There was some discussion of needles over at Caine’s [affinity] about how needles are made. I’m sure you’ll enjoy this!
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
There was some discussion of needles over at Caine’s [affinity] about how needles are made. I’m sure you’ll enjoy this!
When I was in high school I got an old singer sewing machine at the goodwill, managed to adjust it until it worked correctly again, and used it for light leather-work. Sewing machines and rope-making machines have a similar problem: you want to get the thread around the bobbin without moving it – which is a really complicated trick since (for the bobbin to be stable) there has to be some kind of supporting thing that holds the bobbin.
Verizon was ready with new spy tech, to force onto people’s phones when it became legal for them to begin tracking and selling customer data. [boingboing]
Continuation at a tangent to [stderr]
Tools like Palantir are the tip of an iceberg: a gigantic iceberg of data. In case you don’t know, when organizations like the NSA are talking “big data” they are talking “yottabytes.” i.e.:
The Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.) [wired]
I am having trouble getting to rt.com (Russia Times, right?)
During the “Arab Spring” (what a loathsome, patronizing, attitude we express!) the US Government repeatedly socialized ideas about how Twitter, etc, were important to helping anti-government protests, i.e.:
The Obama administration, while insisting it is not meddling in Iran, yesterday confirmed it had asked Twitter to remain open to help anti-government protesters. [guardian]
Yesterday I discussed the retro-scope of information-gathering[1] and I probably should have mentioned that President Obama – along with commuting Chelsea Manning’s sentence – handed the citizens of the US a great big “F.U.” Just before leaving office he quietly changed how the NSA is allowed to share information, considerably expanding the power of the intelligence apparatus.
In an email, I am asked:
Assuming that the current administration is completely unaccountable to law, is it *technically* possible for them to data mine the electronic communications of their political opponents?
Data destruction is a part of good systems administration; you should design it in to your understanding of how you use your systems.