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"Beyond Yottabytes" -- The NSA Will Know Who's Been Naughty and Who's Been Nice:
The New York Review of Books reports on the government's information quest:
"As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report..."the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015."[1] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named."
NYRB continues: "Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be--or may one day become--a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story."
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FedThread: FedThread A newly launched Federal register where you can annotate documents, customize feeds, and search the Federal Register back to 2000. Not to be confused with Threadfed, an embroidery site.
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Health Map: Allows you to see various outbreaks like H1N1, and recalls like salmonella, by geographic area.
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Open Access How-To: SPARC issued a guide for publishers wanting to support open access, along with supply and demand side revenue models.
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Government is an Arm of the Banks: We know that the banks have a phone line to Tim Geithner. But in case you doubted the effect of that on bank behavior, or if you trusted there were no future implications of that relationship for regulation, watch Bill Moyers' show last week with Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (Ohio-9) and Simon Johnson, the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Don't read the transcript. Watch the show.
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Telecoms are Agencies Within The Government?: The banks aren't the only ones with a disconcertingly close relationship with the White House. Wired reports that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is investigating the influence of telecom lobbying on the Justice Department's coup of winning retroactive immunity for AT&T and others accused of spying on citizens. EFF requested related documents under the Freedom of Information Act and the government refused, arguing that the documents were protected because they were "intra-agency", that is, telecoms were an arm of government.
Last month U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White reversed that decision, ruling for the EFF that the Justice Department was obligated to release the names of telecom employees who contacted the Justice Department and White House.
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Is Transparency Is Over-rated? Is Lessig The Fifth Column?: Lawrence Lessig used to argue that culture needed to be free. People should be able to mash it up, he said, make what they wanted out of songs and books and writing. He founded Creative Commons, whereby people can use your work for free, with attribution if they feel like it. He started what turned into the Google Books settlement when he legally challenged copyright laws by pursuing the release from copyright of "orphan" books. At the time, he was at Stanfords' Center for the Internet and Society, funded by 2 million dollars from Google.
Now Lessig is pursuing a different cause while he is at Harvard and on the board of the excellent Sunlight Foundation (biased, maybe, but I have no stakes), which funds projects to make government more transparent. Paradoxically, perhaps, Lessig argues in The New Republic this month that transparency is dangerous because people have short attention spans and mashing up the data will connect money to politicians in seemingly nefarious ways when in fact none may exist. The citizens, simple as they are, will become cynical, and government will fall apart. Something like that. The Sunlight Foundation disagrees. More later.
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Google's Fast Flip: You can browse multiple sites simultaneously. Small print. To note: Google chooses which sites participate.
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States Can Sue Utilities: States had tried to sue utilities for being a "public nuisance", releasing CO2 which creates global warming and the court had ruled against them. Now, as the NYT reports: "a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled that eight states -- California, Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin -- as well as New York City and three land trusts could proceed with a suit" against American Electric Power, Southern Corporation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Xcel Energy and Cinergy Corporation, all large coal-burning utilities."
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Economist Changes User Access: The Economist will remove much of the online content for perusal by non-paying subscribers, including the Table of Contents of the print edition - clever. Subscribers will get access to an audio version, archives and all content.
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Image from Wiki Commons
