Today’s links include some thoughts from Bruce Schneier on surveillance, the latest update from OpenStack on community work and a post from Neelie Kroes (vice president of the European Commission) about cloud computing and data protection reform. Also, an easy blackout plugin for WordPress for sites participating in the SOPA/PIPA protest on January 18th.
Going Dark vs. a Golden Age of Surveillance – Schneier looks at the “policy debate that’s been going on since the crypto wars of the early 1990s.” Namely, law enforcement claims that it’s losing its ability to snoop on communications due to encryption, etc. The counter to that is that there’s a much greater ability to snoop. “They can install an eavesdropping program on your computer, regardless of whether you use Skype. They can monitor your Facebook conversations, and learn thing that just weren’t online a decade ago. Today we all carry devices that tract our locations 24/7: our cell phones.”
Mining of Massive Datasets – By Anand Rajaraman and Jeffrey D. Ullman, developed from manterial for the “Web Mining” course at Stanford. Now published by Cambridge University Press, but a PDF of the book is freely available for download.
OpenStack Community Weekly Review (Jan 6 – 13) – OpenStack updates for last week. Includes event calendar and highlights.
Cloud Computing and Data protection reform – Post from Kroes heading into proposed reform of the data protection directive. More on that soon.
Blackout Your WordPress Site on January 18th, 2012 – Does what it says on the tin. Not sure how widespread the blackout will be now that Congress seems to be backing down on the issue, but I think it’s still a good idea.
Have a cloud news tip for me? Drop me a note at [email protected] or send me a tweet (I’m @jzb).