them to make money. I’m writing them for me. But they may contain some nuggets of wisdom, so feel free to practice your speed-reading.