The
NSA is in the intelligence gathering business. How else can it act
and still achieve its goals?
Alex
Abdo writes:
Earlier today, a former State Department civil servant named John Tye
published an
important op-ed in the Washington Post, explaining that
the NSA has created a giant loophole in Americans’ right to
privacy. While we now know a good deal about the NSA’s spying on
American soil, Tye explains, the NSA’s powers to conduct
surveillance on foreign soil should trouble us even more.
Surveillance on foreign soil takes place under Executive Order 12333,
an authority that contains few meaningful protections for the privacy
of Americans.
Read
more on ACLU.
Too
good to be true?
–
is a free smartphone app which gives you private texting and calling.
Just tap “Wipe” and
your messages are erased instantly, everywhere. Wiper
wipes all sides of a conversation – your
phone and your friend’s, as well as any temporary record
kept on Wiper servers. See when messages have been read or wiped.
Plus, get notified if a friend snaps a screenshot or forwards a photo
or video.
[From
the website:
Call
worldwide for free with Wiper’s app-to-app calling. To ensure
privacy, calls are encrypted and Wiper keeps no call log.
Another
case of not seeing the “self-surveillance” built into the “cool
technology?” (Also another case of “that only applies to second
class citizens”).
The
Rise of the Wedding Drone
When
most people hear the word “drone,” they probably think of killing
machines that patrol war zones.
Now
a new kind of commercial drone phenomenon has taken off in the United
States. People now use small quad copter drones to even
shoot photos and videos for their weddings.
What
seems like a stranger than fiction phenomenon is actually a new
craze across the country. A congressman last month used
a drone to record his own wedding and now is under investigation
by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the government agency
that regulates the nation’s airspace, because the agency still has
an explicit ban
on drone flights for commercial purposes. New York
representative Sean Patrick Maloney reportedly hired a local
videography company to operate the drone to get aerial shots of his
big day in New York’s picturesque Hudson Valley. Ironically,
Maloney sits on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Aviation
Subcommittee, which oversees the FAA.
...and
then there are companies that try to grab everything the search
engines are asked to remove.
There’s
a “Right To Be Forgotten” Industry—and It’s Booming
…
“Online image management has long been in the business of
producing new content so you have a better persona online,” says
Cayce Myers, a professor at Virginia Tech and legal research editor
for the Institute
for Public Relations. “Here they’re doing the reverse.”
Online
reputation management is a growing business that is now being boosted
by the E.U. ruling. For a fee that can amount to thousands of
dollars a month, companies take on clients and scrub clean their
search results by creating search engine-optimized content that hog
up the first few pages of search results on Google.
…
Bertrand Girin, the founder of a France-based reputation management
company, Reputation VIP, has created a spin-off service that
specifically to designed to help people make “right to be
forgotten” requests to Google. Aptly named Forget.Me,
it lets users choose from one of 40 boilerplate requests in nine
separate categories in order to send Google a pre-formulated request.
The service, which is
free, allows users to bypass some of the thorny legal
questions and the difficulty of properly structuring a request.
“When Google put its form online, we looked at the demand from the
public and we saw a gap,” says Girin. “We said, ‘let’s help
people understand what their problem is.’”
Makes
buying so easy you won't even notice that you bought something!
Let
The Follower Beware: Facebook And Twitter Get Serious About Commerce
…
Facebook is doing a “limited” test that involves putting a “Buy”
button within ads on its platform. For Facebook, the big deal is
that clicking on that button doesn’t take prospective purchasers
out of Facebook. They can buy whatever it is that’s being
advertised and go right back to lengthy brawls about politics or
sharing Weird Al videos. Talk about nirvana!
For
my Data Mining and Data Analysis students.
One
Simple Reason You Need a Chief Data Officer
…
articles and blog posts advocating
for a chief data officer give me pause. On the one
hand, I firmly believe data is an enterprise-wide endeavor and an
incredibly important strategic asset. But I also realize I’ve
become biased since covering the topic for all these years.
Data
integration expert David Linthicum seems to shares my hesitation.
“I’m
not a big fan of creating positions around trends in technology,”
he
writes in a recent Actian post.
…
Nonetheless, he’s arguing that there is a very real business need
for a Chief Data Officer — within the ranks of IT — because data,
he writes, is not a trend.
…
Linthicum offers a bulleted list of advantages that large
organizations could gain from appointing a CDO. For instance, he
says a CDO could help the organization achieve a common approach to
data integration. I suspect that alone would pay for the position.
…
Reading through his thorough and rational argument for a CDO, I
realized there’s actually a very simple, single reason why a CDO
makes sense: No one else is
doing the job.
For
my Math students.
Symbols
From
the MathCentre this very
clear nine page leaflet describes symbols and notation
in common use in Mathematics, for each symbol we learn what to say,
what the symbol means and where appropriate an example is given; it
is also possible to search the Math Centre site for further details.
I'd
say this is something for the student bike club, but in Colorado we
actually look for hills (they're much smaller than mountains).
New
Google Maps 8.2 shows elevation and allows voice commands
…
The maps not only show you the cycling routes, but also the
elevation. Along every route, small images are placed, letting the
user know about the elevation. This information helps the cyclists
on deciding whether it is wise to take a route, especially when it is
uphill. It estimates the slope and distance of the hill.
Start
laughing...
…
Australia’s head of curriculum review, Kevin
Donnelly, says
that corporal punishment is “very effective.”
[I'm gonna make this into a
BIG poster! Bob]
…
From law professor James
Grimmelman, who’s been leading the charge questioning
the ethics of the research and publication of the infamous “Facebook
study”: a lengthy letter (PDF)
demanding a retraction of the PNAS article and a review of the
practices surrounding human research and social media.
For
all my students. I found this article on my RSS reader.
What
Is RSS and How Can It Improve Your Life?
…
Just three simple words can change the way you use and consume
information – forever: Really Simple Syndication, or RSS.
Functioning
like a customizable, digital newspaper, RSS benefits almost everyone
– from working professionals wanting to keep abreast of the latest
in their field to hobbyists looking for distractions.
…
RSS simplifies, organizes and delivers web content, without
visiting a website.
