Worth a Look: Kevin Kelly on Cool Tools

5 Star, Information Society, Information Technology, Intelligence (Public), IO Tools
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Cool Tools is a highly curated selection of the best tools available for individuals and small groups. Tools include hand tools, maps, how-to books, vehicles, software, specialized devices, gizmos, websites — and anything useful. Tools are selected and presented in the book if they are the best of kind, the cheapest, or the only thing available that will do the job. This is an oversized book which reviews over 1,500 different tools, explaining why each one is great, and what its benefits are. Indirectly the book illuminates the possibilities contained in such tools and the whole catalog serves an education outside the classroom. The content in this book was derived from ten years of user reviews published at the Cool Tools website, cool-tools.org.

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Kevin Kelly @ Phi Beta Iota

Review (Guest): The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Information Society, Information Technology, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Privacy
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Luke Harding

4.0 out of 5 stars Ed Snowden and the American tribal fear meme, February 19, 2014

 

This is a story about what one American saw atop the tip of an iceberg called the “American national security state.” In the end, Ed Snowden, a 29-year old, $200,00/year High School dropout turned Computer Systems Administrator for Dell, and then Booz Allen Hamilton, both of which were under contract with the NSA, is little more than a proxy for the rest of us: the “paying customer” zombies and drones for the American “national security state.”

As he tried to “ride out” his tenure astride this violently bucking institutional Orwellian Frankenstein, Snowden quickly realized that he was losing ground to this secret self-fashioned protector of America's deepest values. In our life time, the NSA had joined a long string of other self-justifying, self-certifying, security institutions, like the CIA, the FBI, Swat Teams, the DEA, even local police intelligence units, especially in America's inner cities. In our lifetime, these institutions have acquired immense and unwarranted powers, often even unauthorized, unconstitutional and unearned and even criminal influence over our democratic institutions. Today, as this evolving behemoth huffs and puffs and bucks wildly out-of-control, Snowden decided he had no choice but to “jump ship,” taking with him a treasure trove of all that lay below the national security waterline.

What exactly is it that Ed Snowden saw that frightened him out of his wits and out of his $200k job and into the hands of a most curious savior of last resort: Vladimir Putin's Russia, the ex-Communist ex-superpower that, since it was forced to commit suicide as an empire, has now become a capitalist Wild West frontier, a land full of out-of-control oligarchs, which is exactly where Ed Snowden's favorite political hero, Ron Paul would like to take America — if he is ever elected president, that is.

As he now sits ensconced somewhere in Russia, one thought above all else must have occurred to Mr. Snowden: Is this some kind of sick joke? That me, a freedom-loving American, who willingly exercised my civic duty as a free-thinking defender of American values and the U.S. Constitution, conveying crimes being committed against that very Constitution, is now forced to run, hide and seek refuge in a failed ex-Communist state?

That Snowden's reality is true in a nation that is still living on moral credit, and that takes much more credit for being democratic than it deserves or its historical record can substantiate, is almost as embarrassing an irony and contradiction as seeing the U.S. being “in hock up to the hilt” to Reagan's other Axis-of-evil: the last standing Communist Police State, “Red China.” And lest we conveniently forget, said “Red China,” is the same state that less than three decades ago, we were referring to mockingly and derisively as being backwards? Now, that they are in bed with our capitalist oligarchs (the Red Chinese “Job Creators,” par excellence) rather incongruously, China has now become the world's leading capitalist country, holding 60% of our debt, while the U.S. slides noisily, defiantly, but nevertheless persistently and decidedly, backwards. There is an embedded poetic logic to this irony that Snowden's Ron Paul-Ayn Rand Libertarian sensibilities seems to have missed?

This book rather inarticulately unravels the story of exactly what it is that Ed Snowden saw; why he was so alarmed; and why he had no choice but to expose what he saw to the American public and then had to run. It tells how in the ultimate act of patriotic suicide, Snowden had to respectfully sue for the mercy of the “Obama Courts.” However, since he knew that with the “Obama Justice Department,” a fair trial was already off the table, he had no choice but to “punt early” by “going on the lam,” and seeking protection and a haven elsewhere.

Continue reading “Review (Guest): The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man”

Worth a Look: Beyond Transparency – Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation

5 Star, Data, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Worth A Look

Worth a Look: No Place to Hide – Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Congress (Failure, Reform), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Democracy, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Information Society, Information Technology, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Privacy
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Glenn Greenwald

No Place to Hide is a groundbreaking look at the NSA surveillance scandal, from the reporter who broke the story

Investigative reporter for The Guardian and bestselling author Glenn Greenwald, provides an in-depth look into the NSA scandal that has triggered a national debate over national security and information privacy. With further revelations from documents entrusted to Glenn Greenwald by Edward Snowden himself, this book explores the extraordinary cooperation between private industry and the NSA, and the far-reaching consequences of the government’s surveillance program, both domestically and abroad.

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Review (Guest): Scripting Intelligence – Web 3.0 Information Gathering and Processing

4 Star, Information Technology, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)
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Mark Watson

4.0 out of 5 stars Ruby-centric tutorials on Semantic Web, Natural Language Processing, and Large-Scale Data Storage and Processing Technologies July 4, 2009

ByTechie Evan

This four-part book is focused on programming techniques and technologies that in the author's opinion can help next generation web applications handle data more “intelligently”. The code samples are implemented in Ruby (and a little bit of Java).

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Review (Guest): Algorithms of the Intelligence Web

5 Star, Information Technology, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)
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Haralamlos Marmanis and Dmitry Babenko

5.0 out of 5 stars A soon to be classic Algo book for improving intelligent web applications June 19, 2009

By Michael Mimo I have always had an interest in AI, machine learning, and data mining but I found the introductory books too mathematical and focused mostly on solving academic problems rather than real-world industrial problems. So, I was curious to see what this book was about.

I have read the book front-to-back (twice!) before I write this report. I started reading the electronic version a couple of months ago and read the paper print again over the weekend. This is the best practical book in machine learning that you can buy today — period. All the examples are written in Java and all algorithms are explained in plain English. The writing style is superb!

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Review (Guest): Wireless Mesh Networking: Architectures, Protocols and Standards

5 Star, Autonomous Internet, Information Technology
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Yan Zhang , Jijun Luo , Honglin Hu

5.0 out of 5 stars Untangling Mesh Networks, March 10, 2009

 

This review is from: Wireless Mesh Networking: Architectures, Protocols and Standards (Wireless Networks and Mobile Communications) (Hardcover)

Wireless networking has been around for more than a decade, but mesh is a relatively recent revolution. This book edits together extensive research from about 50 global experts into an easy-to-read, fluid and authoritative account of this emerging technology and market.

The release of the 802.11 IEEE standard in 1997 set off a chain of developments including 802.11 a / b / g / and n that have revolutionized the lives of computer users – to a point where laptop/notebooks/netbooks tend to be a primary and fully capable method for network access today.

A similar effort, 802.11s, has been under development since at least 2003 – with the objective of establishing a mesh networking standard. This book does an excellent job raising many of the considerations behind that standard, at the same time it addresses other protocol and standards.

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