Transcription
Let's get right into it. Number 10, the FBI Vault.
The FBI has a website where you can read their actual secret files, not movie props, not conspiracy theories, the real case files. It's called the FBI Vault and it's sitting on the public internet completely free. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI is required to release certain documents, so they built this online library and it is a rabbit hole like no other.
There are files on Elvis Presley. The Bureau was worried he was a a definite danger to the security of the United States. The King of Rock and Roll had a government file. There are files on Albert Einstein, pages and pages of them. Apparently, being the smartest man alive made some people very nervous. And then there's the UFO section. The FBI investigated UFO sightings for decades. There are actual memos from agents describing flying discs. One famous memo from 1950 claims that three flying saucers were recovered in New Mexico. It says each one contained three bodies of human shape, but only 3-ft tall. That memo is real. You can read it yourself. The website is vault.fbi.gov. Just type in any name or topic. You'll either find nothing or you'll find something that completely changes how you see history.
Number nine, Shodan. Shodan is a search engine that makes Google look like a children's toy. Google searches for websites. Shodan searches for everything else. We are talking security cameras, baby monitors, hospital equipment, nuclear plant controls, traffic lights, prison door systems. If it is connected to the internet, Shodan can find it. And a huge chunk of these devices were set up by people who had no idea what they were doing. They plugged them in, connected them to the internet, and just left them wide open. No password, no security, nothing.
Security researchers use Shodan to find these exposed devices before the bad guys do. Someone once found an entire city's traffic light system sitting there completely unprotected. Another researcher found a car wash that could be remotely turned on and off by anyone. Someone else found a casino fish tank that was connected to the internet. Hackers actually used that fish tank to break into the casino's network. The casino lost 10 GB of data through a fish tank thermometer. You can go to Shodan right now and search for things like "default password" and find thousands of webcams and servers still running on factory settings. It is basically a live map of human laziness. Security professionals use it to check if their own devices are accidentally exposed. Think of it as a mirror that shows you exactly how the internet sees you.
Number eight, Import Yeti. You want to know where a company actually gets its products made, not where they claim they get it in their marketing, where they really get it. Import Yeti lets you type in any company name and pulls up their real shipping records. These are public US Customs documents called bills of lading. Every time a container shipment enters the US, it gets logged. Import Yeti just makes that mountain of data searchable. So, you type in a popular brand you like and suddenly you see exactly which factory in China or Vietnam is making their stuff. The factory name, the address, how many shipments they've sent, how much they weigh. This is the kind of information that used to cost thousands of dollars to get from private research firms. Now it's free.
If you're starting a business and want to sell a similar product to a competitor, you can just look up where they source it, then contact that same factory directly. You've just skipped six months of supplier hunting. If you're an investor trying to figure out if a company is legit, you can check. And if you're just curious, you can find out that an expensive handcrafted artisan brand is shipping in 50-ton containers from the exact same factory as a cheap knockoff brand. That happens more than you think.
Number seven, Open Corporates. There are over 200 million companies registered around the world and many of them exist only to own other companies, which in turn own other companies, which are registered to a mailbox in Delaware. Open Corporates is a free website that lets you untangle that web. It's the largest open database of companies on Earth. You type in a company name and it pulls the official registration records, who the directors are, when it was filed, an address, and And importantly, it shows the network. You can see all the other companies that share the same directors or addresses.
Say you're about to hire a contractor, seems legit. You look them up on OpenCorporates and find their company was dissolved twice and refiled under a slightly different name. Suddenly, that confident handshake feels different. Or you see that a new cozy family restaurant in your town is actually owned by a holding company, which is owned by another holding company based out of a UPS store in Nevada. Big money rarely puts its real name on things. It hides behind layers of corporations. It's like Russian nesting dolls, but for tax efficiency and legal liability. OpenCorporates makes those layers visible to regular people. It's a tool for journalists, activists, and anyone who wants to know who they're really doing business with.
Number six, Wigle. Imagine you're sitting in your living room. Your Wi-Fi router is just sitting there, blinking. But someone has already put it on a map. Your network name, its exact GPS coordinates, the day it was first detected. All of it is likely sitting in a public database that anyone can search. That data base is called Wigle. It stands for Wireless Geographic Logging Engine, and it's a crowdsourced map of every Wi-Fi network on Earth. Since 2001, volunteers have been driving, walking, and biking around with special software running on their phones. Every wireless network they pass gets logged automatically and uploaded to the central database. They have logged over 1 billion unique networks.
You can go to wigle.net, type in your home address, and there's a good chance you'll see your own Wi-Fi network sitting on a satellite map, along with every single one of your neighbors' networks. The coffee shop down the block, the office building, all of it. It's a time-lapse of the internet spreading across the physical world. You can watch entire neighborhoods go from having zero coverage in 2005 to being completely blanketed in wireless signals today. It's a powerful tool for researchers. And for you, it's a stunning reminder that even inside your own home, you're part of a global network that's being mapped, logged, and analyzed.
Number five, Futurepedia. It's basically a giant constantly updated catalog of every AI tool that exists. Think of it like a phone book, except instead of finding a plumber, you're finding the AI that will make plumbing obsolete. Right now, there are thousands of AI tools on this site. Tools that design your logos, tools that generate professional voice-overs from text, tools that write and debug code for you. There's even an AI that acts as a personal stylist by analyzing your photos. The site is neatly organized by category. Let's say you're a writer. You click on writing and suddenly you're looking at a list of AI tools that can do in 30 seconds what used to take you an entire afternoon. Futurepedia also shows you which tools are free, which have a free trial, and most importantly, which ones are going viral right now. You can see exactly what tools the smart money is rushing to use, which is either exciting or terrifying, depending on how secure you feel about your job.
Go to the site, find your industry, see what AI can already do, then either use those tools to get way ahead of your competition, or start planning your next career move. Either way, it's better to know than to be surprised.
Number four, Connected Papers. Imagine you need to get smart on a topic, fast. Let us say you want to understand how intermittent fasting affects brain function. You find one good research paper, but that paper is connected to 50 others, which are connected to 500 more. You are drowning in a sea of science. Connected Papers solves this. You give it one single research paper, and it builds you a visual map, a giant web of every related paper that matters. Think of it like a detective's conspiracy board, but instead of photos and red string, it uses circles and lines to show you which papers are most important. The bigger the circle, the more times other scientists have cited that paper. That means it is important. The closer two circles are, the more related their work is. You do not just see a list of articles, you see the entire field of study. You can spot the original foundational papers that started everything. You see the newest, most groundbreaking work. You see which researchers are the major players. It is used by PhD students, doctors, and journalists to get up to speed on complex topics in minutes, not months. It is like having a tour guide for the world of scientific knowledge.
Number three, windy.com. Most weather apps give you a little cartoon sun and tell you it's 72°. windy.com shows you the entire planet's atmosphere swirling in real time. It looks like something you'd see on a screen at NASA mission control. You open it and you see these beautiful flowing lines moving across a map of Earth. Those are the actual wind patterns happening right now. You can see hurricanes forming in the Atlantic. You can watch the jet stream snake across North America like a giant river in the sky. And it's not just wind. You can switch the layer to waves and watch ocean swells roll across the entire globe. Switch to air quality and see plumes of pollution drift over major cities or smoke from wildfires spread across continents. You can track lightning strikes, ocean currents, even carbon dioxide concentration. Pilots use it to plan routes. Sailors use it to avoid dangerous seas. Storm chasers use it to track tornadoes. And you can use it to actually understand why the weather is what it is. The whole thing is free. An incredible feat of data visualization just sitting on the internet. Meanwhile, your phone is showing you a smiley face and a 10% chance of rain.
Number two, privacy.com. You know that sketchy website that asks for your credit card to start a free trial. You know you'll forget to cancel it, but you type in your number anyway. Six months later, you find a charge from a company you've never heard of. privacy.com fixes that. It lets you generate virtual credit card numbers for you to use online. Think of it like a burner phone, but for your wallet. For every website you buy from, you create a new unique card number. That number is linked to your bank account, but the website never sees your real card info. If that website gets hacked tomorrow, the thieves get a card number that can't be used anywhere else. It's a dead end. Even better, you can set rules for each card. You can set a spending limit. So, if you sign up for that free trial and forget to cancel, the card just declines when they try to charge you $99. No awkward phone call, no begging for a refund. The card says no for you. You can also make a card a single-use card. It works for one transaction, and then it automatically destroys itself. It's the safest way to pay for things on websites you don't fully trust.
Number one, publicwww. Imagine you're trying to find all the houses built by one specific builder. You could knock on every door in the city, or you could just look for the unique custom-made bricks he uses on every project. That's what publicwww does, but for websites. Every website is built with code, and people who build multiple sites often reuse little snippets of that code. A unique Google Analytics ID, a specific line of custom text, a file name for a widget. These are digital fingerprints. Publicwww lets you search the actual source code of millions of websites for those fingerprints. So, if you find one suspicious website, you can grab a unique piece of its code, paste it into publicwww, and instantly, you're looking at a list of every other website built by the same person or group, even if they used fake names, even if the sites look totally different. The code gives them away. Marketers use this to find out what hidden software their competitors are using. Investigators use it to link entire networks of scam websites back to a single source. It's basically a fingerprint scanner for the entire internet, a search engine for what lies beneath the surface.
That's all for today. I'll be making similar videos in the future. Subscribe to see them.