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abdulrahmanabdo

How the NSA's Domestic Spying Program Works | Electronic Frontier Foundation - 0 views

www.eff.org/...how-it-works

NSAspyingprogram

shared by abdulrahmanabdo on 05 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • When the NSA’s spying program was first exposed by the New York Times in 2005, President Bush admitted to a small aspect of the program—what the administration labeled the “Terrorist Surveillance Program”—in which the NSA monitored, without warrants, the communications of between 500-1000 people inside the US with suspected connections to Al Qaeda.
    • abdulrahmanabdo
      abdulrahmanabdo on 05 Jul 14
       
      The first time the NSA's spying programs where first exposed and what was chosen to be revealed by the Bush administration.
  • But other aspects of the Program were aimed not just at targeted individuals, but perhaps millions of innocent Americans never suspected of a crime.
  • A person familiar with the matter told USA Today that the agency's goal was "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders. All of this was done without a warrant or any judicial oversight.
    • abdulrahmanabdo
      abdulrahmanabdo on 05 Jul 14
       
      The main reason why some Americans are upset by the NSA's recent actions. It was a breach in the balance of power that much of American government is run by, for now hundreds of years.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • This equipment gave the NSA unfettered access to large streams of domestic and international communications in real time—what amounted to at least 1.7 billion emails a day, according to the Washington Post.
    • abdulrahmanabdo
      abdulrahmanabdo on 05 Jul 14
       
      The intelligence gathering power of the NSA.
  • First, the government convinced the major telecommunications companies in the US, including AT&T, MCI, and Sprint, to hand over the “call-detail records” of their customers. According to an investigation by USA Today, this included “customers' names, street addresses, and other personal information.” In addition, the government received “detailed records of calls they made—across town or across the country—to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.”
    • abdulrahmanabdo
      abdulrahmanabdo on 05 Jul 14
       
      How the intensive intelligence gathering began for the NSA.
  • It works like this: when you send an email or otherwise use the internet, the data travels from your computer, through telecommunication companies' wires and fiber optics networks, to your intended recipient. To intercept these communications, the government installed devices known as “fiber-optic splitters” in many of the main telecommunication junction points in the United States (like the AT&T facility in San Francisco). These splitters make exact copies of the data passing through them: then, one stream is directed to the government, while the other stream is directed to the intended recipients.
    • abdulrahmanabdo
      abdulrahmanabdo on 05 Jul 14
       
      How intelligence gathering works for the NSA.
  • In April 2012, long-time national security author James Bamford reported NSA is spending $2 billion to construct a data center in a remote part of Utah to house the information it has been collecting for the past decade. “Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases,” Bamford wrote, “will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’
  • abdulrahmanabdo on 05 Jul 14
     
    The NSA's Domestic Spying Program and how it works.
Maryam Kaymanesh

Social Media Has Good and Bad Effects on Kids: Experts - 1 views

consumer.healthday.com/...ts-on-kids-experts-651251.html

social social media media classroom student technology social networking

shared by Maryam Kaymanesh on 26 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • and nearly one-quarter of teens say they log on to their favorite social media sites 10 or more times each day.
  • "Facebook is geared toward teen age and up. There are ads and cont
  • ent on the site for an older group.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • he report found that social media encourage kids to connect with each other and to express their creativity.
  • They also provide an opportunity for learning,
  • Bullying was around before the Internet, but cyberbullying makes it easier,"
  • "Kids have always wanted to look at nude pictures, and today, taking and sending a picture can be done in a second,"
  • "We need more technology infrastructure, and pediatricians need to be ready to intervene and help educate young people and their parents on how to be more media literate, and how they can evaluate the types of things they're exposed to,"
  • "Facebook depression."
wstrahan

"Spotify Was Designed from the Ground Up to Combat Piracy" | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/und-up-to-combat-piracy-131204

spotify combat piracy

shared by wstrahan on 11 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • “Spotify was designed from the ground up to combat piracy,” the company confirms. “Founded in Sweden, the home of The Pirate Bay, we believed that if we could build a service which was better
  • than piracy, then we could convince people to stop illegal file-sharing, and start
  • consuming music legally again.”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Right from the beginning Spotify founder Daniel Ek held a solid belief that if his service offered a better experience and superior convenience than that being offered by The Pirate Bay, people would jump on board.
  • And they have. Earlier this year the service confirmed it had amassed a total of 24 million users worldwide, 18 million on their ad-supported service and 6 million paying a subscription.
  • The notion, that “it’s impossible to compete with free”, sat well with lawmakers and governments, who looked at offerings coming out of The Pirate Bay and thousands of other similar sites and widely agreed that no-one will pay for something if they can get it for nothing.
  • “A key part of this [success] has been in ensuring that Spotify has a free [ad supported] tier. By offering this free tier, Spotify is able to compete with piracy on cost and bring music consumers into the legal framework,” the company notes.
  • In Sweden, a market that should be the most difficult to turn around if file-sharing traditions are any barometer, Spotify says that the number of people who pirated music fell by 25 percent between 2009 and 2011.
  • In Denmark the IFPI reports that 48% of users using streaming services had previously been illegal downloaders. An impressive 8 out of 10 of those have now stopped completely.
  • Norway, a success story documented earlier this year, has seen its piracy rates drop to just one-fifth of their levels four years earlier, with streaming services taking most of the credit.
  • There can be little doubt that torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay will always have a following, but when services such as Spotify offer their basic services for free, one has to question why people wouldn’t at least try them
wstrahan

Piracy Collapses As Legal Alternatives Do Their Job | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/ternatives-do-their-job-130716

piracy alternatives

shared by wstrahan on 11 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • “When you have a good legitimate offer, the people will use it,” says Olav Torvund, former law professor at the University of Oslo. “There is no excuse for illegal copying, but when you get an offer that does not cost too much and is easy to use, it is less interesting to download illegally.”
  • Of those questioned for the survey, 47% (representing around 1.7 million people) said they use a streaming music service such as Spotify. Even more impressively, just over half (corresponding to 920,000 people and 25% of Norwegian Internet users) said that they pay for the premium option.
  • While TV show piracy has reduced by half in four years, it actually peaked at the start of 2011 with 200 million shows copied without permission. However, since then with the introduction of legal alternatives, unauthorized copying is down more than 72%.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The report shows that in 2008 almost 1.2 billion songs were copied without permission. However, by 2012 that figure had plummeted to 210 million, just 17.5% of its level four years earlier.
  • As expected, piracy of movies and TV shows in 2008 was at much lower levels than music, with 125 million movies and 135 million TV shows copied without permission. But by last year the figures for both had reduced by around half, to 65 million and 55 million respectively.
wstrahan

Study Finds That Streaming And Spyware Are Killing Music Piracy - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...yware-are-killing-music-piracy

piracy music streaming

shared by wstrahan on 03 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • That report shows that the number of music files being illegally downloaded was 26% less in 2012 than in 2011. What’s more, 40% of the people surveyed in the study who said that they’d illegally downloaded in 2011 did not do so in 2012.
  • So what’s responsible for this massive reduction in piracy? According to the survey, it’s not stepped-up enforcement – it’s the availability of free music via streaming services like Spotify. Nearly half of the people who had stopped or sharply reduced their music downloading cited those services as the reason for stopping.
  • What’s interesting to me is that streaming isn’t just killing downloads. 44% of the survey respondents indicated that they’d also stopped ripping CDs from friends and family.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • n 2012.
  • So what’s responsible for this massive reduction in piracy? According to the survey, it’s not stepped-up enforcement – it’s the availability of free music via streaming services like Spotify. Nearly half of the people who had stopped or sharply reduced their music downloading cited those services as the reason for stopping.
  • So what’s responsible for this massive reduction in piracy? According to the survey, it’s not stepped-up enforcement – it’s the availability of free music via streaming services like Spotify. Nearly half of the people who had stopped or sharply reduced their music downloading cited those services as the reason for stopping.
marikejp

What draws us to Facebook? - 0 views

www.apa.org/...cover-facebook.aspx

facebook

shared by marikejp on 17 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • It can boost our self-esteem, satisfy our need for connectedness and self-promotion, and help us maintain offline relationships.
  • The sociable, the lonely and the narcissistic among us may turn to Facebook to satisfy different needs.
  • site's appeal into two areas: the need to belong and the need for self-presentation. Facebook, Hofmann says, satisfies both of those basic needs.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Paradoxically, the researchers found that spending a lot of time on Facebook correlated with both high levels of feeling connected to other people and with high levels of disconnection.
  • "It's almost like an addiction that doesn't solve the thing that you're trying to cope with."
  • People who are lonely and disconnected spend time on Facebook to cope with their loneliness. But people who aren't lonely also spend time on Facebook, and for them the site helps maintain social connections, leading them to spend even more time there.
  • the students who felt particularly lonely and disconnected after their time away from Facebook reported sharply increased use of the site when they were allowed back on — presumably because the loneliness was motivating them to spend more time there.
  • we gain some psychological benefit even from passively viewing our own profiles.
  • students who were asked to look at their own Facebook page for just three minutes showed a boost in self-esteem
  • reinforces the version of ourselves who we want to be and can have a positive effect on our self-esteem.
  • people who updated their Facebook status frequently, tagged themselves often in photos and had many Facebook friends — including people whom they didn't know in real life — scored higher on a narcissistic personality inventory than people who used the site more judiciously.
  • can be useful because it can allow people to access information that they wouldn't otherwise know — such as a new job opportunity or a news story they might have missed.
  • "The concept is here to stay, because it is driven by human needs,"
perezmv

How Pandora Avoided the Junkyard, and Found Success - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...08pandora.html

technology Pandora success music stations

shared by perezmv on 18 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Pandora’s 48 million users tune in an average 11.6 hours a month. That could increase as Pandora strikes deals with the makers of cars, televisions and stereos
  • At the end of 2009, Pandora reported its first profitable quarter and $50 million in annual revenue — mostly from ads and the rest from subscriptions and payments from iTunes and Amazon.com when people buy music.
  • Its library now has 700,000 songs, each categorized by an employee based on 400 musical attributes, like whether the voice is breathy, like Charlotte Gainsbourg, or gravelly like Tom Waits.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Some music lovers dislike Pandora’s approach to choosing music based on its characteristics rather than cultural associations.
  • “It’s not just that this has an 80-beat-a-minute guitar riff,” he said. “It’s that this band toured with Eddie Vedder.”
  • For Pandora and its listeners, it was a revelation. Internet radio was not just for the computer. People could listen to their phone on the treadmill or plug it into their car or living room speakers.
  • In January, Pandora announced a deal with Ford to include Pandora in its voice-activated Sync system, so drivers will be able to say, “Launch my Lady Gaga station”
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