Perhaps he could ask
Christo to cover the country in fabric?
Sudan’s
Dictator Wants Satellites to Stop Spying on His Crimes
Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has
issues with satellites. It’s not that he would mind some of his
own, if Sudan suddenly developed a working space program. It’s
rather those pesky foreign satellites snooping on Bashir’s war
crimes and state-orchestrated genocide that he wants to get rid of.
On Wednesday, Bashir called on the
African Union (AU) to find ways to “protect”
the continent from spy satellites. The dictator urged the AU to
“legislate
protection of [Africa's] space,” as the state-owned Sudan
Vision website reported, in tandem with developing a new unified
space agency. “I’m calling for the biggest project, an African
space agency,” Bashir said during remarks at a telecommunications
conference in Khartoum. “Africa
must have its space agency,” he added.
The dictator — who is wanted
by the International Criminal Court regarding his role in the
Darfur genocide — has, er, particular reasons for wanting the spy
satellites to stay out. Last year, satellites from private
space monopoly DigitalGlobe uncovered what appeared to be
evidence
of mass killings carried out during Sudan’s
ongoing civil war. But whatever Bashir’s motivations, a
continent-wide space agency actually isn’t a bad idea.
Interesting
Re-Identification
Risks and Myths, Superusers and Super Stories (Part I: Risks and
Myths)
September 6, 2012 by Dissent
Daniel Barth-Jones has a critique of
re-identification studies that informs the conversation about risks:
In a recent Health
Affairs blog article, I provide a critical re-examination of
the famous re-identification of Massachusetts Governor William Weld’s
health information. This famous re-identification attack was
popularized by recently appointed FTC Senior Privacy Adviser, Paul
Ohm, in his 2010 paper “Broken
Promises of Privacy”. Ohm’s paper provides a
gripping account of Latanya Sweeney’s famous re-identification of
Weld’s health insurance data using a Cambridge, MA voter list.
The Weld attack has been frequently cited echoing Ohm’s claim
that computer scientists can purportedly identify individuals within
de-identified data with “astonishing ease.”
However, the voter
list supposedly used to “re-identify” Weld contained only
54,000 residents and Cambridge demographics at the time of
the re-identification attempt show that the population was nearly
100,000 persons. So the linkage between the data sources could not
have provided definitive evidence of re-identification. The findings
from this critical re-examination of the famous Weld
re-identification attack indicate that he was quite likely
re-identifiable only by virtue of his having been a public figure
experiencing a well-publicized hospitalization, rather than there
being any actual certainty to his purported re-identification via the
Cambridge voter data. His “shooting-fish-in-a-barrel”
re-identification had several important advantages which would not
have existed for any random re-identification target. It is clear
from the statistics for this famous re-identification attack that the
purported method of voter list linkage could not have definitively
re-identified Weld and, while the odds were somewhat better than a
coin-flip, they fell quite short of the certainty that is implied by
the term “re-identification”.
The full detail of
this methodological flaw underlying the famous Weld/Cambridge
re-identification attacks is available in my recently
released paper. This fatal flaw, the inability to confirm that
Weld was indeed the only man with in his ZIP Code with his birthdate,
exposes the critical logic underlying all re-identification attacks.
Read more of this commentary on
Concurring
Opinions. Part II of his commentary can be found here.
There is always someone who notices
something odd about the Emperor's new clothes...
"According
to British daily The Telegraph, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has warned that
plans to monitor individuals' use of the internet would result in
Britain losing
its reputation as an upholder of web freedom. The plans, by Home
Secretary Theresa May, would force British ISPs and other service
providers to keep records of every phone call, email and website
visit in Britain. Sir Tim has told the Times: 'In Britain, like in
the US, there has been a series of Bills that would give government
very strong powers to, for example, collect data. I am worried about
that.' Sir Tim has also warned that the UK may wind up slipping down
the list of countries with the most Internet freedom, if the proposed
data-snooping laws pass parliament. The draft bill extends the type
of data that internet service providers must store for at least 12
months. Providers would also be required to keep details of a much
wider set of data, including use of social network sites, webmail and
voice calls over the internet."
Jimmy Wales doesn't
seem to be a very big fan of the UK snooping either.
“Let us check to see if you are
related to a rapist.” Would anyone even consider doing this in the
US?
"In an
attempt to solve a rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl, the Dutch
police have asked
8080 men to provide their DNA. All these people lived 5 km or
less from the crime scene at the time of the murder. This reopened
cold case is the first large-scale attempt not to hunt the rapist and
killer but to locate his close or distant male relatives. All data
gathered will be destroyed after the match with this particular
murder. There seems to be great public support for this attempt."
Shades of The
Blooding.
Perhaps our message is
getting out?
September 05, 2012
Pew
Survey - Privacy and Data Management on Mobile Devices
Privacy
and Data Management on Mobile Devices, by Jan Lauren Boyles,
Aaron Smith, Mary Madden. Sep 5, 2012.
"More than half of
mobile application users have uninstalled or avoided certain apps due
to concerns about the way personal information is shared or collected
by the app, according to a nationally representative
telephone survey conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet &
American Life Project. In all, 88% of U.S. adults now own cell
phones, and 43% say they download cell phone applications or “apps”
to their phones. Among app users, the survey found:
- 54% of app users have decided to not install a cell phone app when they discovered how much personal information they would need to share in order to use it
- 30% of app users have uninstalled an app that was already on their cell phone because they learned it was collecting personal information that they didn’t wish to share
- Taken together, 57% of all app users have either uninstalled an app over concerns about having to share their personal information, or declined to install an app in the first place for similar reasons."
We called it “incidental
intelligence”
September 05, 2012
Users
increasingly sharing photos over text on social media
eMarketer
- Users turn to Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter itself to post
pictures. "As the number of Twitter users grows, consumers
are using the site to share photos, videos and other links with their
followers. eMarketer forecasts that US adult Twitter users will reach
31.8 million in 2013, up 14.9% from the 27.7 million users in 2012.
As the base grows, the way consumers use the site and what they share
is also changing. In July 2012, website analysis company Diffbot
looked at 750,000 links posted to Twitter worldwide and found that
36% were images, 16% were articles and 9% were videos. Additionally,
8% linked to a product, and 7% each linked to a site’s front page,
a status update or a page error. Games, location-sharing, recipes
and reviews each made up less than 2% of links."
What process/practice
would allow you to force them to lower their price for
you? That's the one I want to patent.
"A newly-granted Google patent
on Dynamic
Pricing of Electronic Content describes how information gleaned
from your search history and social networking activity can be used
against you by providing tell-tale clues for your propensity to pay
jacked-up prices to 'reconsume' electronic content, such as 'watching
a video recording, reading an electronic book, playing a game, or
listening to an audio recording.' The patent is illustrated with
drawings showing how some individuals can be
convinced
to pay 4x what others will be charged for the same item.
From the patent: 'According to one innovative aspect of the subject
matter described by this specification, a system may use this
information to tailor the price that is offered to the particular
user to repurchase the particular item of electronic content. By not
applying discounts for users that may, in relation to a typical user,
be more inclined to repurchase a particular product, profits may
increase.' Hey, wasn't this kind of dynamic pricing once
considered evil?"
For my entrepreneurs...
What
the Heck Is Homestuck,
And How’d It Get $750K on Kickstarter?
When I heard that a webcomic called
Homestuck had raised three quarters of a million dollars
on Kickstarter within 24 hours for a videogame version, I set out to
research what it was. Three hours later, I was not much closer to
understanding it.
Homestuck, and the rabid
fandom of its millions of readers, is difficult to explain. Entire
blogs have been started just to answer the question, “What is
Homestuck?”
Here’s the best I can do: It’s a
book/webcomic/Flash animation/videogame hybrid, all created by Andrew
Hussie. When Hussie revealed a
Kickstarter campaign to fund creation of a Homestuck
adventure game on Tuesday, his fans helped him meet
his $700,000 goal within just one day. He plans to
release the game in 2014.
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