Interesting article. Not sure it makes
me feel comfortable.
"A profile of Facebook's CSO
reveals that his 70-person security team includes 25
people dedicated solely to handling information requests from law
enforcement. They get thousands of calls
and e-mails from authorities each week, though
Facebook requires police to get a warrant for
anything beyond a subscriber's name, email and IP address. [Bad
reporting alert... Bob] CSO Joe Sullivan says
that some government agency tried to push Facebook to start
collecting more information about their users for the benefit of
authorities: 'Recently a government agency
wanted us to start logging information we don't log. [and
here I thought they logged everything Bob] We
told them we wouldn't start logging that piece of data because we
don't need it to provide a good product. We talked to our general
counsel. The law is not black-and-white. That agency thinks they
can compel us to. We told them to go to court. They haven't done
that yet.'"
[From the article:
Sullivan and his team actively police
the site for user data worth volunteering to the
authorities. [There has to be some... Bob]
… The company gives law enforcement
“basic subscriber information” on requests
accompanied
by subpoenas: a user’s name, e-mail address
and IP address (which reveals approximate location). Sullivan
insists that everything else—photos, status updates, private
messages, friend lists, group memberships, pokes and all the
rest—requires a warrant.
… He claims that “99.9% of the
time” when Facebook resists a request, the government backs down.
[Which leaves a few every week that they honor? Bob]
Attention angry customers!
Judge
Awards iPhone User $850 in Throttling Case
When AT&T started slowing down the
data service for his iPhone, Matt Spaccarelli, an unemployed truck
driver and student, took the country's largest telecommunications
company to small claims court. And won.
… Spaccarelli could have many
imitators. AT&T has some 17 million customers with "unlimited
data" plans who can be subject to throttling. That's nearly
half of its smartphone users. AT&T forbids them from
consolidating their claims into a class action or taking them to a
jury trial. That leaves small claims actions and arbitration.
How important are trends? Are you
ready for the next big shift in your field?
"Cultural Observatory at
Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts is to index the whole
of the ArXiv pre-print database of papers from the physical sciences,
breaking down the full text of the articles into component phrases to
see
how often a particular word or phrase appears relative to others
— a measure of how 'meme-like' a term is. The team has already
applied a similar approach to 5 million books in the Google Books
database to produce their n-gram
viewer. But the Google Books database carries with it a major
limitation: because many of the works are
under copyright, users cannot be pointed to the actual source
material. [Perhaps
they mean “can't be given a copy of the data...” Bob]
Applying the tool to ArXiv means it could be used to chart trends in
high-energy physics, for example: a quickening pulse of papers citing
the Higgs boson, for example, or a peak in papers about
supersymmetry, a theory which may soon be waning."
A handy techie tool?
Windows does not provide its users with
the facility to selectively disable USB device types. For example,
if you want to disable all storage devices connected to your computer
from within Windows, you do not have a convenient solution to employ.
But here to help and make the process easier is a tool called USB
Manager.
Bad science or bad
reporting? I was under the impression that they (scientists on
either side of the Global Warming debate) knew how much carbon cars &
truck contributed and thought it was an alarming amount. Now I see
that they didn't know and still thought it was trivial. See why I no
longer trust science reporting?
"Gasoline-burning engines put
out twice
as much black
carbon as was previously measured, according to new field
methods tested in Toronto. The tiny particles known as black carbon
pack a heavy punch when it comes to climate change, by trapping heat
in the atmosphere and by alighting atop, and melting, Arctic ice.
With an eye toward controlling these emissions, researchers have
tracked black carbon production from fossil fuel combustion in
gasoline-burning cars and diesel-burning trucks. Until this
study was published [abstract of paywalled article], gas-burning
vehicles had been thought to be relatively minor players."
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