From the year 2003 and working backwards to the beginning of human history, we generated, according to IBM’s calculations, five exabytes–that’s five billion gigabytes–of information.

By last year, we were cranking out that much data every two days.

By next year, predicts Turek, we’ll be doing it every 10 minutes. […]

It’s the latest example of technology outracing our capacity to use it. In this case, we haven’t begun to catch up with our ability to capture information, which is why a favorite trope of management pundits these days is that the future belongs to companies and governments that can make sense of all the data they’re collecting, preferably in real time.

{ Smithsonian | Continue reading }

related { The future of media on mobile devices isn’t with applications but with the Web }

This system is enriching patent trolls—companies that buy patents in order to extort money from innovators. These trolls are like a modern day mafia. […]

The larger players can afford to buy patents to deter the trolls, but the smaller players—the innovative startups—can’t. Instead, they have to settle out of court. Patent trolls take advantage of this weakness. […]

In the smartphone market alone, $15-20 billion has already been spent by technology companies on building defenses, says Stanford Law School professor Mark Lemley. For example, Google bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion—mostly for its patents. An Apple-Microsoft-Oracle-Nokia consortium bought Nortel’s patent portfolio for $4.5 billion. Microsoft bought Novell’s patent portfolio for $450 million and some of AOL’s patents for $1 billion. Facebook bought some of Microsoft’s new AOL patents for $550 million. Lemley estimates that more than $500 million has been squandered on legal fees—and battles are just beginning. This is money that could have been spent, instead, on R&D. […]

Clearly, the laws need revision. Feld says that software patents should be completely abolished—that in the modern era of computing, the best defense is speed to market, execution, and continuous innovation.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

photo { Harry Callahan }

Adscend Media agreed not to spam Facebook users and pay US$100,000 in court and attorney fees, according to the settlement. […] Adscend Media’s spamming generated up to $20 million a year.

{ IT World | Continue reading }

{ Brazil retailer using Facebook likes… on its clothing hangers }

A group of computer security researchers have refined an innovative method of combatting identity theft. (…) Its method, described in the journal Information Sciences, “continuously verifies users according to characteristics of their interaction with the mouse.”

The idea of user verification through mouse monitoring is not new. As the researchers note, “a major threat to organizations is identity thefts that are committed by internal users who belong to the organization.”

To combat this, some organizations turn “physiological biometrics” to verify the identity of a computer user. But these techniques, such as fingerprint sensors or retina scanners, “are expensive and not always available,” the researchers write.

An alternative approach is the use of “behavioral biometrics.” Such a system compiles biometric data such as “characteristics of the interaction between the user and input devices such as the mouse and keyboard” and constructs a “unique user signature.”

{ Pacific Standard | Continue reading }

painting { Antonio Ciseri, Ecce Homo, 1871 }

To justify its sky-high valuation, Facebook will have to increase its profit per user at rates that seem unlikely, even by the most generous predictions. Last year, we looked at just how unlikely this is.

The issue that concerns many Facebook users is this. The company is set to profit from selling user data but the users whose data is being traded do not get paid at all. That seems unfair.

Today, Bernardo Huberman and Christina Aperjis at HP Labs in Palo Alto, say there is an alternative. Why not  pay individuals for their data? (…)

If buyers choose only the cheapest data, the sample will be biased in favour of those who price their data cheaply. And if buyers pay everyone the highest price, they will be overpaying.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

drawing { Tracey Emin, Sad Shower in New York, 1995 }

In 2009, the United States crossed a digital Rubicon: For the first time, the amount of data sent with mobile devices exceeded the sum of transmitted voice data. (…)

Placing a voice call, compared to streaming The Hangover 2 on Netflix or uploading a video clip of your friend’s latest freestyle BMX trick to YouTube, consumes virtually no bandwidth. (…)

And our calls are getting shorter.

{ The Wilson quaterly | Continue reading }

The internet is no stranger to crime. From counterfeit and stolen products, to illegal drugs, stolen identities and weapons, nearly anything can be purchased online with a few clicks of the mouse. The online black market not only can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection, but the whole process of ordering illicit goods and services is alarmingly easy and anonymous, with multiple marketplaces to buy or sell anything you want.

Understanding how the market thrives—unregulated and untraceable—can give you a better sense of the threats (or resources) that affect you and your business.

In our scenario we are going to legally transfer $1,000 USD out of a regular bank account and into a mathematical system of binary codes, and then enter a neighborhood of the Internet largely used by criminals. This hidden world anyone lets purchase bulk downloads of stolen credit cards, as well as a credit card writer, blank cards, some “on stage” fake identities—and maybe even a grenade launcher they’ve had their eyes on.

A journey into the darker side of the Internet starts with two open-source programs: Bitcoin and the Tor Bundle.

{ CSO | Continue reading }

artwork { General Idea, Miss General Idea Glove Pattern (Form Follows Fetish), 1975 }

For eight days running, YouTube’s front page had been taken over by “botted” videos—videos whose views had been artificially inflated by software programs designed to trick YouTube’s servers—and as far as YouTubers could tell, YouTube’s owner, the mighty Google, seemed powerless to stop them.

Google did eventually stop the worst of the bots, fixing a vulnerability in how the site counts mobile views. But the botting problem is far from over. And the episode leaves a lot of lingering questions over the site’s future.

{ DailyDot | Continue reading }

related { Hulu, which attracted 31 million unique users in March under a free-for-all model, is taking its first steps to change to a model where viewers will have to prove they are a pay-TV customer to watch their favorite shows. | NY Post }

In the summer of 2007, Apple released the iPhone, in an exclusive partnership with A.T. & T. George Hotz, a seventeen-year-old from Glen Rock, New Jersey, was a T-Mobile subscriber. He wanted an iPhone, but he also wanted to make calls using his existing network, so he decided to hack the phone. (…)

Hotz’s YouTube video received nearly two million views and made him the most famous hacker in the world. The media loved the story of the teen-age Jersey geek who beat Apple. (…)

Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, who hacked telephone systems early in his career, sent Hotz a congratulatory e-mail. (…)

Hotz continued to “jailbreak,” or unlock, subsequent versions of the iPhone until, two years later, he turned to his next target: one of the world’s biggest entertainment companies, Sony. He wanted to conquer the purportedly impenetrable PlayStation 3 gaming console. (…)

But many were angry at Hotz, not at Sony. “Congratulations geohot, the asshole who sits at home doing nothing than ruining the experience for others,” one post read. Someone posted Hotz’s phone number online, and harassing calls ensued.

{ The New Yorker | Continue reading }

Face recognition techniques usually come with a certain amount of controversy. A new application, however, is unlikely to trigger any privacy concerns because all of the subjects are long dead.

Before photography took over, oil painting and portraiture was used to record what important people looked like. As a result for every artistically important painting there are a lot of “instant snaps” that fill museums and art gallery vaults. What would make these paintings much more valuable is knowing who all of the people in the portraits are.

The solution might be to apply face recognition software. This is the project for which three University of California, Riverside researchers have just received funding.

{ I Programmer | Continue reading | UCR }

art { Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross (detail), 1452-1466 }

Google’s harvesting of e-mails, passwords and other sensitive personal information from unsuspecting households in the United States and around the world was neither a mistake nor the work of a rogue engineer, as the company long maintained, but a program that supervisors knew about, according to new details from the full text of a regulatory report.

The report, prepared by the Federal Communications Commission after a 17-month investigation of Google’s Street View project, was released, heavily redacted, two weeks ago. Although it found that Google had not violated any laws, the agency said Google had obstructed the inquiry and fined the company $25,000.

On Saturday, Google released a version of the report with only employees’ names redacted.

The full version draws a portrait of a company where an engineer can easily embark on a project to gather personal e-mails and Web searches of potentially hundreds of millions of people as part of his or her unscheduled work time, and where privacy concerns are shrugged off.

The so-called payload data was secretly collected between 2007 and 2010 as part of Street View, a project to photograph streetscapes over much of the civilized world. When the program was being designed, the report says, it included the following “to do” item: “Discuss privacy considerations with Product Counsel.”

“That never occurred,” the report says.

Google says the data collection was legal. But when regulators asked to see what had been collected, Google refused, the report says, saying it might break privacy and wiretapping laws if it shared the material. (…)

Ever since information about the secret data collection first began to emerge two years ago, Google has portrayed it as the mistakes of an unauthorized engineer operating on his own and stressed that the data was never used in any Google product.

The report, quoting the engineer’s original proposal, gives a somewhat different impression. The data, the engineer wrote, would “be analyzed offline for use in other initiatives.” Google says this was never done. (…)

The Street View program used special cars outfitted with cameras. Google first said it was just photographing streets and did not disclose that it was collecting Internet communications called payload data, transmitted over Wi-Fi networks, until May 2010, when it was confronted by German regulators.

Eventually, it was forced to reveal that the information it had collected could include the full text of e-mails, sites visited and other data.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

The buy, driven entirely by Zuckerberg, was made because Facebook’s CEO was petrified of Instagram becoming a Twitter-owned property.

Zuckerberg, we’re told, lives in perpetual anxiety, preoccupied by the fear of Facebook losing its place, terrified that youngsters will get their social networking fix from other services. That fear served as the catalyst behind his decision to buy Instagram and keep it out of the hands of a cross-town competitor.

This type of paranoia is relatively normal at Silicon Valley’s largest technology companies.

{ VentureBeat | Continue reading }

Not only is it accurate enough to compensate for the tiny aberrations in the optics, but it’s so accurate that we don’t know how accurate it is because we don’t yet have instruments accurate enough to measure the level of its accuracy.

The point is it’s pretty accurate.

{ Gizmodo | Continue reading }

{ How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Global Taxes | NY Times }

{ Back in late 2009, an Apple patent application surfaced showing that the company had explored ad-supported operating systems, with the user receiving free or discounted goods or services in exchange for viewing the advertisements. | MacRumors | Continue reading }

A team led by psychology professor Ian Spence at the University of Toronto reveals that playing an action videogame, even for a relatively short time, causes differences in brain activity and improvements in visual attention. (…) This is the first time research has attributed these differences directly to playing video games.

{ University of Toronto | Continue reading }

Historically, the book, almost alone, has resisted that great colonizing form of our age, the ad. That, in turn, meant you could be assured of one thing when you opened its covers: that you were alone in the book’s world and time. No longer. Sooner or later, the one thing the coming successor generations of e-book are guaranteed to do is smash the traditional reading experience, that sense — when you step inside those covers — of having plunged into another universe. You can’t really remain in another universe long with your email pinging in the background. So the book, enveloped in our busy world and the barrage of images, information, and so much else that comes our way incessantly, is bound to morph into something different, as is the experience of reading it.

{ Tom Dispatch | Continue reading }

artwork { Chad Person }

{ Mac Flashback Attack Started With Compromised WordPress Blogs }

related { We’ve heard much about the possibility of a quantum internet which uses single photons to encode and send information protected by the emerging technology of quantum cryptography }

They have designed an imager chip that could turn mobile phones into devices that can see through walls, wood, plastics, paper and other objects.

{ The University of Texas at Dallas | Continue reading }