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.
Denmark appointed him to approach Silicon Valley as if it were a global superpower. His challenges show how smaller countries struggle to influence giant corporations.
Amazing and scary all at the same time.
The threats of cyberattack and hypersonic missiles are two examples of easily foreseeable challenges to our national security posed by rapidly developing technology. It is by no means certain that we will be able to cope with those two threats, let alone the even more complicated and unknown challenges presented by the general onrush of technology — the digital revolution or so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution — that will be our future for the next few decades.
A frank telling from the chief lawyer of the N.S.A.