Hope and Progress?

Obama Administration Supports Telco Spy Immunity |Wired.com
I really really really wish this were not true.

Nose to the Art

The Prado Museum Masterpieces in Google Earth - Neatorama
I got lost in The Annunciation on super high rez and refused to zoom out until I could find something recognizable.

Intelink...yoikes

I guess it isn't a good idea to have a link to anything IARPA or DARPA related. Intelink has been visiting me. This is who they are:
"Intelink is the name of the classified and highly secure intranet used by the US intelligence community. It was established in 1994 to take advantage of Internet capabilities and services to promote intelligence dissemination and business workflow. Since then it has become an essential capability for the US intelligence community and its partners to share information, collaborate across agencies, and conduct business. Intelink refers to the web environment on protected top secret, secret, and unclassified networks." Wikipedia.
Hey, I wonder if they use Google alerts. lol.

The Google Way of Science

Kevin Kelly- The Technium
"There's a dawning sense that extremely large databases of information, starting in the petabyte level, could change how we learn things. The traditional way of doing science entails constructing a hypothesis to match observed data or to solicit new data. Here's a bunch of observations; what theory explains the data sufficiently so that we can predict the next observation?"
via metafilter

IARPA wonders if terrorists play WoW

NSA in ur base, spyin’ on ur d00dz
I just assumed they would be doin' this already. How much you want to bet they are?
via musematic.net

Canadian gov't doin' some wikiwar.

Michael Geist - Prentice's Staff Scrubbing Copyright Controversy From Wikipedia Entry
via BoingBoing
This strikes me as amazing. Government employees spending time editing a wikipedia article to hide the facts about a bill they are trying to push through. Those are your tax dollars at work folks.
And since this would be a sad sad excuse for a blog if I didn't mention Obama today, I can cover all my bases with this:

Where the dead videos go to rest.

YouTomb: is a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation."
via michaelgeist

I think this might fit under the heading "Holy Crap"

Air Force Aims for 'Full Control' of 'Any and All' Computers | Wired.com
The government is growing increasingly interested in waging war online. The Air Force recently put together a "Cyberspace Command," with a charter to rule networks the way its fighter jets rule the skies. The Department of Homeland Security, Darpa, and other agencies are teaming up for a five-year, $30 billion "national cybersecurity initiative."
via boingboing

We wont abuse the powers we have, Promise!

'National Security Letter', Loses | Wired.com
This is an interesting article. It seems the FBI has been doing bad stuff with subpoenas. Imagine that.

The Collective Bender

Lifehacker: "Where You Find the Time to Spend Online"
Clay Shirkey talks about gin and television and some other stuff.

Name to Know

Tim Berners-Lee - Wikipedia
OK students, Vint Cerf is the Father of the internet and this guy invented the World Wide Web. I guess I have never thought of them as different things until now. Good to know a bit about this thing I use every day I suppose.

Gimme More Internet

Clive Thompson on New Web Apps for Coping With Information Overload
"Hey kids, is the internet getting you down, are you feeling overloaded? Try our new stress buster: "SLEEP©" and our revolutionary product "OUTDOORS©"
The beta sign-up form says they have a waiting list. Phoey.

A lot of talk about Net Neutrality

FCC Gets an Earful From Open-Net Defenders at Stanford -Wired.com
With ISPs (Bell Canada included) controlling who gets bandwidth and whose info is allowed to pass, things are not looking good. This article is totally biased, but I like to think it is biased on the side of the good guys.

I want to know who the Mother is.

'Father of the internet' presents inaugural lecture- City University London: "Widely known as the 'Father of the internet', Vinton is the co-designer of TCP/IP protocols and basic architecture of the internet."(photo/Joi) via Digg

Visual Index for searching stock art

CSA Images
BoingBoing posted the link to these guys but I like they way they let you browse their image database.
Here is the link to the main page. http://www.csaimages.com/index.asp

Datamining website

Jodange - Welcome

Opinion Mining?

Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

If you wonder if people are really mining facebook for stuff here ya go.

Internet and Protest Culture Stuff

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2008/02/shirky_internal
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2008/02/shirky

These links also from Boing;
"Here's a video of a Clay Shirky talk at Harvard's Berkman Center, called "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations." It's a summary of the ideas in his incredible book of the same title, a book that I continue to return to nearly every day in my thinking, making it the single largest influence on my thoughts in the past year."