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Wednesday, June 22, 2011

FBI Targets Hosting Company In Seizure

A hosting company based in Switzerland, with servers in Reston Virginia, found itself the target of an FBI seizure which left a number of clients looking for answers. According to a story in the NYtimes, DigitalOne's chief executive, Sergej Ostroumow, said in an email to one of it's clients that “This problem is caused by the F.B.I., not our company. In the night F.B.I. has taken 3 enclosures with equipment plugged into them, possibly including your server — we cannot check it.”


Speculation is that the seizure is in relationship to an investigation into the hacking group Lulzsec (Lulz Security group) but no one from the FBI would comment. Sites affected by the seizure include Curbed Network, bookmarking services Instapaper, and pinboard. There is no reason to believe that these sites where the target of the raid and Lockhart Steele, Curbed Networks' President told the news paper that “Our servers happened to be in with some naughty servers,”

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Google's Search By Image

Not too long ago I wrote a blog post for Webbeat.tv entitled Website of the day: Tineye which describes the service that allows you to provide an image or image url and tells you where else on the web the image is being used. Tineye will even detect altered images.

It appears as though Google has recently released a similar tool via it's Google Image search. If you navigate to http://images.google.com/ you'll now see a camera icon in the search field, mouse over the image and the tooltip says "Search By Image". Clicking the icon provides a new search field with the options to upload your own image or provide an image url.

I'm a fan of the Tineye service though one has to believe that Google will quickly out perform Tineye with it's capability to crawl websites and gather data more quickly. In either case this is a very useful tool which I am apt to use frequently.

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