The whole purpose of this process is for companies — and governments — to treat individuals differently. We are shown different ads on the internet and receive different offers for credit cards. Smart billboards display different advertisements based on who we are. In the future, we might be treated differently when we walk into a store, just as we currently are when we visit websites.
The point is that it doesn't matter which technology is used to identify people. [...] And most of the time, it doesn't matter if identification isn't tied to a real name. What's important is that we can be consistently identified over time.
The familiar trope of Jason Bourne movies and John le Carré novels where spies open secret safes filled with false passports and interchangeable identities is already a relic, say former officials — swept away by technological changes so profound that they're forcing the CIA to reconsider everything from how and where it recruits officers to where it trains potential agency personnel. Instead, the spread of new tools like facial recognition at border crossings and airports and widespread internet-connected surveillance cameras in major cities is wiping away in a matter of years carefully honed tradecraft that took intelligence experts decades to perfect.
Such a cool look at locations throughout the U.S. over the last decade via satellite photos.
Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Hopefully this wakes some people up. I'm looking forward to the rest of the reporting in this series.
[...] killing off links is a strategy. It may be presented as a cost-saving measure, or as a way of reducing the sharing of untrusted links. But it is a strategy, designed to keep people from the open web, the place where they can control how, and whether, someone makes money off of an audience.
To demonstrate how easy it is to track people without their knowledge, we collected public images of people who worked near Bryant Park (available on their employers' websites, for the most part) and ran one day of footage through Amazon's commercial facial recognition service. [...] The total cost: about $60.
The potential of this to change the way we work - dynamically identifying groups of people with the same skill sets or interests; automatically creating acronym finders and corporate dictionaries; applying theft protection and information compartmentalization automatically based on information learned from the content itself. This is the sort of thing literally no other company can do.
Mark Russinovich's presented this at several internal keynote speeches. So cool to see that it's finally public and doing something interesting.
To shed light on the software that has tilted the world on its axis, the editors polled computer scientists, software developers, historians, policymakers, and journalists. They were asked to pick: Which pieces of code had a huge influence? Which ones warped our lives?
Some fun examples of the technological and cultural impact of code
Strang has now stepped down from RELEVANT.