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Thursday, May 11, 2006 |
The NSA Phone Database.
USA Today reports on a massive NSA database of every single phone call made in the United States, compiled with the help of the three largest telecom companies.
The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans - most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.
"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added.
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[Dispatches from the Culture Wars]
9:11:49 PM 
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The Identity Fraud Rule Book. [Update: I changed the title from Privacy Rule Book to Identity Fraud Rule Book to more properly reflect my interests - I am looking for clear answers on when it is okay to use someone else's information based on intentions, impact, and any other attributes worth exploring.] .... [Spire Security Viewpoint]
6:46:41 AM
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Global Internet users.
"The global distribution of Internet users has sharply shifted away from the largely American base of years past, giving the "world" in World Wide Web new legitimacy,"this IHT article says."Figures from March show that fewer than one-quarter of global Internet users were in the United States,comScore Networks said in a report last week. A decade ago,the rate was about two-thirds.ComScore,a market researcher based in Chicago,says it believes that its latest research is the first worldwide survey that uses consistent measurements in all major markets,including China and India.Of the 694 million unique visitors over the age of 14 who used the Internet in March,the most were in seven countries:the United States (152.1 million),China (74.7 million),Japan (52.1 million),Germany (31.8 million),Britain (30.2 million),South Korea (24.7 million) and France (23.9 million),it says.Together,China,Japan,India and South Korea represent nearly 25 percent of the total worldwide online population,168.1 million users,a figure that in the aggregate is 11 percent larger than the U.S. online surfership.That is true even though the research excludes traffic from public computers like those at Internet cafés,a primary means of access in Asia,and access from cellphones or PDAs".
The End User:More world on the web [Smart Mobs]
6:46:24 AM
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YouTube offers mobile upload service.
On the surface, the announcement that YouTube will allow people to upload video straight from their cell phones may not seem like that big of deal. But in effect, the biggest user-submitted video site on the web has just armed millions of people with the ability to cover news instantly from the field. When the next big domestic story breaks -- especially if it's in a major U.S. city -- YouTube will become the source of user-generated video. And it could potentially equal or surpass the video traffic served up by conventional online news sites.
[unmediated]
6:45:27 AM
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Two from NYT > Education:
- Colleges Report Mystery Decline in SAT Scores. College applicants' average scores this year fell significantly, by more than 10 points at some universities. Usually, scores change glacially, a point or two a year. By KAREN W. ARENSON.
- Career Student Up for 13th Year. Johnny Lechner withdrew his application for graduation after he realized something was missing from his 12-year academic career: he had never studied abroad. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS.
6:26:02 AM
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Warner band's site made up of auto-fetched fan pix, video, audio.
Warner Music has launched a sweet fan-promo for the band headautomatica -- fans create or find media (text, audio, video) about the band and post and tag it, and the headautomatica site pulls it in, where other fans can vote on it. Fans who tag high-rated material get prizes. The cool thing here is that it's an automated system that automatically pulls in fan stuff from blogs, YouTube, Flickr and so on, letting fans essentially populate the band's site without strong oversight or intervention from the label. Link (via Black Rim Glasses)
[Boing Boing]
6:25:58 AM
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The Catalogue: Film about RFID surveillance.
(Thanks, Joe!)
Chris Oakley's film, "The Catalogue" is a video scenario of a shopping mall in which RFID tags are used for real-time surveillance:
Crystallising a vision of "us seen by them", The Catalogue explores the codification of humanity on behalf of corporate entities. Through the manipulation of footage captured from life in the retail environment, it places the viewer into the position of a remote and dispassionate agency, observing humanity as a series of units whose value is defined by their spending capacity and future needs.
[Smart Mobs]
6:25:45 AM
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the myth that women don’t play games.
What do you think game designers can be thinking?
Let’s design our games assuming no women will play. Let’s market games by using booth babes at conventions or employing girl gamers as “totty with trigger” (you’d think it was a parody but it ain’t) and oh, we’ll run ads showing dead, naked women even when the games themselves have no naked women in them. A focus group? Oh great, but remember to ban women from the focus group, because they’re women and therefore not interesting. (Fortunately, several of the men in that particular focus group spoke on behalf of their girlfriends who are also gamers.) And how about the media? When Wired does a special issue on gaming, they leave out the women - oh, except for that risqué sex game with the dildos. We’ll include that. (I hadn’t realised Wired was a men’s magazine. It’s my favourite to buy on flights and so on - far more interesting than Cosmopolitan or something, and more, um, relaxing than the more intellectual alternatives.)
Let’s look at the facts. Apparently 24-35 year olds are the heaviest gamers. According to a recent survey, 65% of women in this age bracket play games. Only 35% of men in the age bracket do. The survey found that women play “slightly less” console games than men and that many more women play casual games, like flash games in web browsers, solitaire or online Scrabble. They didn’t think to ask the women why they liked casual games, but assume that it’s because they’re non-violent and non-cometitive (they can’t have played many games at games.com). Great. Let’s just assume gender stereotypes instead of asking.
Interestingly, Nick Yee’s statistics from MMOGs show the same trend: while boys are clearly dominant among teenaged players, women players outnumber men for players above 23 years of age:
. . .
So let’s see: despite the game industry marketing games almost exclusively for young men, almost twice as many women as men play games in the biggest market segment, based on age. Many of these games are casual, but even for console games, only “slightly less” women than men play. More women than men over 23 play MMOGs.
And yet the game industry continues to market and design games almost exclusively to that slim market of teenaged horny boys.
And I continue to get stupid comments from male players in WoW - “wow, I didn’t think women played games!” (Doubly idiotic since they can only see my female character and not me.)
Tags: gender, games [jill/txt]
6:24:15 AM
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Mobile phone boom spurs economic growth in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh's booming mobile phone industry has emerged as a key driver of the cash-strapped nation's economy, creating nearly 240,000 jobs and adding 650 million dollars to gross domestic product, reports the AFP.
The mobile phone industry in Bangladesh employs 237,900 people directly and indirectly. These are well-paid jobs with salaries many times the national average," said the study by the international consultancy firm Ovum.
Bangladesh is one of the world's poorest nations with nearly half its 140 million population surviving on less than a dollar day. Around 70 percent depend on agriculture to make their living
[unmediated]
The story also notes,
Bangladesh has witnessed explosive growth in mobile telephony over the last few years with the number of subscribers leaping from 200,000 in the first quarter of 2001 to 11 million in early 2006.
And
Over seven percent of the population now has a mobile phone, up from a mere 0.2 per cent four years ago, the study said, describing the growth as "extraordinary".
Due to huge investment by operators, mobile phone coverage now has been extended to 90 percent of the country, it added.
6:10:30 AM
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