StatsCan's free data costs $2M--a rant

StatsCan’s free data costs $2M – a rant

What a colossal lack of imagination and sense of economic and social prosperity on the part of every government since Mulroney (who made StatsCan engage in cost recovery). In the United States open statistical data has helped businesses, the social sector, local and state governments, as well as researchers and academics. Heck, even Canadian teachers tell me that they've been forced to train students on US data because they couldn't afford to train their students on Canadian data. All this lost innovation, efficiency, jobs and social benefits for a measly $2M dollars (if that). Oh lack of vision, at all levels! Both at the top of the political order, and within StatsCan, which has been reluctant to go down this route for years.

Now that we see the "cost" this battle seems more pathetic than ever.

This bastardised libertarianism makes 'freedom' an instrument of oppression | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian

In the name of freedom – freedom from regulation – the banks were permitted to wreck the economy. In the name of freedom, taxes for the super-rich are cut. In the name of freedom, companies lobby to drop the minimum wage and raise working hours. In the same cause, US insurers lobby Congress to thwart effective public healthcare; the government rips up our planning laws; big business trashes the biosphere. This is the freedom of the powerful to exploit the weak, the rich to exploit the poor.

Monbiot uses the idea of Negative Freedom from Isaiah Berlin's essay of 1958, "Two Concepts of Liberty" to shed light on ideas of freedom often raised in political debate. For Berlin's essay see, Two Ideas of Freedom (pdf).

The Water Army

Undercover Researchers Expose Chinese Internet Water Army - Technology Review

In China, paid posters are known as the Internet Water Army because they are ready and willing to 'flood' the internet for whoever is willing to pay. The flood can consist of comments, gossip and information (or disinformation) and there seems to be plenty of demand for this army's services.

Internet Water Army On the March - Slashdot

New submitter kermidge sends in an article at the Physics arXiv blog about what's called the "Internet Water Army," large groups of people in China who are paid to "flood" internet sites with comments and reviews about various products. Researchers at the University of Victoria went undercover to figure out exactly how these informational (or disinformational) floods operate, and what they learned (PDF) could lead to better spam-detection software. Quoting:
"They discovered that paid posters tend to post more new comments than replies to other comments. They also post more often with 50 per cent of them posting every 2.5 minutes on average. They also move on from a discussion more quickly than legitimate users, discarding their IDs and never using them again. What's more, the content they post is measurably different. These workers are paid by the volume and so often take shortcuts, cutting and pasting the same content many times. This would normally invalidate their posts but only if it is spotted by the quality control team. So Cheng and co built some software to look for repetitions and similarities in messages as well as the other behaviors they'd identified. They then tested it on the dataset they'd downloaded from Sina and Sohu and found it to be remarkably good, with an accuracy of 88 per cent in spotting paid posters."

Privacy and Security Fanatic: Irony: Surveillance Industry Objects to Spying Secrets & Mass Monitoring Leaks

Irony: Surveillance Industry Objects to Spying Secrets & Mass Monitoring Leaks In the continued spotlight on mass surveillance, WikiLeaks Spy Files posted Gamma videos teaching intelligence agencies how to hack iTunes, Gmail and Skype. But Tatiana Lucas, one of the people behind profiting from the secret snoop ISS conferences, wants you to believe that exposing surveillance methods will cost U.S. jobs, make companies hesitant to support government surveillance, and maybe stop Congress from updating a lawful-interception law. Yet this company that profits on mass monitoring fails to mention privacy rights, civil liberties, or human rights. By Ms. Smith on Sun, 12/11/11 - 1:49pm.

A rant on the practices of these companies--but who can blame Ms. Smith

There are such things as human rights and civil liberties even if some in the lucrative business of virtual force to monitor all of us don't like all the press focusing on the government deploying Trojans for remote searches. One such unhappy person is behind the Intelligence Support Systems (ISS) secret snoop conference for stealthy government spying. After the Wall Street Journal published 'Document Trove Exposes Surveillance Methods', ISS World Program Director Tatiana Lucas complained to the Wall Street Journal, "We are concerned that the article and others like it contribute to an atmosphere where Congress isn't likely to pass an updated lawful-interception law. The law would require social-networking companies to deploy special features to support law enforcement. Without the update, the opportunity for U.S. companies to develop and launch intercept products domestically for eventual export will be greatly curtailed."

Amazon's Very Clever Move, Yes, a Very Clever Move Indeed - Forbes

Amazon is now offering a reward to people who use its mobile price checking app, Price Check. This is a very clever idea indeed and it only requires a little tweaking of the press release to illustrate why:

I guess this is another rule of the information age. Crowd-source your inputs. If you need information, get the public to input the information for you. You get the information, and you also get the intelligence that this information mattered to a number of people--the more it mattered to the more important it must be.

BBC News - Iran shows film of captured US drone

US officials have acknowledged the loss of the unmanned plane, saying it had malfunctioned. However, Iranian officials say its forces electronically hijacked the drone and steered it to the ground.