TRAFFIQ — Premium Advertising Marketplace Biosphere 2: How a Sci-Fi Stunt Turned Into the World's Biggest Earth Science Lab Flickr: Image If you were born after 1980 or so, then you probably most closely associate the concept of a manmade biosphere with Pauly Shore and fart jokes you didn't even think were funny when you were eleven. But unlike the Biodome, the Biosphere was an actual thing. And it was almost as disastrous as the movie. In 1991, an apocalypse-fearing oil billionaire named Ed Bass poured $150 million into building the Biosphere 2, a 3-acre-wide complex of glass and steel. The completely sealed-off habitat encompassed five different biomes, and was ostensibly designed to be deployed off-planet in order to kick start otherworldly colonies. The New York Times' new documentary about the Biosphere 2 splashes the spotlight back on the once-ambitious effort to build a self-sustaining space station in the Arizona desert. The structure was built by Peter Pearce, an erstwhile associate of the famed Buckminister Fuller, the futurist who patented the geodesic dome. Image: Flickr Image: Flickr
Google Gets a Privacy Deadline Google has a fleet of camera-equipped cars prowling the streets of every major metropolis, snapping endless rounds of photographs for its Street View mapping service. The next time one rolls by, watch out--it could be "accidentally" capturing more than just the front of your house. Back in May, German officials launched a criminal investigation into the company's Street View cars, and found they had been scanning unsecured Wi-Fi networks and collecting private user data--small bits personal information, accessed websites, and email messages. Today, the government set a deadline: Develop new guidelines for data collection or face government regulation. "We need a charter guarding private geographical data and we need it drafted by December 7," de Maiziere told AFP. Google has made several attempts to hedge the controversy.
The Data Bubble The tide turned today. Mark it: 31 July 2010. That’s when The Wall Street Journal published The Web’s Gold Mine: Your Secrets, subtitled A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series. It has ten links to other sections of today’s report. It’s pretty freaking amazing — and amazingly freaky, when you dig down to the business assumptions behind it. Here’s the gist: The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It gets worse: In between the Internet user and the advertiser, the Journal identified more than 100 middlemen—tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks—competing to meet the growing demand for data on individual behavior and interests.The data on Ms. Two things are going to happen here. Improving a pain in the ass doesn’t make it a kiss.
How to Build a Secret Facebook The NSA's Utah data center near Bluffdale, Utah. Via Google Street View Since retiring from a three-decade career at the NSA in 2001, a mathematician named William Binney has been telling anyone who will listen about a vast data-gathering operation being conducted by his former employers. The invasive spying program Binney described—one that could build a "social graph" of nearly any user of the American Internet, like some massive, secret Facebook—was in the works, he says, when he left the agency. But now we know more about one aspect of the US's surveillance arsenal. Agencies like the FBI, which itself has been quietly pushing for a "back door" system like this, call it crucial for national security. This was not the kind of reality that Binney, like Snowden and other recent espionage whistleblowers, signed up to build. William Binney in Laura Poitras's "The Program," 2012. Edward Snowden in a video for the Guardian by Laura Poitras As J. Technology was already well ahead of the law.
Know Privacy Cookie Madness! I just don’t understand Julia Angwin’s scare story about cookies and ad targeting in the Wall Street Journal. That is, I don’t understand how the Journal could be so breathlessly naive, unsophisticated, and anachronistic about the basics of the modern media business. It is the Reefer Madness of the digital age: Oh my God, Mabel, they’re watching us! If I were a conspiracy theorist — and I’m not, because I’ve found the world is rarely organized enough to conspire (and I found this to be especially true of News Corp. when I worked there, at TV Guide) — I’d imagine that the Journal ginned up this alleged exposé as a way to attack everyone else’s advertising business just as its parent company skulks behind its pay wall and surrenders its own ad business. But I’m not a conspiracy theorist. That’s why I’m confused. The story uses the ominous passive voice of newspaper scare stories: “…a Wall Street Journal investigation has found…” As if this knowledge were hiding.
The Revolution Will Be Live-Mapped: A Brief History of Protest Maptivism The revolution may not be televised, but it will be Google-mapped with crowdsourced data from social media networks. Modern-day digital cartography is transforming the ancient art of protest—with live tactical maps built by cyberactivists using Google Maps, Umaps, or the open source world map open street map, and updated in real-time with tips from the ground sent via social media. The maps help activists avoid police, find shelter, medical help, food and other protest groups, and stay mobile to avoid arrest or violence. This kind of maptivism was instrumental during the Arab Spring two years ago. Now, as Turks in Instanbul protest the authoritarian rule of Prime Minister Tayyip, live maps and social media are again playing a crucial role—enough to compel Tayyip to call Twitter "the worst menace to society." Savvy Turks created a Google map on June 1 to track police movement near Taksim Square. Not long after Libya, people starting rising up in Syria.
Crystal Ball - Google CEO Schmidt Rekindles Privacy Fears with AI Talk In what has become an all-too familiar rite of technological punditry, techperts are crawling all over the latest comments from Google CEO Eric Schmidt about the future of search being more predictive, pretty much telling people what they want before they know they want it. You know the story. Google has some Matrix- or Inception-like ideal that its search engine will become so personalized that people's behaviors will be guided by the search algorithms anticipating the human impulse and then acting on it. Schmidt recently sat down with Wall Street Journal editors and said (paywall warning): We're trying to figure out what the future of search is ... Here's the example Schmidt provided that raised hackles in many quarters: Let's say you're walking down the street. Later, Schmidt noted: "As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant. Depends on your point of view.
eXelate Raises $15 Million For Behavioral Targeting Data Marketplace eXelate, a New York-based provider of data management tools for online publishers and operator of an open marketplace for audience targeting data, has raised $15 million in Series B funding in a round led by Silicon Valley’s Menlo Ventures with participation of Israeli VC firm Carmel Ventures. The latter led the company’s initial $4 million financing round back in October 2007. Menlo Ventures partner Mark Siegel will join Carmel’s Shlomo Dovrat on eXelate’s board, which was recently expanded to include New York Times Company SVP Digital Operations Martin Nisenholtz and IPG’s Mediabrands Ventures CEO Matt Freeman. Since eXelate’s U.S. launch of the eXelate eXchange in May 2008, the company has expanded both its footprint of accessible audience data (to 150 million U.S. unique visitors presently) as well as its suite of solutions to enable efficient interactions between buyers and sellers of data.
The Motherboard Guide to Avoiding the NSA If you've been reading the headlines about the NSA mining intelligence data from the world's largest data mongers, and haven't already burnt down your house with everything you own in it and set sail for a libertarian expat community in Chile, then there are some less dramatic suggestions in store for you. Evading the NSA's comprehensive surveillance system is no simple task, especially as we only know snippets of the agency's capabilities. But we're going to try our best. First, it's time to take an inventory of anything you own or are borrowing that can be traced. Phones, credit cards, cars, e-mail addresses, bank accounts, social media profiles, wi-fi coffee machines, residences, P.O. boxes, and so on—any piece of property where there is more than a handwritten cash receipt proving more than purchase price should either be ditched or reengineered to steer clear of the NSA's radars. Cash Image via Flickr Prepaid Credit Cards Image via Flickr Bitcoin Illustration by the author Phone Image Via
Google's 600 Gigabyte Privacy Fiasco, by the Numbers "We screwed up," Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in June. "Let's be very clear about that." Schmidt was referring to the "rogue data" controversy, a privacy fiasco that has embroiled the company everywhere from Germany to Spain to South Korea. Discovered several months ago after a third-party audit, between 2006 and 2010 Google's Street View vehicles, the cars it used to capture images from the world's major cities, had "accidentally" intercepted loads of personal data over unsecured Wi-Fi networks. Just how much did Google screw up? In those four years, Google collected about 600 gigabytes of personal data from users in more than 30 countries--a heck of a lot of data to "inadvertently" collect because of a coding mishap. So as German prosectors gear up for a policy fight with the Internet giant, we want to put that data into perspective to give you a sense of just how much our privacy has been violated. 62 million... messages in your Gmail inbox 60,000... videos watched on YouTube
What They Know About You A few online marketers will show you what they know about you – or think they know. Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. , Yahoo Inc. and others have created "preference managers" that let you see, and change, the interests they've assigned to you based on your browsing behavior. The companies acted partly in response to concerns about the privacy of the people they're tracking. Some, but not all, of the preference managers let you halt tracking by that company. But none will block all tracking, or prevent you from seeing ads. Some require you to register, and one lets you pick a charity to which you can donate some of the money made by selling your data. The companies gather this information by tracking your Web-surfing activity through small computer files or software programs installed on your computer by the websites you visit. Some of their guesses can be wrong.
Meet the Man Behind the Push to Ban Killer Robots Image via Wikipedia Depending on who you ask, armed robots that can discern by themselves when and how to stage attacks, without guidance from humans, present either an unprecedented danger to humanity or its greatest mechanism of defense. But both sides agree that such "lethal autonomous robots," as they're known, are on their way whether we're ready for them or not. The prospect of free-thinking war machines waging the ultimate battle against the human race has been bouncing around most of our minds since Arnold promised us that he'd be back in the 1980s. Less then three decades and more than a few drone strikes later, a new UN report is calling for "national moratoria" on developing killer robots in every country on the globe. To bring clearer into focus the backdrop of killer robots and the threat they pose, I talked to Peter Asaro, co-founder of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. Asaro: I think we face these issues immediately today.