Category: IO Impotency

The number crunch: Will Big Data transform your life – or make it a misery?

The age of Big Data is upon us. Fuelled by an incendiary mix of overblown claims and dire warnings, the public debate over the handling and exploitation of digital information on an astronomically large scale has been framed in stark terms: on one side are transformative forces that could immeasurably improve the human condition; on the other, powers so subversive and toxic that a catastrophic erosion of fundamental liberties looks inevitable.

I wrote Foreign Policy's Global Conversation Infographic on New Year's Day. The content used to create the visualization was based on the Global Data of Events, Language and Tone, commonly referred to as GDELT. The effort was suspended during the week ending January 17th via this terse announcement.

. . . . . .

I believe this means that whomever created the CAMEO coding was either not credited appropriately, or there may be an issue with using it in a derivative product. I ran into this late last year – I was going to republish the Global Terrorism Database packaged for use with Sentinel Visualizer, but this was not allowed. I was free to publish a set of scripts to accomplish this task, the issue was that the entities that fund that effort wanted a count of total users, so any derivative work had to be post processing run by the user, rather than repackaging.

I hope what we are seeing here is some sort of pause to clean house and/or make things right with regards to whatever coding material was incorrectly used. The volume and quality of content was extremely promising and I hope the suspension is just some misunderstanding that can be quickly corrected. I kept the archive of the 1979 – 2012 data so I can continue working on something that will handle the live feed when it returns.

Read full post.

Huh?

Guardian: Intelligence chair: NSA leaker Edward Snowden may have had Russian help

Last year, in an interview with the New York Times, Snowden said he did not take any of the documents he obtained to Russia, “because it wouldn’t serve the public interest”.  Snowden said there was “zero-percent chance” that Russia had received any documents and that he had handed all his NSA data to journalists from media outlets including the Guardian, before leaving Hong Kong. “What would be the unique value of personally carrying another copy of the materials onward?” he said.

New York Times: Congressional Leaders Suggest Earlier Snowden Link to Russia

A senior F.B.I. official said on Sunday that it was still the bureau’s conclusion that Mr. Snowden acted alone.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: Snowden as Russian Agent? Snowden as Joint Chinese-Russian Project?”