Summary:
I'm not in full agreement with what Rob Turk says. I think there's
an interesting robot here,
but I'm not sure the goal described above will produce *that* robot.
I also agree with
Rob that it could make a good TV episode.
As a side note: Private Investigators are in the business of invading people's
privacy. All we can do is hope they have ethics and responsibility. I
wouldn't want to start
a privacy thread here, but I've included two annecdotes below for your
amusement.
I see two definitions (not exclusive) of robot: one is the indexer of
information as a front end to standard
search engines (Lycos, Yahoo etc). The other is a more focused searcher for
specific information: what
many call an agent.
When a PI goes hunting for a missing person (courtesy an unfortunate friend
... child support),
one of the first things they do is hit Lexus/Nexus to see if the target has
made the news. This
picks up marriage announcements, some classifieds, as well as traditional
news. You don't
always come up lucky, but diligence demands that this be an early stop on
the trail.
When I use the net to find someone, I start with Deja News: search for there
name and permuations
that are likely email names. I get back articles which I filter (John would
never be posting to
alt-rec.music.makers). I then use the who-where type servers, and finally
hunt the open web and gopher.
Now this would be a neat process to automate -- if only to compress the
transfer time. It's an
agent. The code is a specific web robot. I imagine a PI firm that built
the agent and created a DB
could sell this to other PI firms (a la Nexus) for a fixed fee.
its already useful. For example
Mitchell Elster -- (via who-where) --> elsterm@us.net
us.net --(via rs.internic.net) --> Silver Spring, MD 20904-1735
if us.net is considered a small ISP then we have a name and a city. Not a
bad start.
<bwcc is actually in Bowie -- which I know from there web site>
As more and more people consider an email a necessity, this will grow beyond
the web-head
(Rob Turk's phrase) and into the general population.
------------------------------------------ Fun Annectodes
--------------------------------------
I needed a consultant in another city to do some on-site work for a client.
I used
Deja News to search <city>.jobs.*. Saw a subject line that caught my eye.
Click on
the hyperlink, read the text. Thinking it was a good lead, I clicked on the
gent's name
(a hyperlink in Deja News) thinking it was a mail-to link. It actually gave
me his posting
summary. In addition to learning about the severity of problem that sent
him to the
newsgroups, I had the opportunity to learn more about his sexual interests
than was
really necessary.
When my friend was working with the PI (several years ago), she was asked
the names
of his best friends. It seems the PI had someone inside the phone company
that for
$200/phone bill Could produce a copy of all long distance calls made.
Equally as
illegal as hacking the Bell system computers, but I know lots more people
with $200
than good hackers. Frightening, eh?