Atlas of the WWW
Lavabit – J’utilise PGP pour écrire à ma mère, non pas parce que nous « avons quelque chose à cacher »
L’affaire Snowden a pris ces derniers jours une nouvelle tournure, lorsque le boss de Lavabit a tout bonnement et simplement décidé de fermer son service de messagerie. Lavabit, c’est quoi? Un minuscule fournisseur de messagerie e-mail mais qui mettait un point d’honneur à défendre la vie privée. Caleb Delisle, un copain américain, faisait partie des utilisateurs. Il nous explique pourquoi lui, et certainement Snowden, avai(en)t choisi ce service et comment faire aujourd’hui qu’il n’existe plus.
Smart Government and Big, Open Data: The Trickle-Up Effect
As we grow numb to the daily headlines decrying the unimaginable scope of data being collected from Internet companies by the National Security Agency’s Prism program, its worth remembering that governments themselves also produce mountains of data too. Tabulations of the most recent U.S. census, conducted in 2010, involved billions of data points and trillions of calculations. Not surprisingly, it is probably safe to assume that the federal government is also the world’s largest spender on database software—its tab with just one company, market-leader Oracle, passed $700 million in 2012 alone. Government data isn’t just big in scope. It is deep in history—governments have been accumulating data for centuries. In 2006, the genealogical research site Ancestry.com imported 600 terabytes of data (about what Facebook collects in a single day!) from the first fifteen U.S. censuses (1790 to 1930).
Philips Hue susceptible to hack, vulnerable to blackouts (video) –
Oh, Philips. Why’d you have to make it so easy for ne’er-do-wells to go full Aiden Pearce on Hue smart light users? A recent study by researcher Nitesh Dhanjani reveals that Hue’s control portal — known as the bridge — uses a shoddy authentication system when communicating with smartphones and computers. That system uses the bridge’s MAC address, which is easy to detect. As such it’s also easy to hack the device and cause a blackout.
The Digital Revolution and information era have radically changed every aspect of our lives, and continue to shape our social structure. Within that spectrum, the internet stands out as a unique phenomenon which captures our hearts and minds. We use it as an extension of ourselves, granting it access into our most inner circles in the process.
A major area where the impact of the internet is felt the most is the acceleration of globalization trends. As the world becomes smaller, physical borders seem to fade away. These trends, in turn, may lead us to consider today’s world map, drawn centuries ago by the global powers of the time, as obsolete.
Tell me, professor, what is big data?
In the beginning there was data. Data is just data.
Data is not large and it is not small
It does not live and it does not die
It does not offer truth and neither does it lie
(with apologies to Michael Moorcock)
In other words, data has always existed as both big data and small data (OK, so “small data” is not a real term, but it is useful here as a distinguisher).
But an often overlooked fact is that all data is very difficult to handle properly. We have used databases since the 1960s but it wasn’t until 1993 that we even understood transactions properly.
Lixeira conectada deixa ruas de Londres após coletar dados móveis
Lixeiras que exibem notícias e anúncios on-line aos pedestres de Londres terão de ser retiradas das ruas apos ter sido comprovado que os dispositivos também coletam dados de celulares dos pedestres, informou a agência Bloomberg nesta segunda-feira (12).
“A coleta de dados – mesmo que anônima – precisa parar”, disse a autoridade distrital City of London Corp., que atua como uma subprefeitura no distrito financeiro de Londres, em seu website. O órgão pediu que a empresa Renew, fabricante das lixeiras, pare de coletar dados e levou o caso a um gabinete de informações – órgão independente criado pelo governo britânico para reforçar a privacidade de dados.
Apple iOS 7 and Psychogeography of Technology
It is now that we as consumers become dériver (this is my coinage, I’ve opted for an English ending to the French dérive); that is, a Debordian dérive takes hold as we allow our thoughts and emotions to drift and permeate our new virtual worlds. The dériver is necessitated, according to situationist theory, by the increasingly predictable and monotonous experience of everyday life. The dériver grants a rare instance of pure chance, an opportunity for an utterly new and authentic experience of the different atmospheres and feelings generated by the urban landscape, or in the instance of technology, a purely virtual landscape, based on known and experienced geography.