Archive for June 12th, 2013

NetTrax: You can run, but you can’t hide ….

June 12, 2013

Been reading a book called Big Data, Big Analytics …

Given the flap over the Feds grabbing phone and Internet info, this caught my eye.

Book quotes a guy named Niv Singer, Chief Technology Officer at Tracx, a social media intelligence software provider.

Niv says:

“It can sometimes be a real challenge to unify social profiles for a single user who may be using different names or handles on each of their social networks …

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… so we’ve built an algorithm that combs through key factors including content of posts, and location, among others, to provide a very robust identity unification.”

Singer explained that they are combining social check-in data from Facebook, Foursquare, and similar social sites and applications over maps to show information … down to the street level where conversations are happening

Source

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English translation: You can run, but you can’t hide …they’ll find you.

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Laughs: Daily Show smacks Clapper and the NSA program … very funny.

June 12, 2013

First, you lose Leno … then you lose Jon Stewart (or more precisely, Stewart’s temp replacement John Oliver) … not good.

Monday night, the Daily Show skewered Clapper and the Prism program.

The fish-in-a-barrel shot was DNI Clapper’s boldface lie to Congress.

The humor isn’t in the content, it’s in the way the dude delivers the lie … like he had taken drama lessons on acting guilty.

Wouldn’t you love to play poker with this fish?

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The  best line, though, has to do with the sophisticated algorithms used to to ID somebody as a foreigner: if the nums say there’s a 51% likelihood, then it’s ok to listen in … that passes the NSA “foreigner test”.

As Oliver said: “51% … that’s flipping a coin“


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Click to view the video  … very funny

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Nums: What, you don’t have a security clearance?

June 12, 2013

Interesting article in the WSJ: “U.S. Relies on Spies for Hire to Sift Deluge of Intelligence”

The numbers that pop:

  • Almost 5 million folks are walking around with security clearances
  • Of those, almost 30% – 1.4 million — have top secret clearance
  • Of those, over 1/3 are contractors, i.e. non-government personnel.

 

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Man, I would have bet the under on all of those.

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