Category: Links

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When the Whole World Has Drones

The proliferation of drone technology has moved well beyond the control of the United States government and its closest allies. The aircraft are too easy to obtain, with barriers to entry on the production side crumbling too quickly to place limits on the spread of a technology that promises to transform warfare on a global scale. Already, more than 75 countries have remote piloted aircraft. More than 50 nations are building a total of nearly a thousand types. At its last display at a trade show in Beijing, China showed off 25 different unmanned aerial vehicles. Not toys or models, but real flying machines.

When the Whole World Has Drones
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What Your Klout Score Really Means

Your Klout score is gaining in importance: A high one might bring perks, but a low one could dash your career dreams.

Something that hit me while I was reading this (other than how much I dislike Klout) is that companies are increasingly using the ‘service’ to discriminate between preferred and non-preferred customers. I can see a service like Klout developing in the future that is widely used by marketers, insurance agencies, and other groups interested in actuarial sales/risk analysis to mine social media information in order to assign scores that invisibly affect individuals’ daily behaviours and routines.

Hopefully things won’t be so invisible that consumer protection laws can’t be activated to dilute such behaviours. Even more hopefully, let’s pray that those laws still have the dulled teeth they have today when Klout on steroids is truly birthed.

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The Politics of Academic Space

In an economy of scarcity, a rare commodity like office space will be fought over tenaciously.

I have to admit that I’ve never had an issue finding office spaces on campus; at a previous university I had three separate offices, and presently enjoy two separate (and well furnished!) offices. I tend to work out of those spaces 6-7 days a week, 6-12 hours a day. In other words: I use the spaces that are provided to me.

That said, I’ve watched just how nasty office-space wars can become. Such conflicts aren’t something that I’d wish on my worst enemy, and the most aggravating aspect of most space conflicts is the sheer amount of unused office space. There’s nothing like seeing a war occur between a small group of people in a department for a coveted office space while 95% of the offices are unoccupied because graduate students and faculty alike refuse to come and work on campus.

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Privacy organization files FTC complaint against Snapchat | Digital Trends

Snapchat’s problems with its glaring loopholes are mounting, and this time its fate may end up in the hands of the FTC after EPIC’s complaint.

Just because the American’s lack privacy commissioners doesn’t mean that there aren’t dedicated civil society advocates holding companies’ feet the fire. Nor that violating contract law is any less important in the US than in other jurisdictions.

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Snapchat: not for state secrets

Just in case you thought that Snapchat’s privacy settings were awesome, researchers have found that the security model is pretty piss poor.

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2013.5.21

There is a technical term economists like to use for behavior like this. Unbelievable chutzpah.

One potentially good thing out of all this, Tim Cook will address it directly tomorrow in front of the Senate:

Mr. Cook is expected to emphasize that Apple is most likely “the largest corporate income tax payer in the U.S., having paid nearly $6 billion in taxes to the U.S. Treasury” in the last fiscal year. “Apple does not use tax gimmicks,” Mr. Cook is expected to testify.

He is expected to seek to rebut the Congressional findings by arguing that some of Apple’s largest subsidiaries do not reduce Apple’s tax liability, and to argue in support of a sweeping overhaul of the United States corporate tax code – in particular, lowering rates on companies moving foreign overseas earnings back to the United States. Apple currently assigns more than $100 billion to offshore subsidiaries.

I figured this would lead to a change in tax policy. Now I’m sure of it.

(via parislemon)

This story, the day before Cook testifies to the Senate, is probably the worst thing Apple PR could have dreamed of. I wouldn’t want to be in Cook’s shoes tomorrow though, by the same token, if I were an American taxpayer I’d be pissed as all hell about Apple’s actions regardless of the legality of those actions.

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1TB Comes to Flickr

thisistheverge:

Yahoo unveils the new Flickr with one terabyte of free space

Looks wild.

As a pretty heavy Google user, I look forward to seeing if Google ups their own storage offerings to ‘compete’ with Yahoo!

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Links Writing

2013.5.20

Yahoo will need to balance its involvement with Tumblr to let the creative site flourish while also driving some benefits to core Yahoo. While Tumblr likely needs to take its feed advertising slowly so as not to negatively impact the user experience, the company should be able to leverage Yahoo!’s sales force and advertising relationships.

So it’s kind of cool to see what actual analysts say about Yahoo buying Tumblr. But I have a pretty hard time figuring out what benefits the site would be driving to “core Yahoo”. Better integration with Flickr, maybe? Not really sure what core Yahoo comprises, anymore. (via jakke)

This is something I’ve been thinking about a bit. Just off the top of my head, how could Yahoo! leverage Tumblr:

  • Use Tumblr to surface popular/emerging content for the various Yahoo! branded home pages that are provided to enterprise customers;
  • Offer free blogging services to enterprise customers;
  • Integrate Flickr’s communities (somehow) withTumblr to enhance finding and sharing original content;
  • Leverage Tumblr to expand Bing search capabilities (which would be part of the Yahoo!/MS search integration, and perhaps offer Yahoo! another line of revenue given Microsoft’s current pursuit of Social searchability)
  • Generally provide customized blogging solutions across properties. If Tumblr is eventually de-siloed then Yahoo! would have a blogging platform like Google (i.e. Blogger) except it would be ‘fresh’ like Blogger was at the time of Google acquiring it.

Those are just the most immediate thoughts. I really think that what happens will occur over time and not tomorrow; Yahoo! needs to get ‘integration right’ or else risk drowning their new $1.1 billion dollar baby.

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Chinese hackers who breached Google gained access to sensitive data, U.S. officials say

Hackers who breached Google database appeared to seek identities of Chinese spies in U.S. who might be under watch.

This story is incredibly significant: it clarifies an additional target of the Aurora attacks in 2009 (the database that Google stored FISA warrant information in) and, as an extension, provides a notion of why NSA was involved in the investigation (i.e. any revelation of FISA information constitutes a national security issue).

I suspect we’ll never get the full story of what all occurred, but this article very nicely supplements some of the stuff we learned in Levy’s book In the Plex, as well as popular reporting around the series of attacks on major Western companies that happened in late 2009. It also reveals the significant of meta-data/information: it wasn’t necessarily required for attackers to know what specifically waas being monitored to take action to protect agents; all that was needed was information that the surveillance was occurring for countermeasures to be deployed.

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Damning findings removed from Sen. Mike Duffy

The Senates internal economy committee sanitized the original audit of Sen. Mike Duffys expenses to remove damning findings, documents obtained by CTV News show.

I really don’t remember the last time I enjoyed eating popcorn so much whilst watching Canadian politics.