You have got to be kidding. Where in government are you going to
find a division of sarcastic people? Dim-witted, certainly.
Opinionated, without doubt.
US Cyber-Warriors Battling
Islamic State on Twitter
The
United States has launched a social media offensive against the
Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, setting
out to win the war of ideas by ridiculing the militants with a
mixture of blunt language and sarcasm.
…
For
the past 18 months, US officials have targeted dozens of social
network accounts linked to Islamic radicals, posting comments, photos
and videos and often engaging in tit-fot-tat exchanges with those
which challenge America. At the US State Department, employees at
the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC),
created in 2011, manage an Arabic-language Twitter account
set up in 2012, an English-language equivalent
and a
Facebook
page, launched this week. [Just
learned about that Facebook thing, huh? Bob]..
Was
the idea to deploy blimps everywhere or just to protect congress?
Who was it again that had cruise missiles targeting Washington?
EPIC
FOIA Case – Army Blimps over Washington Loaded with Surveillance
Gear, Cost $1.6 Billion
by
Sabrina I.
Pacifici on Aug 30, 2014
“EPIC
has received substantial new
information
about the surveillance blimps, now
deployed over Washington, DC.
The documents were released to EPIC in a Freedom
of Information Act lawsuit
against the Department of the Army. The documents also reveal that
the Army paid Raytheon
$1.6 billion. EPIC will receive more documents about the
controversial program In October. For more information, see EPIC:
EPIC v. Army – Surveillance Blimps
and EPIC:
Freedom of Information Act Litigation.”
A generic Opt-Out form? Will that work? (Or is it merely an, “If
you do this, we will sue” notice?)
Merrill
Hope reports:
Breitbart Texas has learned that a new “Student Privacy
Protection Request Form” has been released by the Thomas More Law
Center (TMLC), a national non-profit public interest law firm based
in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The “data-mining” opt-out form was designed to protect students
from Big Data’s chokehold on the classroom. It was crafted with
the Common Core states in mind; however, it is relevant to non-Common
Core states, like Texas,
who are still tied to Fed
Led Ed’s reporting and database systems.
Read
more on Breitbart.
On one hand, this is “public data” since anyone can read and
record license plates. On the other hand, somewhere in this vast
collection of data might be something that a criminal could use to
violate someone's privacy. So the data is both public and private?
Cyrus
Farivar reports:
A Los Angeles Superior Court judge will not force local law
enforcement to release a week’s worth of all captured automated
license plate reader (ALPR, also known as LPR) data to two activist
groups that had sued for the release of the information, according to
a decision
issued on Thursday.
Read
more on Ars
Technica.
[From
the article:
The
organizations had claimed that these agencies were required to
disclose the data under the California
Public Records Act. In late July 2012, the ACLU
and its affiliates sent requests to local police departments and
state agencies across 38 states to request information on how LPRs
are used.
"The
[LPR] data contains hot list comparisons, [Was
that requested? Bob] the disclosure of which could
greatly harm a criminal investigation," Superior Court Judge
James Chalfant wrote
in his 18-page decision. "It
also would reveal patrol patterns [Or
we could follow the cars Bob] which could compromise
ongoing investigations, and even fixed point data could undermine
investigations. Disclosure could also be used by a criminal to find
and harm a third party. [Based
on where their car was two years ago? Bob] Balanced
against these harms is the interest in ascertaining law enforcement
abuse of the ALPR system and a general understanding of the picture
law enforcement receives of an individual from the system,
unsupported by any evidence as to how well the ALPR data will show
this information. The balancing works in favor of non-disclosure."
We
can because we say we can.
From
Public Intelligence:
The following report on the FBI’s use of national security letters
(NSL) from 2007-2009 was released
in August by the Department of Justice.
A Review of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Use of
National Security Letters: Assessment of Progress in
Implementing Recommendations and Examination of Use in 2007 through
2009
- 232 pages
- August 2014
Perspective. Worth reading.
Predictive
First: How A New Era Of Apps Will Change The Game
Over
the past several decades, enterprise technology has consistently
followed a trail that’s been blazed by top consumer tech brands.
This has certainly been true of delivery models – first there were
software CDs, then the cloud, and now all kinds of mobile apps. In
tandem with this shift, the way we build applications has changed and
we’re increasingly learning the benefits of taking a mobile-first
approach to software development.
Case
in point: Facebook, which of course began as a desktop app, struggled
to keep up with emerging mobile-first experiences like Instagram and
WhatsApp, and ended
up acquiring
them for billions of dollars to play catch up.
The
Predictive-First Revolution
Recent
events like the acquisition
of RelateIQ by Salesforce demonstrate that we’re
at the beginning of another shift toward a new age of
predictive-first applications. The value of data science
and predictive analytics has been proven again and again in the
consumer landscape by products like Siri, Waze and Pandora.
Big
consumer brands are going even deeper, investing in artificial
intelligence (AI) models such as “deep learning.” Earlier this
year, Google
spent $400 million to snap up AI company DeepMind, and just a few
weeks ago, Twitter
bought another sophisticated machine-learning startup called MadBits.
Even Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon, with claims that its
“Project
Adam” network is faster than the leading AI system, Google
Brain, and that its Cortana virtual personal assistant is smarter
than Apple’s Siri.
Free
is good!
Millions
of historic images posted to Flickr
An American academic is creating a searchable database of 12
million historic copyright-free images.
Kalev
Leetaru has already
uploaded 2.6 million pictures to Flickr, which
are searchable thanks to tags that have been automatically added.
The
photos and drawings are sourced from more than 600 million library
book pages scanned in by the Internet Archive organisation.
…
To achieve his goal, Mr Leetaru wrote his own software to work
around the way the books had originally been digitised.
The
Internet Archive had used an optical character recognition (OCR)
program to analyse each of its 600 million scanned pages in order to
convert the image of each word into searchable text.
As
part of the process, the software recognised which parts of a page
were pictures in order to discard them.
Mr
Leetaru's code used this information to go back to the original
scans, extract the regions the OCR program had ignored, and then save
each one as a separate file in the Jpeg picture format.
…
He added that he also
planned to offer his code to others.
"Any
library could repeat this process," he explained.
"That's
actually my hope, that libraries around the world run this same
process of their digitised books to constantly expand this universe
of images."
All
I need is a cup of coffee!
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