Weekly Updates #2
New blogs, podcast episodes, awesome osint tools and some resources.
Welcome to the first edition of Weekly Updates, your weekly summary of what happened in OSINT this week.
This week’s issue includes...
🔍✨ This Week in OSINT
📖Read. 🎬Watch. 🎙️Listen. To…
📰✨ Newsletter Spotlight
🛠️✨ OSINT Toolbox
🔧📈 OSINT Tool Updates
🎁🔍 Mystery Box
OSINTCon 2.0, organised by OSINT Ambition in partnership with TOVEK, is back on popular demand. This time we have more amazing speakers, more amazing talks and some surprises too. The conference will be on 1st and 2nd November 2025, 10 AM to 8 PM GMT with a break in between. Claim your VIP pass now at https://osintconference.com/
(Call for Speaker is also open now, apply on the website.)
This Week in OSINT
Read, Watch & Listen
Read LLMs vs. Geolocation: GPT-5 performs worse than other AI models
Read A Chinese Fentanyl Smuggling Network’s Footprints in Japan.
Read The Open Source Tool That Has Preserved 150,000 Pieces of Online Evidence.
Read What Can Open Sources Reveal About Beijing’s Deadly Floods?
Read Mobile Phishers Target Brokerage Accounts in ‘Ramp and Dump’ Cashout Scheme.
Listen to NeedleStack’s new episode, Intelligence tradecraft in the digital age | E87
Listen to the first episode of The OSINT Podcast, Episode 1 – OSINT in Action: From Counterterrorism to Chinese Content.
Listen to the new episode by James Intelligence Podcast on US-Mexico border security.
Listen to the new episode of StageTalk with Bellingcat, Speaking of Violence with Leyla Hussein.
Listen to this podcast episode, How to Operationalise OSINT in the Defence Sector.
Newsletter Spotlight
- published VSCO: The Not-So-Safe Space, describing how it can be used in an Investigation due to a lack of privacy and security in the app.
- published A Free OSINT Lesson: Go Job Hunting to Find Your Target.
OSINT Toolbox
GEM - A search engine for ads selling second-hand clothing worldwide, on various platforms.
Kagi - Privaсy focused search engine that aggregates results from different sources.
Space Frontiers - AI assistant to search for answers to questions in a specific dataset. Choose one - PubMed, BioMed, Wikipedia, Telegram, Reddit or other).
TattoDo - A very large database of tattoos from around the world. Even for rare requests, there is an endless feed of posts from tattoo artists who share their work. Useful as an additional source of information for identifying people with tattoos.
Kagi Translator - Translations across 244 languages using advanced language models.
Nanonets OCR - Hugging Face space for particularly heavy text recognition tasks in Images/PDFs. Good at reading tilted, blurred and other unreadable text.
Image Upscaling & Restoration using GFPGAN Algorithm - Hugging Face space that restores blurred images. The faces are sometimes looks creepy, but more natural than many similar tools.
TraceTracks - an OSINT tool that discovers YouTube videos basted on SoundCloud tracks.
Credit for this section goes to
Mystery Box
If you use ChatGPT and some other AI chat tools in a browser (including Gemini), your prompts are saved in your browsing history. Know more.
Anti-detect Tools - List of anti-detect and humanising tools and browsers, including captcha solvers and SMS-activation.
Obsidian OSINT Templates - These templates are suggestions of how the Obsidian notetaking tool can be used during an OSINT investigation.
Obsidian OSINT Templates & Plugins - Custom templates for OSINT investigations designed to advance pivoting.
Thanks for reading our newsletter. Please feel free to provide feedback and suggestions for this new version. You can contact me at @dheerajydv19 on Twitter, LinkedIn and Telegram.