A Google feature that doesn't ordinarily get a lot of attention is Google Alerts, which is a service that sends you links to things that match certain search terms on a periodic basis.  Some people use it for  vanity searching because they have a personal brand to maintain, some people use it to keep on top of a rare thing they're interested in (anyone remember the show Probe?), some people use it for bargain hunting, some people use it for intel collection... however, this is all predicated on Google finding out what you're interested in, certainly interested enough to have …

Here and behind the cut are the notes I took at DefCon 23. They are necessarily incomplete because they're notes, and I refer you to the speakers' presentations and eventually video recordings for the whole story.

Applied Intelligence: Using Information That's Not There - Michael Schrenk

• Knowing your operations and resources
• More effective and efficient
• Competitive intelligence
• What's happening outside of your business
• Know your competitors and markets
• Collect, analyze, and apply external data
• There is a professional association of people who do competitive intelligence
• Applied intelligence is actionable and changes what you do
• Most is useless unless you develop it …

Well, I'm back from DefCon in sunny and hot Las Vegas, Nevada and more or less reinserted back into my everyday life. I'm just about caught up on everything that happened at work and finally finished the notes that are going to comprise this article. I'll type up the notes I took during the talks at DefCon in a couple of days; they've voluminous and I want to get the experience out of my head and into external storage before the memories fade much more. Unfortunately, I didn't make it to any of the villages so I don't have anything …

To everyone who attended the Global Existential Risks and Radical Futures Conferences yesterday, thank you. It was an honor and a privilege to meet with and speak to all of you.

As promised, here are my slides in the form of an HTML5 presentation. They were authored in Markdown and run through Landslide to convert them into HTML5 slides.

The latest revelation by Wikileaks of what happens behind the scenes in the twenty-first century began publication on Monday. Called the GI Files (for Global Intelligence), it is said to be made up of approximately five million e-mail messages and associated documentation copied from the e-mail servers of Strategic Forecasting, Incorporated (Stratfor) by adherants of the Anonymous meme and passed on to Wikileaks some time last year. Due to the gargantuan volume of data Wikileaks has opted to release smaller quantities of information every day rather than overwhelm everyone with information. Predictably, spin control efforts on all sides started up …

Every once in a while a news article about attempts to crack US military and government systems coming out of China or the Middle East hits the 'wires; rumors of groups of systems crackers belonging to the Air Force/United Nations/Department of Homeland Security/Microsoft/the Illuminati regularly make their rounds at hacker conventions. Military data nets are increasingly becoming targets of crackers from abroad, safe from prosecution and extradition because it's so difficult to start legal proceedings against someone you don't even know, let alone can grab by the scruff of the neck (police dramas and MLATs to …