We only worry about the one's we (or
someone on the 'net) notice.
The
Creepiest Apps and Sites
Girls Around Me might be no more, but
these apps and sites are just as scary.
Despite the
outrage, though, it's the information that someone voluntarily
enters into a social networking site to reconnect with friends,
divulges in a survey for a chance to win an iPad, or inadvertently
uploads along with a photo of a night out that can be their undoing.
Apps like Girls Around Me merely exploit the vulnerabilities that
users themselves have created.
An update on yesterday's report
alphadogg writes with a distressing bit
of analysis of the training
materials acquired by the ACLU last week. From the article:
"Many law
enforcement agencies across the U.S. track mobile phones as part of
investigations, but only a minority ask for court-ordered warrants,
according to a report
released Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union. More than
90 law enforcement agencies said they track mobile phones during
investigations, but only
six reported receiving court-approved warrants after
demonstrating that there's probable cause of a crime, according to an
ACLU report based on public information requests
filed by the group last year."
The ACLU has a handy page allowing you
to see
if your local PD engages in such practices.
(Related) Apparently, there is a gold
mine of interesting articles contained in the ACLU data...
How
Apple and Google help police bypass iPhone, Android lock screens
Quel Dommage! I wish the actual
numbers were easily available because I suspect a 43% decline in the
Trillions of Francs they lost to pirates is significantly more that
their entire annual sales of “hard media”
"France has one of the
strictest anti-piracy
laws. After 17 months of operation, Hadopi has released a
report, claiming that illegal
P2P downloads have been reduced significantly in the country: the
studies they cite measured 43% and 66% decrease in copyright
infringement. But that huge amount of 'lost revenue' doesn't
seem to show up in the French recording industry, as the overall
recorded music market has
decreased by 3.9% in 2011. Even more interesting is that digital
music sales have skyrocketed in France. Could it be that it's not
piracy killing the traditional recording industry but digital
distribution?"
What hath Hillary wrought?
April 02, 2012
Revolution
@State: The Spread of Ediplomacy
Revolution
@State: The Spread of Ediplomacy, Fergus Hanson, March 2012
- "The US State Department has become the world’s leading user of ediplomacy. Ediplomacy now employs over 150 full-time personnel working in 25 different ediplomacy nodes at Headquarters. More than 900 people use it at US missions abroad. Ediplomacy is now used across eight different program areas at State: Knowledge Management, Public Diplomacy and Internet Freedom dominate in terms of staffing and resources. However, it is also being used for Information Management, Consular, Disaster Response, harnessing External Resources and Policy Planning. In some areas ediplomacy is changing the way State does business. In Public Diplomacy, State now operates what is effectively a global media empire, reaching a larger direct audience than the paid circulation of the ten largest US dailies and employing an army of diplomat-journalists to feed its 600-plus platforms. In other areas, like Knowledge Management, ediplomacy is finding solutions to problems that have plagued foreign ministries for centuries. The slow pace of adaptation to ediplomacy by many foreign ministries suggests there is a degree of uncertainty over what ediplomacy is all about, what it can do and how pervasive its influence is going to be. This report – the result of a four-month research project in Washington DC – should help provide those answers."
Perspective Clearly, I'm a very small
fish in an ever expanding pond...
April 02, 2012
NielsonWire
- Buzz in the Blogosphere: Millions More Bloggers and Blog Readers
- "Blogs are sometimes overlooked as a significant source of online buzz in comparison to social networking sites, yet consumer interest in blogs keeps growing. By the end of 2011, NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company, tracked over 181 million blogs around the world, up from 36 million only five years earlier in 2006. People are churning out more content than ever, and blogging remains an important avenue for consumer expression, according to an NM Incite report. Consumer-generated blogs have continued a strong upward trend since the company began tracking them in 2006, according to the U.S. Digital Consumer Report State of The Media: Q3-Q4 2011. While Facebook continues to be the social media juggernaut, don't count blogging out. Combined, the three major blogging platforms -- Blogger, Wordpress and Tumbler, in that order -- account for 80.5 million unique pairs of eyeballs in October 2011, NM Incite said today. (Facebook had 139.1 million unique that month.)" [a hat tip to all my blogging colleagues whose tenure is moving into a second decade - You're the beast!]
Perspective We don't teach numbers
that large in schools because they are “astronomical”
What
to Do With 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes of Astronomical Data per
Day
Over the next 12 years, thousands of
antennas will be built and installed across a 5,000-kilometer stretch
of the southern hemisphere. Satellite dishes, tripod-like dipole
antennas, and tiled circular stations will dot arid savannas and
comprise the world’s biggest, most accurate radio telescope ever
constructed: the Square
Kilometer Array.
… the SKA represents a new step in
terms of data management and the complexities of project
coordination. The instrument will generate an
exabyte of data every day – that would be
1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes – more than twice
the information sent around the internet on a daily basis and
100 times more information than the LHC produces.
Why can't we leave the dead, dead!
Help
Recreate Leisure Suit Larry For The 21st Century
This $500,000
Kickstarter project aims to recreate LSL using the latest in
graphics technology and the original game’s author, Al
Lowe, will be helping to regenerate his besuited cad.
Fifteen dollars gets you a digital copy
of the game while $10,000 gets you: [No comment
Bob]
If I'm going to combine sound and
pictures, shouldn't they be moving pictures?
BrainShark, is a service for narrating
and sharing slide presentations online. I've written about some of
their offerings in the past. Recently they launched a new service
for sharing PowerPoint presentations through Box.
Now you can share your PowerPoint files with others for viewing and
or file editing. Learn more about the new service in the video
below.
One of BrainShark's signature offerings
is their SlideShark service for sharing PowerPoint presentations over
iPads. SlideShark
converts your PowerPoint files without losing any of your original
formatting, transitions, or animations. To use SlideShark just
upload your PPT files to your free SlideShark account, SlideShark
converts the files for you, then you can access your converted files
on your iPad at anytime using the free SlideShark app.
BrainShark also offers myBrainshark
for Android to share presentations that you narrate on
myBrainshark. Here's how myBrainshark
works; upload a slide presentation that you've created then use your
computer's microphone to record your voice over each slide. If you
don't have a microphone My
Brainshark provides a phone number that you can call to create a
voice recording.
Do I have a book that Google hasn't
already scanned?
1DollarScan
Improves Its Book Digitization Service With Fine Tune and Dropbox
Users send their books, documents,
photos, and other printed material to the 1DollarScan office, which
then handles the scan process. For a price of $1 per “set” (for
books, one set means 100 pages; for documents, it’s 10), you get a
PDF that you can read on your smartphone or tablet. Don’t send any
physical copies that you’re particularly attached to, however,
because books will have their spines removed for scanning, and all of
the printed materials will be recycled two weeks after the scan.
Stay current... I could create
(curate?) a list of RSS feeds for each subject I teach, then have the
students create an account and add my OPML file to it...
Google Reader is receiving a lot of
flak for some of the changes they have made as of late. This opens
the door for a new competitor to step in and try to dethrone the
almighty Google. Subpug is hoping to be your replacement. They
offer a great feature set, and they are incredibly easy to use.
They especially cater to new RSS users,
who aren’t following thousands of feeds already. They offer a
bunch of pre-subscribed categories that make it easy to find what you
are in to, and subscribe to some popular sites in that category.
Best of all, you don’t need to sign up for any kind of account to
start using their service. You simply go to their website, and start
reading.
You can also import an OPML file to add
all the feeds you read on another reader.
For my students...
To begin the
conversion process, you’ll want to click the Convert
link across the top menu. From there, you can enter your text body
(up to 2,000 words). You’ll also need to enter a valid email
address, as they send the file as an attachment to your email.
Festvox
is extremely fast and free. Right from the main page, you’re able
to select one of four audio types and voices of either American,
Spanish, Indian, Scottish, or British.
vozMe
is just as quick as Festvox, but converts text to the MP3 format. No
registration is required and you can immediately download and save
your text to speech recordings. vozMe also supports conversion of the
Spanish language.
SpokenText
is by far the most extensive solution I’ve found. Though it
requires account registration, it’s completely worth it.
More than just
text to speech, Zamzar
is one of the most feature-rich and functional conversion tools on
the web. In our scenario, you’ll want to either convert your block
of text to a TXT file and upload it, or enter a URL
that you want to convert.
Someone might like this...
Who
Wants To Be a YouTube Millionaire?
DV Guide: You too can make millions!
Today, we tell you how you can join those who have used YouTube to
bank the big bucks.
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