Throughout this period, as smartphone sales started to boom, the frequency of people’s Internet use was steadily increasing. In tandem, British spies were working frantically to bolster their spying capabilities, with plans afoot to expand the size of Black Hole and other repositories to handle an avalanche of new data.
By 2010, according to the documents, GCHQ was logging 30 billion metadata records per day. By 2012, collection had increased to 50 billion per day, and work was underway to double capacity to 100 billion. The agency was developing “unprecedented” techniques to perform what it called “population-scale” data mining, monitoring all communications across entire countries in an effort to detect patterns or behaviors deemed suspicious. It was creating what it saidwould be, by 2013, “the world’s biggest” surveillance engine “to run cyber operations and to access better, more valued data for customers to make a real world difference.”
HERE WAS A SIMPLE AIM at the heart of the top-secret program: Record the website browsing habits of “every visible user on the Internet.”
Before long, billions of digital records about ordinary people’s online activities were being stored every day. Among them were details cataloging visits to porn, social media and news websites, search engines, chat forums, and blogs.
Gary Edwards on 19 Oct 13Interesting stats coming out from the recent Forrester study on Office Productivity. The study was conducted by Philipp Karcher, and it shows a fcoming collision of two interesting phenomenon that cannot continue to "coexist". Something has to give. The two phenom are the continuing dominance and use of client/server desktop productivity application anchor, MSOffice, and, the continuing push of all business productivity application to highly mobile cloud-computing platforms. It seems we are stuck in this truly odd dichotomy where the desktop MSOffice compound document model continues to dominate business productivity processes, yet those same users are spending ever more time mobile and in the cloud. Something has got to give. And yes, I am very concerned about the fact that neither of the native XML document formats {used by MSOffice (OXML), OpenOffice and LibreOffice (ODF)} are designed for highly mobile cloud-computing. It's been said before, the Web is the future of computing. And HTML5 is the language of the Web. HTML is also the most prolific compound-document format ever. One of the key problems for cloud-computing is the lack of HTML5 ready Office Productivity Suites that can also manage the complexities of integrating cloud-ready data streams. Sadly, when Office Productivity formats went down the rat hole of a 1995 client/server compound document model, the productivity suites went right with them. Very sad. But the gaping hole in cloud-computing is going to be filled. One way or the other.
