Run Skidmark Run! Google Steps-up Internet Paedophile Hunt

It’s en ease to bag out the behemoth that is Google, outwardly the company looks like a money making machine – without a huge social conscience – Scratch the surface a little however, and your glimmered by small signs of hope. There’s a bunch of cool stuff coming out of Google’s X-Labs, Project Loony’s superneat wifi via balloon power. Google Culture  dictates that the company has a social conscience, exercising that conscience is - it seems – a little harder?

In it’s latest effort to set-things-right, Google is doing what it does best, it’s creating an image database to help law enforcement control the traffic of offensive images and remove child pornography from the web. Indeed, it’s a no-brainer, Google’s mission statement outlines the company’s intention to ‘organize the worlds information’ and mapping a world of depravity in order to be rid of it,  something the company is exemplary at.

While we’d love to sing Google’s praises, we are left wondering why that hadn’t happened sooner, search, categorize and list is after all what Google does best?

Now that Google has announced plans to setup an online database of offensive images, you can expect that the war will escalate quickly. The ethos of the plan is to enable law enforcement agencies, not-for-profits and private companies to detect and remove offensive content more easily :: Read the full article »»»»

UPDATED! PRISM Data Mining

Catch-up! June 7 20113: The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill reported that PRISM was the source for more than 2,000 intelligence reports each month. More than 24,000 reports were issued in 2012. A total of 77,000 intelligence reports have cited PRISM since the program began six years ago.

US intelligence agencies are accessing the servers of nine internet giants as part of a secret data mining program, according to reports from the US and Britain. The Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency NSA and FBI had direct access to servers which allowed them to track an individual’s web presence via audio, video, photographs, emails and connection logs.

Seems ALL of Silicon Valley’s behemoths are involved in the program, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Apple, PalTalk, AOL, Skype and YouTube, amusingly they’ve ALL denied any participation in the program. Presently, Twitter seems to be the ONLY techbehemoth NOT taking part in PRISM?

The USA’s top spy James R. Clapper said the stories contained “numerous inaccuracies,” but he did not offer any details. And he said the law that allowed US government agencies to collect communications from internet companies only permitted the targeting of “non-US persons” outside the United States :: Read the full article »»»»

Adelaide Exhibition: The Australian Ballet on the International Stage by Lisa Tomasetti

UPDATE! Hill Smith Gallery, Adelaide May 10 to June 8, 2013 - Behind the Scenes: The Australian Ballet on the International Stage is an exhibition by Sydney-based  - South Australian born – photographer, Lisa Tomasetti. This latest set of pictures were shot over several years, taken on the Australian Ballet’s tours to Tokyo, New York and Paris :: Read the full article »»»»

Cisco Predicts Internet Measured in Zettabytes

Technology behemoth Cisco has forecast that the need for internet speed will increase at head-spin pace over the next 4 years. The company predicts that by 2017, global internet traffic will be measured in zettabytes – one zettabyte is the seventh power of 1000 or 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes, a sextillion – a trillion gigabytes.

Cisco reckons that by the end of 2015 annual global internet traffic will wiz past the zettabyte threshold. By 2017 the internet will reach nearly 1.5 zettabytes in data consumption annually. However, more worrying for boffins is the growth in peak-hour internet traffic. Over the past 5 years peak hour traffic increased at a steady 30 per cent a year, last year it grew at 40 per cent and Cisco say that growth is set to triple of the next 5 years.

The research is part of Cisco’s Visual Networking Index – VNI – and ongoing initiative by the behemoth that explores the implications of IP growth. Another amazing stat to come out of Cisco’s research is the growth of mobile, in 2012 less than 25 per cent of internet traffic originated from mobile devices, they expect mobile to grow to half of all internet traffic by 2012

It’s worth noting; in pre modern internet 1986, the planets entire historical data output – television, radio, cable etc – was 0.400 zettabytes. in 2000 we still only consumed 1.2 zettabytes – remember, that’s everything, all broadcast technologies – by 2017 the planet will be consuming more than 5 zettabytes of data a year, almost a third of which will be pulled through the internet:: Read the full article »»»»

The City For Singles? PRAGUE!

I’m unsure if it still goes on, but there was once a supermarket – Woolworths  in Double Bay – that held an informal singles night. My recollection is a little foggy, but I believe the code for single and available was a bunch of celery pointing out of your shopping basket, a little complex perhaps. Well the Czech’s have a much simpler resolution.

Transport officials in the Czech capital, Prague, say they plan to help the city’s lonely hearts by introducing train carriages reserved for singles. Prague transport company Ropid wants to set aside carriages on some or all of its trains for singles seeking a soul mate.

The city-owned company will start polling passengers to determine whether they would be interested. Spokesman Filip Drapal says the initiative is one of the activities Ropid hopes will lure people out of their cars and onto public transportation :: Read the full article »»»»

Apple’s Tim Cook Flatout Rejects US Senate Caining

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has defended his company’s tax avoidance  tactics, Cook faced a grilling by US lawmakers accusing the tech-behemoth of sham subsidiaries and convoluted strategies to shift profits offshore, however Cook strenuously denied the company used gimmicks to avoid paying taxes. Cook told a US Senate committee Apple paid all the taxes it owed, complying with not only the law, but the spirit of the law.

Cook said last year Apple paid $US6 billion to the US coffers, a tax rate of about 30 percent.

The high level US Senate committee investigating corporate offshore tax avoidance has accused Apple of shifting billions of dollars in profits to avoid paying US taxes on a massive scale. It found Apple avoided paying $9 billion in tax in 2012. Earlier, Panel chairman Senator Carl Levin accused Apple of “exploiting an absurdity” in its tax payments.

Mr Cook told the hearing that Apple lives up to its tax obligations and more, but some lawmakers expressed outrage over findings of the panel’s probe that the tech-behemoth avoided taxes by using a web of foreign subsidiaries, some without any tax jurisdiction :: Read the full article »»»»