Getting into open source investigation can be challenging.
A newbie investigator can easily get lost in the multitude of online tools and interfaces available on the internet. For instance, on the day of writing this document, Bellingcat's Online Investigation Toolkit lists over 300 online tools that accept many types of input data and serve different purposes.
Even as an experienced investigator, sometimes you need to quickly find a tool that would allow you to obtain more details from limited pieces of information that you have.
This is the reason why Bellingcat's Online Investigation Toolkit is constantly flooded with users (represented as animals on Google Drive's interface) who have to look for the tools they need inside a spreadsheet.
But what if there was a better way of finding the tool that fulfils your goals?
Maybe there is a way to... Break up that zoo?
- Make sure you have
npmandNode.jsversion18.3.0or greater installed. - Clone this repository into a local directory and
cdinto it. - Install dependencies.
npm install- Start the web server.
npm start- Open a web browser and navigate to
127.0.0.1:8080. - Have a look at the user manual, and enjoy searching!
Please refer to the User manual for a complete usage guide.
- [Tech]: Redesign the storage system to use a database instead of CSV files
- [Functionality]: perhaps include a backoffice interface for managing services, updating their scores and adding new ones
- [UI/UX]: Add more relevant icons for each service
- [The extra mile]: Implement user authorization for personalized scores on each service
At the time of writing, Dezoofier stores all data in CSV files. Given the limited size of the data (about 300 services and 60 entities), at this point it is not an issue in terms of performance. However, this means that in order to update that data, one needs to open the CSV file, make modifications to it by hand and then restart the server.
This process can be greatly improved by moving to database storage and implementing a backoffice interface for elegant data management.
The tool has been written in the form of a browser application because this allows it to be simple in usage and easily accessible.