“Everybody does it!” But probably not after
they think about this for a while.
AT&T
hit with $100M fine for throttling "unlimited" data
The Federal Communications Commission announced on
Wednesday it will impose a whopping $100 million fine on AT&T to
punish the phone carrier for severely slowing down the data speeds of
customers who have “unlimited data plans.”
According to the FCC, it received thousands of
complaints over AT&T’s slow mobile internet, and that the
carrier failed to notify subscribers it was providing
slower-than-advertised speeds.
“The Enforcement Bureau’s investigation
revealed that millions of AT&T customers were affected. The
customers who were subject to speed reductions were slowed for an
average of 12 days per billing cycle, significantly
impeding their ability to use common data applications such as GPS
mapping or streaming video,” said the FCC in a news
release.
… “Unlimited means unlimited,” said FCC
Enforcement Bureau Chief Travis LeBlanc. [Honesty,
what a concept! Bob]
Interesting that AT&T does poorly here too.
EFF’s
2015 Data Privacy Report Lauds Apple, Dropbox, Slams Verizon
Digital rights organization the Electronic
Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published its fifth annual Who
has your back? report into online service providers’
transparency and privacy practices when it comes to government
requests for accessing user data.
The organization notes a general transformation
among major Internet players to be more transparent with users about
data requests over the past four years. But for its latest report
it’s tightened evaluation criteria, arguing that “it’s time to
expect more from Silicon Valley”.
When innovation crosses the line?
Beware the
Listening Machines
One of my great pleasures in life is attending
conferences on fields I'm intrigued by, but know nothing about. (A
second pleasure is writing about these events.) So when my friend
Kate Crawford invited me to a daylong “Listening
Machine Summit,” I could hardly refuse.
What's a listening machine? The example of
everyone's lips was Hello
Barbie, a version of the impossibly proportioned doll that will
listen to your child speak and respond in kind.
… Barbie accomplishes this magic by recording
your child’s question, uploading it to a speech recognition server,
identifying a recognizable keyword (“New York”) and offering an
appropriate synthesized response. The company behind Barbie’s
newfound voice, ToyTalk,
uses your child’s utterance to help tune their speech recognition,
likely storing the voice file for future use.
… listening machines trigger all three aspects
of the surveillance holy trinity:
- They're pervasive, starting to appear in all aspects of our lives.
- They're persistent, capable of keeping records of what we've said indefinitely.
- They process the data they collect, seeking to understand what people are saying and acting on what they're able to understand.
To reduce the creepy nature of their surveillant
behavior, listening systems are often embedded in devices designed to
be charming, cute, and delightful: toys, robots, and smooth-voiced
personal assistants.
There are things your App can do that you really
need to think about. Do you need to do what the App allows you to
do?
'Find My
Phone' Leads To Tragic Shooting Death Of Man Seeking Stolen
Smartphone
... Location technology means that, at least
while the phone is on, we can see right where it is on a map. This
week, an 18-year-old’s attempt to retrieve his smartphone
in Ontario, Canada ended in tragedy.
Jeremy Cook apparently left his smartphone in a
taxi and then looked the phone up online,
at which point he discovered that someone else had picked it up. He
and a relative went out to locate the person carrying his phone and
ended up confronting three people in a car outside a strip mall in
London, Ont. During the confrontation, Cook was shot multiple times
and died at the scene.
Another player thinks they can lock out the NSA
and China. Is the apparent security a competitive advantage?
Reddit, the self-described “front page of the
Internet,” will start encrypting all of its traffic by the end of
the month, joining other major Internet players that have made
similar moves in recent months.
… Many digital giants, including Facebook,
Google and Wikipedia, have all already transitioned to what’s known
as HTTPS everywhere. Most websites continue to use the unencrypted
HTTP protocol to communicate data.
… Even the U.S. government recently said
all federal websites will only provide service through an encrypted
connection by the end of 2016.
But the tech community has repeatedly clashed
with the government over encryption, accusing it of not supporting
strong, robust encryption.
Government officials maintain that while strong
encryption is key to free speech and fighting oppression, it also
enables criminals to operate without fear of detection.
Yet another branch of government being “managed”
by people who can't manage? Are we guaranteeing that only second
rate controllers are guiding planes?
DOT to
Investigate FAA Based on FOX Business Report
The Department of Transportation is investigating
the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) following a FOX Business
Network report, which uncovered misconduct and cheating in the air
traffic controller program. The
DOT released a statement on their investigation.
Earlier, the FAA launched its own internal
investigation after a
six month FOX Business Network report, Trouble in the Skies,
uncovered misconduct and cheating in the FAA air traffic controller
program.
… FAA administrator Michael Huerta says he is
troubled by the reports of misconduct and ordered the investigation
in response to a letter from the Subcommittee on Aviation chairman
demanding answers.
The letter was signed by 14 members of congress
after FOX Business broadcast recordings of FAA employees offering to
help air traffic control applicants cheat on a key test.
The FBN investigation also uncovered shocking
details of corruption within the FAA as it deals with the growing
scandal. Critics of the FAA are calling Huerta's internal
investigation the "same old dog and pony show" and are
demanding Congress hold hearings.
Perhaps we should create a Forrest Gump award?
(“Stupid is as stupid does”) This seems more like a Cristo art
project than anything useful.
Project
to move Wikipedia from computer to many books
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Jun 17, 2015
NYT
– “The Wikipedia
entry for “quixoticism” runs only about 255 words. But if anyone
could argue for a personal mention, it might be Michael
Mandiberg. For the past three years, he has been fully engaged
in a project that might make even the most intrepid digital
adventurer blush: transforming the English-language Wikipedia into an
old-fashioned print reference set running
to 7,600 volumes. Mr. Mandiberg, an interdisciplinary
artist who teaches at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York, describes the project as
half utilitarian data visualization project, half
absurdist poetic gesture… [What
is vast online is half vast in print. Bob] For the
code-literate, the technical operations will be tracked on a monitor
in the gallery and online at printwikipedia.com.”
Perspective.
It’s All
About The Context - How Mobile Is Crucial For Marketers
The mobile is clearly no longer the second screen
for customer engagement. Nearly a third of total digital traffic (31
percent) is now via mobile devices, with more consumers than ever
using their mobile devices to engage with companies, be that shopping
or interacting over social media.
Yet 71% of marketers still rank desktop as the
primary route for providing a consistent customer experience,
according to the Econsultancy/Adobe Quarterly Digital Intelligence
Briefing: The Quest for Mobile Excellence.
Big Data just keeps getting bigger!
HathiTrust
Research Center adds 5 billion pages
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Jun 17, 2015
News
release: “…Partnering with close to 100 research libraries
from around the world, HathiTrust
holds about 595 terabytes of digitized textual data —
that’s about 157 miles, or 10,000 tons of text. In 2010,
HathiTrust launched the HTRC to help researchers around the world
accomplish tera-scale data mining and textual analysis. The HTRC is
a collaborative effort among Indiana
University; the University
of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC); and the University
of Michigan. Until recently, the HTRC had access to less than a
third of the full HathiTrust repository. That all changed this year,
and now the HTRC is working with the University of Michigan to enable
analysis of the entire 5 billion pages of textual data in the
HathiTrust repository. “This will be the first time that a
researcher could analyze, as data, a collection that is equivalent to
some of the largest research libraries in the world,” says Robert
McDonald, associate dean of libraries at Indiana University. This
poses a new challenge for the HTRC. Most of the texts in the
HathiTrust remain under copyright, so one of the chief HTRC goals is
to ensure non-consumptive research access to these protected works.
This stipulation has led the HTRC to create the Secure HathiTrust
Analytics Research Commons (SHARC), a secure framework for researcher
access to restricted content.”
It's never too early t think about stocking
stuffers.
Why Stay
Boring: Find Funny Office Supplies with These 8 Websites
Just because?
Need Food?
8 Best Social Restaurant Recommendation Apps Worldwide
Resources for my Math students.
MIT Open
Courseware: Free Math Videos and Learning Materials
… The MIT
Open Courseware is a website by the Massachusettes
Institute of Technology where they publish actual class videos from
the said Institute. This means that unlike Khan Academy where you
see an electronic whiteboard/blackboard, in MIT Courseware you see
real professors teaching and interacting with students.
… Aside from videos, they also contain audio
course. The complete list of uploaded audio and video courses can be
found here.
The Youtube Channel can be found here.
… Aside from mathematics, the courses in MIT
Open Courseware also include science, technology, engineering, and
social science.
Surprising that they missed LibreOffice and IBM's
Lotus Symphony.
http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/slideshows/4-free-spreadsheet-alternatives-to-microsoft-excel.html?google_editors_picks=true
4 Free
Spreadsheet Alternatives to Microsoft Excel
Tools for students?
Your
about.me profile is now a portable digital business card thanks to
this new app
… About.me has
always been a digital business card of sorts, a convenient place to
list basic work experience and links to a user’s different social
media accounts. The new Intro by about.me app aims to embrace that
usage by offering users the ability to share and view about.me
profiles on either Windows Phone or Windows devices.
The app allows users to control the specific
information they share, send the info to an email address, phone
number or about.me account, keep a history of about.me cards both
sent and received, communicate with contacts either through the app
directly or by adding their information to the device’s address
book and of course, view a user’s entire about.me profile page.
Definitely something NOT
for my students. (Digest Item #1)
Carry On
Watching Cat Videos
That time you spend watching
cat videos online may not actually be as wasteful and pointless
as you have been led to believe. In fact, according to a new study
published in the Computers
in Human Behavior journal, watching cat videos may be good for
you.
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