Barry Irwin
SensePost
Sep
11
After the scary legal threats, Paterva has re-released Evolution as Maltego, and Roelof has given some background as to what happened. The essential change is that Maltego now uses Yahoo, as they provide more reasonable automation uses, and has removed several of the social networking transforms until something behind the scenes is sorted out. I did a quick search on 'Person=Dominic White' and was a bit disappointed with the results. We'll just have to wait till things are resolved, but at least we have some functionality restored.
As an aside, it irritates me when these sort of legal threats are thrown around. It is a classic case of shoot the messenger, the problem isn't resolved, just the one company trying to make money off of it is hurt. If this tool was released open-source, there wouldn't be much they (the social networkers) could do about it apart from attempting some technical pattern based blocking which would be an arms race they would be likely to loose. My next suggestion then is that Paterva release a stripped down Maltego version under a BSD license or the like. Save advanced functionality for the commercial version, and use the free version so seed the web with hundreds of 'searchers', removing the current single point of failure.
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