Category: Blogging

Bruce Schneier’s Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

Here’s a great Berkman panel discussing Bruce Schneier’s new book that zig-zags back and forth on which is worse – big data, or big government snooping.


via Bruce Schneier’s Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World – YouTube.

Signs of Spring

The overnights and mornings here have been cold, dipping to near freezing, but our days have been temperate and things are growing. The hillsides are reaching that green haze point – that day when they seem to have a green nimbus around those bare grey branches – and shortly after all turns green and half the houses in Lenexa will become invisible again behind their screens of leafy trees.

Here’s a photo gallery of some of those signs of Spring:

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NASA | A View From The Other Side

Here’s a great view from the other side of the moon, courtesy of NASA and the Lunar Reconnaissance orbiter.

NASA | A View From The Other Side – YouTube.

Here in Kansas we are experiencing signs of Spring, buds appearing on trees, snow melted, and yesterday I got my first chigger bite.

A New Year’s Resolution Challenge for All – Always Augment Your Intelligence

In this millenium why shouldn’t you Google, ask Siri, or Alexa, almost anything just to double check? Why wouldn’t you augment your intelligence with the biggest brain and knowledge base on the planet: the Internet? Please take a New Year’s resolution to start asking Google and Siri more, start augmenting your feeble human intelligence, in this coming year stop handicapping your brains friends.

The other day I saw someone online boast about how they knew some obscure English etymology fact as they proclaimed that they ‘didn’t even have to look it up!’ Their pride in their knowledge of a trivial fact was a revelation for me: my generation usually takes great pride in their knowledge of facts, as if knowing something obscure were of value by itself. However does knowing facts matter as much in this day and age, and does knowing more facts than your neighbor make your life better anymore than having more beer caps would?

Remember when you memorized kingdoms, phylums, orders, species in that branching tree of life? That's all been uprooted and it's better and more useful to look up the clade and phylogeny of species now.
Remember when you memorized kingdoms, phylums, orders, species in that branching tree of life? That’s all been uprooted and it’s better and more useful to look up the clade and phylogeny of species now.

Before you automatically object, please take a moment to weigh some values against the facts you treasure.

First – Is it better to know things, or is it better to know how to know new things? Is it better to commit things to memory, or is it better to commit patterns, learning tools, logic, faces, friends, beautiful moments, and art to memory? Is the knowledge that you have as important as the journey to gain it?

Second – Any bare fact in and of itself is pretty trivial – and gaining that fact is more trivial still. This thudded home to me with great force on my last vacation as I watched a couple unfold a map, and pore over it, trying to find some location. Meanwhile their teen kept trying to interject and they kept hushing her. It took the teen pushing her phone screen with a pinpointed map on it in her parents face for them to recognize that she had just asked her phone and found the spot they’d both been arguing over and trying to find for ten minutes. She’d done it in seconds.

Third – Our memories are fallible, and we all have built in biases. These are inescapable conditions of being human. What we think we know is sometimes wrong. e.g. My wife tells me I’m wrong a lot. I think it was Socrates who said something akin to “The unexamined life is not worth living” so why don’t you examine your assumptions and “knowledge” on occasion?

Fourth: Our biases aren’t all socially evolved conditions of being human, some are built in by purposeful lies. That’s known as propaganda, and propaganda is driven by fear and hate. Propaganda only works with the ignorant, or the with the willfully ignorant who never test their knowledge, challenge their assumptions, or question what they hear.

Fifth: Your human perceptions are also flawed, maybe that song’s not really about a cross-eyed bear. (mondegreen – you could look it up.)

So why think you know some fact, or take a guess, when instead you can just ask Google, Siri, Alex, or even Bing? Why not double check even if you think you know? When I thought I knew the quote author above I was a bit wrong…. Yes, it was Socrates sort of, but only as paraphrased by Plato’s recollection of his speech at his trial. I just learned something new that I thought I already knew. So there’s the power of augmenting your intelligence. Finding that out was as simple as asking my pad.

Perhaps to my generation facts are of more value simply because of the efforts you had to go to just to obtain them – as my many trips to the library for my high school debate team attest to… nowadays finding things out has become trivial with all of the online data tools and search engines that we have at our beck and call.

In this millenium why shouldn’t you Google, ask Siri, or Alexa, almost anything just to double check? Why wouldn’t you augment your intelligence with the biggest brain and knowledge base on the planet: the Internet? Please take a New Year’s resolution to start asking Google and Siri more, start augmenting your feeble human intelligence, in this coming year stop handicapping your brain friends. Be not proud of what you know – instead be proud that you are smart enough to look it up.

Crossposted to LittleGreenFootballs.com .

Microsoft Tells U.S.: The World’s Servers Are Not Yours for the Taking

Microsoft legal has a philosophy that local laws ought to apply to data — the only part that gets fuzzy under this approach is cloud data that is mirrored in multiple servers across multiple nations.

This discussion and case is highly important for the future of technology – if one country can by fiat demand that only country of origin laws apply to US companies doing business in foreign countries, what kind of reception and business can they expect? If your data is not secure when housed in US data farms, where will the data farms go? There will be lots of fallout from this case that could affect US employment. Right now businesses seek secure and stable locations that have class A networks for their data farms – if we fall behind in laws protecting data, and in network, we aren’t going to see many cloud farms built here.

The major market share players for PaaS and SaaS cloud services are Amazon, Google, and Microsoft – if the NSA continues to take an “All your base are belong to us” approach then that’s not going to continue.

Microsoft’s fight against the US position that it may search its overseas servers with a valid US warrant is getting nasty.

Microsoft, which is fighting a US warrant that it hand over e-mail to the US from its Ireland servers, wants the Obama administration to ponder a scenario where the “shoe is on the other foot.”

“Imagine this scenario. Officers of the local Stadtpolizei investigating a suspected leak to the press descend on Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany,” Microsoft said. “They serve a warrant to seize a bundle of private letters that a New York Times reporter is storing in a safe deposit box at a Deutsche Bank USA branch in Manhattan. The bank complies by ordering the New York branch manager to open the reporter’s box with a master key, rummage through it, and fax the private letters to the Stadtpolizei.”

In a Monday legal filing with the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals, Microsoft added that the US government would be outraged.

More: Microsoft Tells US: The World’s Servers Are Not Yours for the Taking

Also See:
For in depth coverage of these positions
Brad Smith and Jonathan Zittrain on Privacy, Surveillance, and Rebuilding Trust in Tech | Noblesse Oblige

Click to access verizonamicus.pdf

Click to access applebriefinremicrosft.pdf

Vemödalen: The Fear That Everything Has Already Been Done

So I have this feeling often while taking photos — and then I try to do something different, but actually doing something different that’s not been done before is exceedingly rare because … 7 billion. Let me repeat that: Seven Billion. Now say it again like Carl Sagan would, then feel the hope and despair.

 

Vemödalen: The Fear That Everything Has Already Been Done – YouTube.

Gigabit Providers Not Focused on Apps – Study

The headline statement won’t be true until the real broadband apps are actually there because while you can predict a trend you can’t predict the future. Locking into broadband apps until real broadband is in place a while would be premature. I foresee a day when musicians will regularly collaborate in real time or near real time on the network, I see phone calls going video, but the ability and the openness comes first. You have to be open to get those true broadband apps propagated, and if you remain open you will have apps that foster “stickiness” for your network.
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From Jason Meyers, Light Reading:

The report, published by Broadbandtrends LLC , surveyed 88 service providers in various parts of the world (with a heavy focus on North America) about their plans for delivering gigabit broadband. Not surprisingly, the study credits Google Fiber Inc. ‘s announced intent in 2010 to enter the market with both raising consumer consciousness about gigabit services and catalyzing other providers. Google, the report suggests, sparked a race to save face.

“When we asked what the drivers were, it was interesting that being perceived as a tech leader was number one,” says Teresa Mastrangelo, principal analyst for Broadbandtrends. “It wasn’t about the speed at all. It wasn’t about future-proofing the network. It was about saying ‘We’re the first in this market,’ and being perceived as very forward-looking.”

It also wasn’t about identifying and fostering new or enhanced applications like gaming or high-definition telepresence, for example, that could fully leverage the speed of gigabit networks, Mastrangelo says. That’s significant, especially given widespread skepticism about the need for gigabit speeds — particularly in residential environments — and industry efforts to foster creation and development of gigabit-ready apps.

via Gigabit Providers Not Focused on Apps – Study | Light Reading.