NSA, Data Encryption, and the Turnkey Totalitarian State

Wired  reports on the the National Security Agency’s construction of a $2 billion fortified center designed to capture, store, and analyze foreign and domestic information such as cell phone calls, emails, financial transactions, and personal purchases. The Bluffdale Utah center is designed to capture the exponential growth of information being produced openly and on the invisible web . The NSA expects to capture yottabytes of data, a number so large that no term exists to describe the next higher level of magnitude.  However some information most prized by the NSA is unusable as a result of strong encryption commonly used both by government agencies and average citizens to secure data.  To solve this problem the NSA is building faster computers designed to break the encryption algorithms. But until that time the NSA continues to collect data at an unprecedented pace. Some critics wonder if the government can resist using this information for political purposes such as eavesdropping on political enemies or dissidents.

Former NSA official [William Binney]held his thumb and forefinger close together:  “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

Narrow the Gap

Forty-nine years after the passage of the Equal Pay Act a gap remains between the compensation women and men receive for comparable jobs. Through the use of social media and statistics from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics web developer Gina Trapani  has created Narrow the Gap a site that raises awareness about the problem of pay inequality through social media interaction and visualization of labor statistics in ways easily used on social media networks such as twitter. For instance a search for occupations related to libraries returns the result:

"Women who work in education, training, and library occupations make 81 cents to the dollar men earn doing the same job. " - Narrow the Gap

  

A rather shocking statistic and a ready-made tweet or Facebook wall posting. 

For students interested in web development Narrow the Gap is also a part of the Equal Pay Challenge  a government sponsored contest designed to encourage development of applications that educate the public about the problem of pay inequality.

Copyright: Fun with Homophones

Luke Barats sets some lyrics about an Egyptian river god and a deer named Harrison to the public domain tune of "Good Morning to All."

Physical Archive of the Internet Archive

Brewster Kahle the founder of the Internet Archive disliked the idea of discarding physical copies of books once they were digitized. To remedy this situation he established the Physical Archive of the Internet Archive which has the goal of collecting one copy of every book in print. Currently the archive receives 20,000 volumes each week from libraries and private donations. Once the books are processed they are boxed and placed in 40 foot shipping crates. Brewster Kahle argues physical copies of books are special and help preserve culture especially since digitized copies are fragile and prone to technological obsolescence.

“If the Library of Alexandria had made a copy of every book and sent it to India or China, we’d have the other works of Aristotle, the other plays of Euripides. One copy in one institution is not good enough.”
- Brewster Kahle

Story:  New York Times

Pi Day

March 14th (3.14) is Pi Day. Join the Math Club in celebrating Pi Day with some mini pies from 9:00AM - 3:00PM in the entry way to Founders Hall.

The Exploratorium has more information about the history of Pi and activities to do while you celebrate!

Encyclopaedia Britannica Ceases Print Publication

The New York Times reports that the Encyclopaedia Britannica after 244 years will cease to offer the print version of the Encyclopedia. The Encyclopedia will continue to be offered online.

 “It’s a rite of passage in this new era. Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”

Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.

Video: Totally Digital: The Encyclopaedia Britannica Now

The Portal to Texas History: Early Texas Newspapers

The Early Texas Newspaper Collection is a primary source of information on the political and social developments that occurred in Texas during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The collection provides access to 12,280 scanned pages originating from 61 Texas newspapers dating from 1829 to 1936. The collection includes The Telegraph and Texas Register which was considered the paper of record during the Texas Revolution and several papers written in Spanish, German, French, and Czech.

Early 20th Century Russia - The Prokudin-Gorskii Collection

In 1905, Sergey Prokudin-Gorskii embarked on a 10 year mission to document the massive Russian Empire. Using an ingenious technique that he developed and a camera of his own design, 3 monochrome pictures were taken of each subject through red, green, and blue filters. This allowed the images to later be projected in brilliant color. This collection of glass slides acquired by the Library of Congress in 1948 vividly portrays a lost world, the old Russia before World War I and the subsequent revolutions.

 

Libraries Turn up in the Most Curious Locations

Doityourselfers and guerrilla librarians are taking the library to the streets or at least their front lawns. Micro libraries are springing up throughout US cities and the world whether they be in the form of a retrofitted phone booth  or a dog house this phenomenon is spreading the love affair of libraries and the printed book.

The web site Little Free Library has created a community of micro libraries and provides information for finding or building your own!

Picking a Wild Salad: You Tube and the Infringing Sounds of Nature

 

60 hours of video are uploaded every minute to You Tube so when disputes arise it can be difficult for the video service to mediate between users and rights holders. You Tube uses ContentID an automated system to identify possible infringing content and then allows rights holders to pull any infringing videos from the site. However what happens when a rights holder claims the ambient sounds of nature as their property?  This article highlights how You Tube’s policies have given rights holders powers that may bypass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The video mentioned in the article has been restored to You Tube.

Link to the story.