The picture comes into
focus...
What
local cops learn, and carriers earn, from cellphone records
April 18, 2012 by Dissent
Bob Sullivan reports:
The war on drugs
has gone digital; but is it also a war on cellphone users?
That’s just one
of the questions raised by an msnbc.com investigation into use of
cellphone tracking data by local police departments across the
nation. Msnbc.com built a database of thousands of invoices issued
by cell phone network providers to cities after cops asked for caller
location and other personal information between 2009-2011. The
invoices were first obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union
and released to the public earlier this month.
The database
offers perhaps the first blow-by-blow accounting of several cities’
use of cellphone tracking as a crime-fighting tool and the potential
blow to civil liberties that the requests represent.
Read more on Red
Tape. It really gives a sense of what might be going on around
the country as well as how carriers bill – or don’t bill – for
services and how most requests do not involve
warrants.
“What happens at school,
stays at school?”
FL:
Pasco school board to consider limiting student photos on Facebook
April 17, 2012 by Dissent
Ronnie Blair reports:
Pasco County
students who use cellphones or other electronic devices to snap
photos of classmates, teachers or anyone else at school would need to
ask permission under planned revisions to the student code of
conduct.
They would also
need to ask the person’s permission before posting those photos on
social network sites or other Internet sites.
The same
prohibitions would apply to video.
Read more on the Pasco
Tribune.
So you can’t take a picture of a
school concert and upload it without getting every student’s
permission just to even take the picture?
You can’t snap photos of a high
school football game and upload it without getting every player’s
permission before you can even take a picture?
Prohibiting the taking of pictures in
some settings such as locker rooms, bathrooms, or the nurses’s
office makes some sense, but how far does this prohibition go?
[From the article:
Alfonso said the photography issue
raises some questions, especially regarding what constitutes consent.
"Whose consent is it?" he
asked. "Is a 10-year-old student going to be able to consent
over his parents' consent?"
Ever more knowledgeable
and well known people are being ignored...
Tim
Berners-Lee speaks out against U.K. surveillance bill
The man credited with inventing the
World Wide Web has come out against the British government's
contentious plans to monitor all Internet communication.
In an extensive interview with U.K.
newspaper the Guardian,
Tim Berners-Lee said the type of surveillance that the government was
proposing was tantamount to the "destruction of human rights"
and "the most important thing to do is to stop the bill as it is
at the moment."
I am amazed that a
motorcycle gang would stoop so low as to admit an IP Lawyer... (My
God! You don't think they're all IP Lawyers, do you?)
FBI:
Motorcycle Gang Trademarked Logo to Keep Narcs at Bay
We’ve always considered trademarking
as a way to protect a company’s intellectual property and to aid
consumers in identifying trusted products and services.
But on Tuesday, we stumbled on a novel
use of intellectual-property law put into play by an alleged
organized crime syndicate founded in Southern California.
The Vagos
Motocrycle Club, which the Federal Bureau of Investigation has
declared an outlaw motorcycle gang, has trademarked
its jacket patch, replete with the trademark registration symbol,
“in an effort to prevent law enforcement agencies from inserting
undercover officers into their organization,” according to an FBI
memo that surfaced on Tuesday.
The 2011 “law enforcement sensitive”
memo
(.pdf), unearthed by the Public
Intelligence blog, warns infiltrating law enforcement officers
that they “may be placing themselves in danger” if they don’t
have the registration symbol at the bottom of the 600-member club’s
patch, which is an insignia of Lokia, the god of
mischief. [The patron saint of lawyers? Bob]
Perspective
Amazon’s
Secretive Cloud Carries 1 Percent of the Internet
Amazon’s cloud computing
infrastructure is growing so fast that it’s silently becoming a
core piece of the internet.
That’s according to an analysis done
by DeepField Networks, a
start-up that number-crunched several weeks’ worth of anonymous
network traffic provided by internet service providers, mainly in
North America.
They found that one-third
of the several million users in the study visited a website that uses
Amazon’s infrastructure each day.
… It’s popular with companies
that see big spikes and drops in computing demand. Netflix
uses it to handle the back-end of its streaming service, which is
in hot demand on Sunday nights and then gets quiet a few hours later.
And a supercomputing company called Cycle Computing even managed to
build
one of the world’s 50 most powerful supercomputers on the
Amazon cloud.
… The company operates several data
centers — it calls them “availability zones” — in Virginia,
the West Coast, Singapore, Tokyo and Europe and, clearly, they have
been growing fast in the past few years.
According to data
compiled by Adrian Cockcroft, director of cloud architecture at
Netflix, Amazon has increased the number of IP addresses assigned to
servers in those data centers more than fivefold in the past two
years — from just over a quarter-million IP addresses in February
2010 to more than 1.7 million last month.
That could show that Amazon’s
business is growing even faster than most people realize (Gartner
pegs its growth rate at about 30 percent year over year) or it could
mean that Amazon is simply loading up on IP addresses in anticipation
of future growth.
Perspective
"Yet another move by IBM out of
end-user hardware, Toshiba
will be buying IBM's retail point-of-sale systems business for $850M.
Is it really a good idea for a company defined by good (and in this
case, high-margin) hardware to sell it off in favor of nebulous
consulting stuff? 'Like IBM's spin-offs of its PC, high-end printer,
and disk drive manufacturing businesses to Lenovo, Ricoh, and Hitachi
respectively in the past decade, IBM is not just selling off the RSS
division but creating a holding company where it
will have a stake initially but which it will eventually sell.'
Is there really no money in hardware anymore?
"
For
my “starving students” – worth a look. (Also suggests what the
'missing parts' must cost)
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/04/9-bargain-bin-gadgets-for-the-struggling-99-percent/?pid=3236
9
Bargain-Bin Gadgets for the Struggling 99 Percent
"A
gigabyte here, a gigabyte there, pretty soon, you're talking big
data" (with apologies to Everett Dirksen)
If you are an Internet user, it is more
than likely that you store some of your content in the cloud be it
Facebook, Google Docs, Dropbox or others. ZeroPC allows you to
connect all your cloud storage in one single space and navigate
through it seamlessly. The services supported are Box.net, Dropbox,
Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Flickr, Google Docs, Instagram, Picasa,
Sky Drive and Sugar Sync.
The
“Fast Food University” model? “Over One Billion educated?”
Last fall, 3 Stanford
classes were offered free, online, and open to the general public:
Artificial
Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Intro to Databases. Their
popularity far exceeded the university’s initial expectations from
what I can gather – hundreds of thousands of students in a class’ll
do that, I suppose.
… And now, two other Stanford
professors, on leave but still affiliated with the university, are
officially unveiling their startup, Coursera.
… I covered
Coursera earlier this year. But today the startup is pulling
back the curtain on its plans, announcing that it’s raised $16
million in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New
Enterprise Associates. It has also secured partnerships with four
universities – Princeton, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and
the University of Pennsylvania – which will offer open online
courses through the Coursera platform.
Over
1 million students have already signed up for the
initial courses that Coursera’s had posted on its website.
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