Claus.dahl

After taking in a four-hour keynote at the Google I/O conference, Mat Honan is transported to a magical place called Google Island.

The soft, froggy voice startled me. I turned around to face an approaching figure. It was Larry Page, naked, save for a pair of eyeglasses.

"Welcome to Google Island. I hope my nudity doesn't bother you. We're completely committed to openness here. Search history. Health data. Your genetic blueprint. One way to express this is by removing clothes to foster experimentation. It's something I learned at Burning Man," he said. "Here, drink this. You're slightly dehydrated, and your blood sugar is low. This is a blend of water, electrolytes, and glucose."

I was taken aback. "How did you..." I began, but he was already answering me before I could finish my question.

"As soon as you hit Google's territorial waters, you came under our jurisdiction, our terms of service. Our laws-or lack thereof-apply here. By boarding our self-driving boat you granted us the right to all feedback you provide during your journey. This includes the chemical composition of your sweat. Remember when I said at I/O that maybe we should set aside some small part of the world where people could experiment freely and examine the effects? I wasn't speaking theoretically. This place exists. We built it."

I was thirsty, so I drank the electrolyte solution down. "This is delicious," I replied.

"I know," he replied. "It also has thousands of micro sensors which are now swarming through your blood stream."

"What... " I stammered.

"Your prostate is enlarged. Let's go hangout now. There's some really great music I'd like to recommend to you."

You could consider this a follow-up to 2004's EPIC 2014 by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson.

Tags: Google   Mat Honan   Matt Thompson   Robin Sloan

dead simple timer for the Scientific 7-Minute Workout  

I really wish Bret would independently release some of his work as products  

Writer Tom Junod on journalism and regret:

I remember walking into a dinner party after Slate called the Angelina profile the Worst Celebrity Profile of All Time. My arrival was greeted with silence; people did not know what to say. So I brought it up, not just to ease the tension but also because I was, like my editor, perversely proud of being so honored, knowing that you can't hope to write the Best Celebrity Profile of All Time unless you are absolutely prepared to write the Worst. I'm not in this business because I expect to be admired but rather because I want the freedom to say what I want to say and get some kind of reaction for saying it, so if I can't enjoy the fact that Slate devoted 2,500 words to the Angelina profile then I've lost something of myself that I desperately need to preserve in order to write the way I want to write. The great vice of journalism in the age of social media is not its recklessness but rather its headlong rush for respectability -- its self-conscious desire to please an audience of peers rather than an audience of reader -- and the first step towards respectability is regret.

Here's his profile of Jolie and the Slate takedown of it. And you can like this post riiiiight down here (God, please do):
↓↓

Tags: Angelina Jolie   celebrity   journalism   Tom Junod

my pick for a worthy Google Reader successor  

Insane legal actions over relatively mild pranks are coming fast and furious these days. We just recently discussed the 17 years old high school girl staring down felony charges over a childish year book prank. There have also been several cases of those that fall victim to pranks turning to intellectual property law as a way to hide their gullibility. There's something -- embarrassment perhaps -- that spurs victims into unreasonable legal action once the trap has been sprung.

And now we can add to that list the case of Joshua Barber and Nicholas Kaiser, who are looking at up to 5 years in prison and/or a half-a-milliion dollar fine for the crime of getting two NFL general managers to talk to each other on the phone and recording the conversation. Their prank consisted of calling the office of Buffalo Bills GM Buddy Nix, claiming to be Tampa Bay GM Mark Dominik, hanging up, then dialing Dominik. The confused Nix called back using the redial function on his phone (many, many times), and the pranksters finally called Dominik as well, just as Nix called them back, hit the conference button, joined both GMs on the line and recorded the ensuing conversation. It's worth noting that conversation was about as innocuous as it gets. No real embarrassment was to be had from the recording, which was then sold to Deadspin. The result of the prank is far less innocuous.

[The] two Plymouth, Mass. men were charged Wednesday with intentionally intercepting a wire communication and with making a telephone call without disclosing their identity with the intent to annoy or harass the person at the called number. The complaint further states that after the conversation was recorded, Barber and Kaiser sold the unauthorized recording to the website deadspin.com. If convicted, Barber and Kaiser face a maximum penalty of five years in prison, a $500,000 fine or both.

And yes, here are your tax dollars at work, with the FBI/DOJ gloating about taking those darn prank callers off the street and ruining their lives with extended jail time and fines. Half a million and half a decade in jail for a prank phone call? Shall I assume The Jerky Boys are currently dropping soap in barred showers, or is the safer assumption that someone in the legal system sees this high-profile prank as a way to further their career?

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At first glance, the similarities between PicMix and Instagram are obvious. Both apps are photo sharing platforms with simple, square Polaroid-esque aesthetics, and display photos from friends in streaming feed.

But while Instagram is figuring out how to monetize, Indonesian startup, PicMix seems to have nailed it from the get-go.

PicMix makes it part of the core photo posting process for users to add frame and text embellishments. Many of the frames included in the app are branded from labels (who have paid for the privilege) that users actually want to use on their photos. It’s not hard to imagine getting a user in Asia to willingly use a Hello Kitty or Louis Vuitton frame around their picture.

The company offers these frames to users as part of branding campaigns that are run by labels. They also put up photo competitions, and the criterion to enter is to use one of the branded frames around their photos. The visual impact of a frame or brand’s “sticker” on a photo is far more significant than hashtagging a brand.

Stickers and frames are catching the wave of users warming up to adding extra bells and whistles on their photos, beyond photo filters. While Instagram hasn’t departed from its genesis as a vintage, Polaroid-style filter app, a crop of photo editing apps have blossomed around it to fill that gap. These third parties allow you to add captions and combine several photos into a single collage, ready to be loaded into Instagram. Two popular examples are Photo Grid for Android and Photo Collage Creator for iPhone.

Right now, PicMix charges an absurdly low $5,000 per brand campaign, but as its user base grows, it’s likely to increase that.

Mike Prasad, a marketing and brand development consultant and co-founder of Hawaii-based accelerator, Kinetiq Labs, said he was impressed by PicMix’s execution of brand marketing. “Getting brand insertion without ill will is key. It’s amazing that it’s got users to want to insert brands, in a process that is not negative,” he said.

Since the company launched less than a year ago, it’s already attracted 11 million users to the platform. 35 percent of those are in Indonesia, with the rest in South Africa and Venezuela.

The reason for that spread is that unlike most photo sharing apps which tend to prioritize the iPhone upon launch, PicMix is available on feature phone platforms like the Nokia Asha, as well as BlackBerry, and Android.

Calvin Kizana, founder and CEO of PicMix’s maker, Inovidea Magna Global, spoke to me at his booth at the ID Byte Jakarta conference, which I visited as part of the Geeks On A Plane trip last week. He said the company chose these platforms over the iPhone because he wanted to grab share in his home market—a notoriously loyal BlackBerry base.

And an iOS version is coming. PicMix will enter the US market with it within the next two months, said Kizana.

The company’s users seem to be pretty active. Each day on average, a user shares between five and 10 photos, to add up to a total of 450,000 photos uploaded to the service daily. The company was hosting this on Indonesian servers, but switched over to Amazon Web Services after its first month of business, when it hit 200,000 users and its servers were starting to feel the strain.

PicMix received a round of funding from Indonesian mobile equipment distributor, Erajaya. Kizana declined to share how much the funding was, and when exactly the deal was struck, but said that the investor came in when PicMix hit the five-million user mark.

Besides sponsored marketing campaigns, PicMix also makes money through in-app purchases of premium frames, stickers and filters. Focusing on its emerging market base, it’s also established carrier billing arrangements in 75 countries worldwide, and has just launched a gift card service with Indonesian payment provider, Indomog.

Carrier billings and prepaid gift cards have helped the company appeal to its domestic base, within which a significant proportion of users don’t have credit cards, said Kizana.

"If those services don't trust me enough to give me an RSS feed, why should I trust them with my data?"  

“A pres­ent overwhelmed by the not-always-intended effects of the technological world we’d created.”

-

Andrew Blum, ‘Children of the Drone’ (2013)

Very similar to this:

Late modernity is a period of social change prompted by the need to cope with the risks generated by modernity itself.

Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization

Or in this case, the postnormal is a period of social re-equilibration instigated by the chaotic risks posed by the postmodern.

We are catching with postnormal hands what the machinery of control pitched in the postmodern, like drones.

When they start flinging postnormal inventions at us — like autonomous battle robots, or semi-intelligent buildings grown from nano slime, or genetically engineered yogurt yeasts that make us more nationalistic — then we will be all the way into the postnormal, and past the fringes where we are today.

(via stoweboyd)

Digging that last paragraph on the “postnormal” inventions. What was a normal invention anyway? Just spent the day reading time travel stories by Ray Bradbury. The inventions that really matter all were postnormal at some point. This reminds me that I should re-read Bruce Sterling’s Shaper-Mechanist stories.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaper/Mechanist_universe

(via notational)

“What I would like to see right now is for people at these internet companies to stand up and say the truth, all of it, about their dealings with the NSA.” – Michael Arrington

[This article first appeared on NSFWCORP]

Silicon Valley is shocked, shocked, shocked.

It is shocked to discover that the National Security Agency has been systematically spying on the phone metadata of millions of Americans. It is shocked that the same NSA has also been demanding that tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Paltalk provide a secure drop box for handing over subpoenaed data. And most of all Silicon Valley is shocked that the executives at those companies, and who knows which others, have so willingly acceded to the agency’s demands.

Michael Arrington, the well known tech investor (including, important disclosure, $25,000 in NSFWCORP*), summed up the outrage neatly in a blog post entitled “Cowards”…

Will not one tech CEO stand up and tell the truth?

The NSA story of the secret assassination of the Fourth Amendment continues to unfold. Today we heard from Google CEO Larry Page and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Page was confused (the title of his post is ‘What the…?’). Zuckerberg claimed the press reports were outrageous. Both made strong denials of specific allegations (‘direct access,’ ‘back doors’). Both were technically telling the truth. Both were also overtly misleading people.

So…much…false…indignation.

In a follow-up post, he goes even further – imagining a terrifying dystopian world in which… well…

…sitting around the NSA office one day an analyst has an idea. Like, ‘Hey, let’s find Republicans in Wyoming who have Facebook or Twitter friends with someone outside of the U.S. And then cross reference that with concealed carry permits. I think these guys might be gun running. Can I get a high five!?

Our guy fills out a form in PRISM, I imagine, with his query. The damn Twitter doesn’t do Prism and needs a more formal order, probably requiring someone to wake up the secret judge and tell him to get that stamp ready. And then they send off the order in a variety of ways and demand a response in 24 hours or something.

…

Hey, bring up those Verizon records and see where this guy’s been. Damn, he goes to the range nearly every day. I wonder if he’s complying with every single Federal and state gun law. Let’s send an agent down to chat with him. And if he gives you any shit just show him this picture of his mistress Verizon sent over. That’ll shut him up.

WAIT! Here’s a frickin video! oh man, I’m sending this to myself. No, hold on guys, I’m doing this. Ok, now, show him this video of himself in a compromised position with his girlfriend and ask if we should sent it to his wife at their home address, it’s right here.’

Arrington, along with the rest of Libertarian-leaning Silicon Valley, is right to be wary of the way the government is able to use technology to track our every move. He’s also right to criticize the double-speak of any Valley company that prevaricates on its true level of involvement in programs like PRISM.

The only odd thing is why Arrington doesn’t go even further in connecting the dots fully between Silicon Valley and government snooping.

If we’ve learned anything in the past few days it’s that the NSA does precious little of its own spying, relying instead on companies like Palantir and Booz Allen Hamilton. Indeed, Palantir is just one of dozens — hundreds? — of Silicon Valley companies developing and operating the tools used by intelligence agencies like the NSA. If the dystopian drama that Arrington imagines ever actually plays out, it’ll likely do so using tools created by a private company located within a dozen miles of Palo Alto.

As the Financial Times’ April Dembosky reminds us, the relationship between the Valley and Homeland Security is nothing new. The Internet started out as a government project, designed to keep communication lines open in the event of a nuclear attack. In 1999 the CIA established In-Q-Tel, a venture capital fund to invest in technology companies that might be useful to the folks in Langley or Fort Meade.

A look at In-Q-Tel’s board of trustees shows how close the relationship between the geeks and the sneaks has become. The board is almost indistinguishable from that of a major Valley VC firm: Jim Barksdale former CEO and President of Netscape sits next to Howard Cox of Greylock, sits next to Ted Schley of KPMG… sits across from David E. Jeremiah, the Chairman of Wackenhut Services Inc and AB “Buzzy” Krongard, Former Executive Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

In-Q-Tel’s investment portfolio, at least on first glance, also seems remarkably similar to that of a regular Valley fund, with Web 2.0-y names like “illogic” and “Delphix” and “Connectify.” The only difference is that the companies on the list are all “focused on new and emerging commercial technologies that have the potential to give the CIA and broader US Intelligence Community (IC) mission-advantage today and in the future.”

In-Q-Tel’s highest profile investment is Palantir – the data mining firm founded with additional money from Valley uber-Libertarian Peter Thiel – but the venture firm’s entire portfolio includes over 100 companies, all reflecting the CIA’s current big obsessions: “big data,” video surveillance and encryption.

The interest in big data is typified by Cloudera, in which In-Q-Tel has invested twice. According to the Palo Alto-based company’s website:

With Cloudera, businesses and other organizations can now interact with the world’s largest data sets at the speed of thought — and ask bigger questions in the pursuit of discovering something incredible.

“Other organizations.” Emphasis mine.

For video surveillance, the CIA has backed companies like iMove (“Look everywhere / See everything / All the time”) and 3vr (“allows video surveillance systems to reach their true potential”) both of which provide tools to refine and then analyze huge amounts of CCTV and surveillance data for intelligence agencies.

In-Q-Tel’s investment in encryption companies like Mocana, meanwhile, are a conspiracy theorist’s dream: Who better to trust with encrypting the data stored on your smartphone than a company part owned by the CIA?

How is it possible, then that Mr. Arrington is so furious at the NSA, so disappointed by their Silicon Valley enablers but has nary a peep about Valley startups which take CIA money to build the very technology that is taking away (our capital “L”) Liberty?

Let’s do some data mining of our own, shall we?

According to CrunchBase – the technology investor database founded by Arrington himself – Cloudera, iMove, 3vr, and Mocana – all share one additional investor in common: SV Angel, one of the Valley’s most prolific “micro VC” firms. And whose name do we find on the firm’s list of limited partners? One Michael Arrington. (In a neat piece of symmetry, SV Angel’s co-founder, Ron Conway, is an investor in Arrington’s CrunchFund.)

Once you start digging into the data, the connections get really entertaining: Arrington is also an LP in Benchmark, which invested alongside In-Q-Tel in data-storage company Decru. And in Andreessen Horowitz, which co-invested with In-Q-Tel in Silver Tail Systems and Platfora. CrunchFund also invested in Facebook, which boasts Palantir’s Peter Thiel as a board member, and from where former data team leader Jeff Hammerbacher left to head up technology at Cloudera.

Data mining is fun!

Of course, as a limited partner in SV Angel and the rest, Arrington almost certainly didn’t get to choose the companies in which to co-invest with the CIA. The fact that he stands to profit, perhaps handsomely, from their success is just a happy coincidence for the man who last week railed against spy technology which “kills liberty and freedom on a scale never seen before. It’s not a way to stop terrorism. It IS terrorism.”

For a more direct example of Arrington embracing the technology he calls on others to resist, you have to look to a company called Skybox Imaging, which raised $70 million from a number of major Silicon Valley investment firms including CrunchFund. Skybox plans to put 24 satellites into orbit in order to “empower commercial and government customers to make more informed, data-driven decisions that will improve the profitability of companies and the welfare of societies around the world.”

If that line about improving “the welfare of societies” didn’t creep you out, the company’s list of advisors certainly will. Step forward Jeff Harris, Former Director of National Reconnaissance Office and Lt. Gen David Deptula, Former Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance

Closer to earth, CrunchFund is also an investor in the gloriously named Prism Skylabs, which debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt, the startup competition founded by Arrington (and – another disclosure – twice hosted by me). Prism negates the need for costly satellites by allowing companies to tap into existing CCTV technology to detect patterns of behavior which might be, well, interesting. Interesting to whom? Perhaps Mr. Arrington could ask the CIA-backed 3VR who just signed a partnership with Prism Skylabs to increase integration between the two services. Or he could speak to Prism Skylabs CEO Steve Russell who, before founding Prism, was founder and CEO of 3VR.

Honestly, though, I’m being unfair in singling out Michael Arrington here. Really the only remarkable thing about his involvement with CIA-friendly big data companies is his hypocrisy in attacking those Valley luminaries who won’t admit to exactly the kind of spying his portfolio companies help facilitate. (In the hypocrisy stakes, though, Arrington comes a distant second to Ron Paul who this week told Fox Business, “I’m worried about, somebody in our government might kill [Edward Snowden] with a cruise missile or a drone missile,” after Snowden exposed the mass government surveillance facilitated by companies like Palantir. Last year Ron Paul received over $2.5 million in donations from his biggest single donor… Palantir’s Peter Thiel)

Pick any even moderately prolific Valley investor, and I’ll show you in three degrees of Kevin Bacon how they back — and profit from — at least one company that works closely with the CIA to spy on us. And why not? The CIA is not the only one interested in “big data” – the collection and analysis of huge amounts of information which can be filtered and analyzed to tell us everything there is to know about everyone on earth.

Big data is a nerd’s dream: turning human behavior into measurable, understandable graphs, in the same way the big data experts at Netflix claim they can tell viewers who enjoyed “Sneakers” whether they’ll also enjoy “Enemy of the State.” And who has access to more big data than the federal government? Can you really blame the folks at Palantir or Cloudera or Prism Skylabs from getting wet around the lips at the idea of getting into America’s phone records or every instant message we’ve ever sent. Think of all the patterns! Imagine the possibilities! And also: ka-ching!

And therein lies the truth, and the hypocrisy, of Silicon Valley’s outrage over government snooping: The only people who love big data more, and who care about our privacy less, than the NSA are the outraged Libertarians of Silicon Valley.

Sure, they’re furious when they’re the ones being spied on, but when a company comes to pitch them a piece of software that will see and analyze our every thought, hope, and dream — well, sign me up boy! This shit is super awesome! And if the CIA wants to throw in a few million dollars, in exchange for being able to use that technology to read our emails or watch us from the heavens well… we’re just investing in tools. It’s really not our problem what the evil government does with them. It’s not us doing the spying, ferchristsake – we have a chief privacy officer… and… hell, software doesn’t spy on people, the NSA spies on people. And… and… look over there! Is Mark Zuckerberg really building a drop box for the feds? Can you believe that guy?

It’s like the man said. So…much…false…indignation.

…

This article was originally published on NSFWCORP. Subscribe now.

[*Disclosure: Several investors mentioned in this post, including Peter Thiel, SV Angel, Greylock, Marc Andreessen and CrunchFund are investors in PandoDaily]

Image credit: Brad Jonas for NSFWCORP.

The Tampa Bay Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting spent a year investigating bad charities and this is what they found.

The worst charity in America operates from a metal warehouse behind a gas station in Holiday.

Every year, Kids Wish Network raises millions of dollars in donations in the name of dying children and their families.

Every year, it spends less than 3 cents on the dollar helping kids.

Most of the rest gets diverted to enrich the charity's operators and the for-profit companies Kids Wish hires to drum up donations.

In the past decade alone, Kids Wish has channeled nearly $110 million donated for sick children to its corporate solicitors. An additional $4.8 million has gone to pay the charity's founder and his own consulting firms.

No charity in the nation has siphoned more money away from the needy over a longer period of time.

But Kids Wish is not an isolated case, a yearlong investigation by the Tampa Bay Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

Using state and federal records, the Times and CIR identified nearly 6,000 charities that have chosen to pay for-profit companies to raise their donations.

Then reporters took an unprecedented look back to zero in on the 50 worst -- based on the money they diverted to boiler room operators and other solicitors over a decade.

These nonprofits adopt popular causes or mimic well-known charity names that fool donors. Then they rake in cash, year after year.

The nation's 50 worst charities have paid their solicitors nearly $1 billion over the past 10 years that could have gone to charitable works.

Despicable. And a reminder that before you give, you should check on a site like Charity Navigator or GiveWell for organizations where a sizable portion of your contribution is going to the actual cause. For instance, the aforementioned Kids Wish charity currently has a "donor advisory" notice on their Charity Navigator page. (via @ptak)

Tags: best of   business   charity   lists

and, best of all, they want Warner to pay back millions in undeserved licensing fees  

"Your light bulbs will narrate their agonizing deaths."  

so many octagons [via] 

I can’t even remember how many times in the past I have chuckled at the idea of a blimp/balloon-based internet. I guess it was because those ideas were promoted by companies that sounded a bit flim-flammy or sometimes, just plain nuts.

Of course, now we might have to take this whole balloon-based broadband thing seriously — Google is putting a lot of money, time and effort behind it. In a blog post, the company announced Project Loon:

Today we’re unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access. We believe that it might actually be possible to build a ring of balloons, flying around the globe on the stratospheric winds, that provides Internet access to the earth below.  It’s very early days, but we’ve built a system that uses balloons, carried by the wind at altitudes twice as high as commercial planes, to beam Internet access to the ground at speeds similar to today’s 3G networks or faster. As a result, we hope balloons could become an option for connecting rural, remote, and underserved areas, and for helping with communications after natural disasters.  The idea may sound a bit crazy—and that’s part of the reason we’re calling it Project Loon—but there’s solid science behind it. This is still highly experimental technology and we have a long way to go.

Google has launch its balloon-based Internet connectivity technology as a trial down in the Canterbury area of New Zealand. It kicked off the program by sending 30 balloons up in the air and 50 testers will be connecting to those balloons. They will launch more balloons in countries which have the same latitude as New Zealand.

This isn’t the first time Google has talked about balloon-based broadband. In 2008, there was talk that Google was looking to work with a company called Space Data Corp., and send balloons up in the air and provide connectivity in rural areas. SDC specialized in sending balloons to about 20 miles up in the air to provide connectivity to truckers and oil companies. It recently started experimenting with the idea of blimp-based broadband in Africa.

Google is obsessed with the idea of connecting more and more people to the Internet, especially in the developing world, and there isn’t a single technology that can get it done. So it has been toying with many ways to provide connectivity in areas that are un-connected. While I don’t have any doubts that Google’s mission to connect the world is driven by the profit motive, I still find the idea of pushing for seamless connectivity exciting. Seamless connectivity, as you know, has been a bit of a personal passion for me.

Looking at it from the outside, you can see that Google is putting two of its core strengths — algorithms and cloud computing infrastructure — to work on what has been a difficult problem to solve. Google admits the idea is crazy but highly experimental, which makes it all the more worthwhile to follow the project. I am also looking forward to sinking my teeth into understanding how this works (or not.)

P.S. Check out these awesome behind the scenes photos Trey Ratcliff took of the Google Loon project and shared them on his Google+ page.

This video below shows how Project Loon works.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013
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intantly spin up an Ubuntu server with a built-in terminal for 35 free minutes [via] 

In a book called Three Felonies A Day, Boston civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate says that everyone in the US commits felonies everyday and if the government takes a dislike to you for any reason, they'll dig in and find a felony you're guilty of.

The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague. In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets. The dangers spelled out in Three Felonies a Day do not apply solely to "white collar criminals," state and local politicians, and professionals. No social class or profession is safe from this troubling form of social control by the executive branch, and nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional democracy hangs in the balance.

In response to a question about what happens to big company CEOs who refuse to go along with government surveillance requests, John Gilmore offers a case study in what Silverglate is talking about.

We know what happened in the case of QWest before 9/11. They contacted the CEO/Chairman asking to wiretap all the customers. After he consulted with Legal, he refused. As a result, NSA canceled a bunch of unrelated billion dollar contracts that QWest was the top bidder for. And then the DoJ targeted him and prosecuted him and put him in prison for insider trading -- on the theory that he knew of anticipated income from secret programs that QWest was planning for the government, while the public didn't because it was classified and he couldn't legally tell them, and then he bought or sold QWest stock knowing those things.

This CEO's name is Joseph P. Nacchio and TODAY he's still serving a trumped-up 6-year federal prison sentence today for quietly refusing an NSA demand to massively wiretap his customers.

You combine this with the uber-surveillance allegedly being undertaken by the NSA and other governmental agencies and you've got a system for more or less automatically accusing any US citizen of a felony. Free society, LOL ROFLcopter.

Update: For the past two years, the Wall Street Journal has been "examining the vastly expanding federal criminal law book and its consequences". (thx, jesse)

Tags: books   Harvey Silverglate   John Gilmore   Joseph Nacchio   politics   privacy   security   Three Felonies A Day   USA

Baltazar Ushca is the last ice miner of Ecuador's Mt. Chimborazo. Dozens of men, including Ushca's brothers, used to mine Chimborazo's glacial ice but commercial ice production has rendered the arduous process obsolete.

Also, it appears that the rocks and grass aren't separated from the ice before it goes into the blender?

Tags: Baltazar Ushca   video

Chinese-produced oil paintings based on Google's blurred-out images of artwork  

Actor/writer/director Ethan Hawke did a well-received AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit yesterday. A few highlights follow. On privacy and family:

My kids and I always have a debate about if the positives outweigh the negatives. Great seats to the Nicks game vs. being hounded for autographs at halftime. Every give has a take. For me, the blessings far outweigh the curses. I consider it a kind of luxury tax. For my family, I think it's more difficult; they don't get to work with Denzel Washington and Sidney Lumet, but they still have the paparazzi.

On Nicolas Cage:

I'm kind of obsessed with Nic Cage. I just found out about /r/onetruegod too. He's the only actor since Marlon Brando that's actually done anything new with the art of acting; he's successfully taken us away from an obsession with naturalism into a kind of presentation style of acting that I imagine was popular with the old troubadours. If I could erase his bottom half bad movies, and only keep his top half movies, he would blow everyone else out of the water. He's put a little too much water in his beer, but he is still one of the great actors of our time. And working with him was an absolute pleasure. In fact, one of my favorite scenes I've ever done is the last scene in LORD OF WAR.

On hobbies and work:

No... I'm so lucky, so much of what I would do as a hobby I do for my professional life. I love what I do. And I get to shake it up by directing in a movie, acting in a movie, directing a play, writing a book, acting in a play - i've found a way over the years to continue to shake up my job so it remains interesting to me. I'm one of the handful of people who doesn't want a hobby because I'd rather be doing my job.

And on the one thing he would change in his life:

I don't want to say. You know, the things that we want to change about our lives are things we don't want everybody to know, and one of the most difficult things for me was having to learn in front of the public that having a reputation is a double-edged sword. It prevents me from making a first impression. I feel like I haven't made a first impression on anyone in 20 years. There are many things about my life and my behavior that I wish I could change, situations I wish I could have handled better, relationships I could have healed, but unfortunately the earth seems to turn one way and all we can do is try to learn.

Hawke lives in my neighborhood and I see him every once in awhile on the street and at the playground. That "I haven't made a first impression on anyone in 20 years" makes me want to give him a hug the next time I see him.

Tags: Ethan Hawke   Nicolas Cage

Points [breakfastny.com] by futuristic product development studio Breakfast is a new kind of street sign that dynamically rotates towards the direction of the real-time content it is showing.

The directional street sign consists of 3 separate arms pointing in different directions, each containing a LED display that shows specific text or graphics about a nearby destination. Depending on the actual location of the content it displays, each arm is able to rotate endlessly around 360� degrees. The content varies depending on what passers-by select via a list of buttons, ranging from public transport arrival times nearby to the content and actual location of Twitter messages.

Watch the short documentary video below.

Via FastCoCreate.

new-aesthetic:

Fake shops used to make towns neater for G8 - RTÉ News

“Local councils in Northern Ireland have painted fake shop fronts and covered derelict buildings with huge billboards to hide the economic hardship being felt in towns and villages near the golf resort where G8 leaders will meet this month. Northern Ireland’s government has spent £2m (€2.3m) tackling dereliction over the past two years, the environment department said. Some buildings have been demolished and others have been given a facelift in an attempt to make areas more attractive. Almost a quarter of “dereliction funds” were freed up for local councillors in Co Fermanagh in anticipation of Britain hosting the annual Group of Eight leaders’ summit there on 17-18 June.”

I'm a little obsessed with the story that broke yesterday about PRISM, the NSA/FBI project to gather information from popular Internet services, including Facebook, Google, and Apple.

So, naturally, I've been doing a lot of digging about the story on *.gov websites. In the process, I realized that the U.S. government loves the "PRISM" acronym. There are literally dozens of projects and applications named PRISM at the state and federal level, many with delightfully goofy logos. Here are some of my favorites.

Panelist and Reviewer Information System
Database of prospective reviewers for The National Endowment for the Humanities

Parallel Research on Invariant Subspace Methods
Argonne National Laboratory project to develop infrastructure and algorithms for the parallel solution of eigenvalue problems

Pliocene Research, Interpretation and Synoptic Mapping
USGS project to understand global climate change

PRoject Information SysteM
Apply for grants from the Washington State's Recreation and Conservation Office

Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model
Climate analysis tool from the National Water and Climate Center

Pesticide Registration Information SysteM
The Environmental Protection Agency's database on all registered pesticide products.

Portable Remote Imaging Spectrometer
NASA JPL's airborne instrument for monitoring the ocean from UAVs

Performance and Registration Information Systems Management
U.S. Dept. of Transportation program to register commercial vehicles

Performance Reporting Information System
The State of Oregon's workforce reporting system

Partnerships for Regional Invasive Species Management
The State of New York's environmental effort to manage invasive species

Patient Reporting Investigation Surveillance Manager
Communicable disease data system for the State of Wyoming's STD program

Performance Related Information for Staff and Managers
Dept. of Mental Health's reports on hospital trends

Proactive Recruitment in Introductory Science and Mathematics
National Science Foundation's effort to fund STEM programs for undergrad students

Proteomics Research Information System and Management
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's system for managing large-scale protein data

Procurement Information System for Management
Procurement software used across the federal government

 

In the corridors of the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) in New York these last couple of days, it has been clear that Jim Gilliam, the founder and CEO of community organizing tools maker NationBuilder, is a man above others. That’s not just true because of his 6-foot-9 stature. Nor is it only because of his moving 2011 speech at this event that told his story of surviving two types of cancer and a double lung transplant.

It’s also because he represents a rare species in the activist-heavy, nonprofit-oriented tech-political crowd gathered at New York University’s Skirball Center. He’s an entrepreneur who has grown a civic-minded startup from scratch and has raised serious venture capital. The company is on a tear, having grown to 60 people in the space of three years, and gathering more than 2,500 paying customers on its platform, which itself has been in operation for two years. It is now seeing 20 percent revenue growth month by month. Its customers have collectively raised more than $110 million on the platform.

NationBuilder and Gilliam himself are already proving to be examples for the PDF crowd; they have shown that business can be mixed with a social mission.

Yesterday, NationBuilder announced that it had raised a Series B round of funding that totaled $8 million. The round was led by the Omidyar Network – a global network respected for its socially conscious investing – with Andreessen Horowitz re-upping on its initial investment from last year’s Series A round, which totaled $6 million. NationBuilder will use the money to scale its operation. Because it focuses on a community organizing model, which requires lots of leaders enlisting the support of large numbers of people, it is a capital-intensive operation. As well as working on the product, it will be hiring more engineers, nonprofit charity worker types, and a controller.

While the company’s ultimate goal is to help community organizers of all types and levels, NationBuilder has so far been very focused on political campaigns. Logic might have suggested that the end of the 2012 US elections should also have marked a slowdown in the flow of political customers to the platform. That hasn’t been the case. In fact, NationBuilder’s political business is much busier now than it was even in the thick of the 2012 campaign. Gilliam says there are 500,000 elected offices just in the US, many of which previously couldn’t afford the sorts of campaign tools that NationBuilder has now made cheap and accessible. The majority of the company’s business now is coming from Mayoral and city council races. For instance, there was recently a special election for a city council seat in Washington DC, Gilliam says. All seven of the candidates used NationBuilder.

Clearly, there is a long road ahead for NationBuilder. It will face challenges in scaling, not least because of its people-heavy business model. The fact that it has had to raised $14 million in the space of a year testifies to the enormity of the pure logistical task ahead. So far, however, it looks to have a lock on the market for political campaign software. That doesn’t make it unassailable, but the headstart will help – especially in the resistant-to-change political world. If it can replicate that success outside the US, the market opportunity is huge. Opportunities also beckon outside of politics.

In the meantime, Gilliam accepts that NationBuilder itself serves as a leader in the growing tech-political community, and it is a responsibility he has embraced. He mentions a study he read that found that the number one reason people leave a group is lack of leadership. He notes that while the Internet has been wonderful in terms of connecting people, a lack of leadership and tools has also squandered some of that collective energy. Recognizing the need, he is unafraid to step up.

“Our responsibility is to help grow that leadership capacity,” he says. “There’s a vacuum of leadership in the world, and at a time when we need more. That’s how I think about my role here.”

One metric for Gilliam’s leadership will be in how many of his peers he can inspire to follow his lead. NationBuilder is part of a small group of civic-minded startups that are taking a strong for-profit line on the way it is attempting to fulfill its social mission, with Change.org, Causes, and Rally among its few peers. Much of the battle, one suspects, is in showing that it can be done. Convincing investors like Andreessen Horowitz and the Omidyar Network that community organizing is going to be a big business can only help.

featuring Brewster Kahle, hero of the Internet  

lnternetporn:

what ur average tragedy looks like after 100 years

The only times I want to write a book is when I see an image I’d want to use as the cover. 

I was reminded of this old idea and decided to step up the fidelity to see if I would learn more about it.

I have a feeling most highlights will be full sentences, so it could just be that, tapping a sentence and done. Which reminds me that it’s odd Kindle’s highlighter doesn’t default to sentences.

It would also be cool if this one could remember pages and add the highlights when it sees it again.

It should probably also save everything it saw as an image so you could get the context of a highlight.