Tuesday, March 13, 2012


This is not surprising. There are legitimate reasons to store data in the cloud and not everyone gets a copy of the “Companies the RIAA wants us to bust” memo.
MegaUpload's users may include U.S. government officials
When the file-swapping site MegaUpload was shuttered by the U.S. government--and consequentially its offices raided, $42 million of its assets frozen, and its leader Kim DotCom arrested--some officials might not have thought of unintended consequences, such as the loss of legitimate files.
They also might not have realized that they too might be outed as having used MegaUpload.
During an interview with TorrentFreak this week, DotCom said, "Guess what--we found a large number of Mega accounts from U.S. government officials, including the Department of Justice and the U.S. Senate." [Will these people recover their data while others can not? Bob]


“Plain language” requires twice as many lawyers working twice as long.
A privacy policy in plain language? Be still, my heart.
March 13, 2012 by Dissent
Peter Fleischer points us to some examples of plain language privacy policies:
….Many government regulations aren’t really drafted for normal citizens. They’re drafted by and for lawyers, lobbyists, specialists, and regulators. The same is often true of privacy policies. I’m in the school that thinks that privacy policies should be drafted for the general public, and that they should look something like plainlanguage.gov’s privacy policy. Even the IRS, which is not an agency generally celebrated for its brevity of its prose, managed to publish a privacy policy that is exactly 7 sentences long.
Wouldn’t it be great if businesses wrote so simply and clearly?


Forgive me loyal readers. I will immediately add stories about Justin Bieber to this blog. (er.. What's a Justin Bieber?)
Reading Over Your Shoulder: Social Readers and Privacy Law
March 12, 2012 by Dissent
Margot Kaminski has an article in Wake Forest L. Rev. Online that begins:
My friends, who are generally well educated and intelligent, read a lot of garbage. I know this because since September 2011, their taste in news about Justin Bieber, Snooki, and the Kardashians has been shared with me through “social readers” on Facebook.[1] Social readers instantaneously list what you are reading on another website, without asking for your approval before disclosing each individual article you read. They are an example of what Facebook calls “frictionless sharing,” where Facebook users ostensibly influence each other’s behavior by making their consumption of content on other websites instantly visible to their friends.[2] Many people do not think twice about using these applications, and numerous publications have made them available, including the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Guardian.[3]
I intend to prompt conversation about social readers on three fronts. First, social readers are part of a shift toward real name policies online, and, for a number of reasons, should remain opt-in rather than becoming the default setting. Second, if people do choose to use these applications, they should know that they are making that choice against a backdrop of related battles in privacy law concerning the right to consume content without a third party sharing your activity more broadly. And third, when individuals choose to use these applications, they may be sharing their habits more widely than they think.
Read the full article on Wake Forest Law Review.


How (and how much) will this change the game?
‘Personal Cloud’ to Replace PC by 2014, Says Gartner
There’s no doubting the cloud invasion. But the research firm Gartner believes the personal cloud will replace the PC as the center of our digital lives sooner than you might think: 2014.
“Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices,” Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement on Monday. “Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life.”
Google plans a cloud-centered future with Google Play and its market-leading Android mobile OS. But the personal computer will also not miss out on the cloud, as Microsoft and Apple are planning to weave the cloud into the next generation of their desktop operating systems, Windows 8, and OS X Mountain Lion.
But a cloud-happy future will not be as easy as that, because “it will require enterprises to fundamentally rethink how they deliver applications and services to users.”

(Related) How much more useful if you can access this anywhere on any device?
MrSeb writes about a really cool project from Microsoft's speech research group. From the article:
"Microsoft Research has shown off software that translates your spoken words into another language while preserving the accent, timbre, and intonation of your actual voice. In a demo of the prototype software, Rick Rashid, Microsoft's chief research officer, said a long sentence in English, and then had it translated into Spanish, Italian, and Mandarin. You can definitely hear an edge of digitized 'Microsoft Sam,' but overall it's remarkable how the three translations still sound just like Rashid. The translation requires an hour of training, but after that there's no reason why it couldn't be run in real time on a smartphone, or near-real-time with a cloud backend. Imagine this tech in a two-way setup. You speak into your smartphone, and it comes out in their language. Then, the person you're talking to speaks into your smartphone and their voice comes out in your language."
The Techfest 2012 keynote has a demo of the technology around minute 13:00.

(Related) Remember, they call it American Sign Language because no one else uses it. It's a unique language.
UK Researchers Plan Mobile Real-Time Sign Language Translation App
… A team of British researchers, however, is making the attempt, creating a tool that translates a set of standard signs into readable text, in real time. It’s called the Portable Sign language Translator, and it should be out next year.


Once again, I offer myself as taste tester. (Notice that there are very few snarky comments following this article – everyone wants a taste!)
An anonymous reader tipped us to an interview with Phillip Lee, author of Brewtarget, one of the best pieces of Free brewing software available (it's even in Debian). The interview discusses some of the technical decisions made (why Qt and Cmake?), and mentions a bit of the plans for future development: "The way the database was designed previously really hadn't been changed since the my first code in 2008, and we were running into a brick wall with some of the features we wanted. After we move to SQLite, there will be quite a lot of new features like being able to search through the ingredients in the database and stuff like that. I also plan to add some water chemistry tools for people that like to alter the ions and salts to fit a particular profile." (The last bit about water salt modifications comes as a relief to at least this brewer.)

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