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Selling Secrets of Phone Users to Advertisers – by Claire Cain Miller and Somini Sengupta, October 5, 2013 “Now, smartphones know everything — where people go, what they search for, what they buy, what they do for fun and when they go to bed. That is why advertisers, and tech companies like Google and Facebook, …
Three Paradoxes of Big Data by Neil Richards (Washington University in Saint Louis – School of Law) and Jonathan King (Washington University in Saint Louis) “Big data is all the rage. Its proponents tout the use of sophisticated analytics to mine large data sets for insight as the solution to many of our society’s problems. …
EFF – “A group of prominent technologists submitted a letter today to the NSA Review Group, a body charged with conducting a review of NSA activities that does not currently have a technologist as a member. The letter urges the Review Group to seek assistance from independent technologists in order to conduct a thorough review, …
News from the Library of Congress October 1, 2013 (REVISED October 3, 2013) Federal Government Shutdown “Due to the temporary shutdown of the federal government, all Library buildings are closed, all public events are canceled, and all inquiries and requests to the Library of Congress web-based services will not be received or responded to until the shutdown …
“The current shutdown in Washington is limiting the access that scholars and researchers have to vital materials, including the US Census website. To that end, Oxford University Press and the Social Explorer team will open up access to Social Explorer – the premier US Census demographics website – for the next two weeks. Social Explorer …
A British newspaper wants to take its aggressive investigations global, but money is running out. by Ken Auletta, New Yorker, October 7, 2013. “Since June 5th, the Guardian had been publishing top-secret digital files provided by Edward Snowden, a former contract employee of the National Security Agency. In a series of articles, the paper revealed …
Are Some Tweets More Interesting Than Others? #HardQuestion – Omar Alonso, Catherine C. Marshall, and Marc Najork. October 2013 “Twitter has evolved into a significant communication nexus, coupling personal and highly contextual utterances with local news, memes, celebrity gossip, headlines, and other microblogging subgenres. If we take Twitter as a large and varied dynamic collection, how can …
“EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) is making the government database ERIC available during the government shutdown. ERIC, the Education Resource Information Center, is typically available through the government website (http://eric.ed.gov/) as well as via EBSCO’s EBSCOhost® research platform. Because of the shutdown, access to the full text of articles and other materials will not be available but …
“The U.S. Department of Justice has opposed requests by Facebook, Google, Microsoft and other companies to publish the number of surveillance requests they receive from the National Security Agency and other agencies. Requests from five Internet companies, also including Yahoo and LinkedIn, would hurt the NSA’s ability to conduct surveillance on “particular” Internet communications, the …
“Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project presents his organization’s latest findings about what people do at libraries and what they’d like libraries to become. He describes the services patrons say they want libraries to offer and he describes the big issues that new libraries are resolving.”
Via Jeff J. Berns: “Per http://blog.archive.org/2013/10/02/governmentblackout/, the Internet Archive grabbed copies of a number of federal agency websites just before they were taken offline due to the lapse in appropriations. You can access the archives through the links on the blog entry. The databases, search engines, etc. may not work, but the static pages should …
THOMAS.gov and beta.congress.gov remain online. FEMA.gov is partially available. BLS.gov and BEA.gov are closed. Via Gretchen Gould: a list of government websites that were completely offline or “dark” as of the evening of October 1, 2013: Bureau of Economic Analysis (bea.gov) Business.gov Census.gov Copyright.gov Data.gov Disability.gov ED.gov ERIC (eric.ed.gov) FCC.gov FTC.gov FTC.gov Library of Congress …
