2045 and the Global Future Agenda to Counterfeit Humanity.

So, is the end of human civilization as we know it going to be extinct in less than 32 years? Most of us will still be alive, hopefully, in 2045; therefore, this transformation,  known as the Singularity--the moment when technological change becomes so rapid and profound, it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history, a post-human existence, if you will--should concern the general public about what it implies about our human future while we still have brains in our heads.

The idea that you can upload yourself, your brain, into a computer and become digitally immortal sounds a little batshit, right?  But Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, stated that's what's going to happen during his conference speech at the Global Futures 2045 International Congress recently. He also claims that the biological parts of our body will be replaced with mechanical parts and this could happen as early as 2100. I guess the idea is to kill oneself the moment our brain uploads.  Heaven's Gate, anyone? 

That's right. The director of engineering at Google is planning to put all of our brains into robot avatars and all of his pals--most of the global elite--think that's the best idea since sliced bread.  Of course, they do. Think of all the money they'll save when  corporations can replace human beings with robot avatars (see video below).  What they don't understand--or maybe they do, they just hope that we don't--is they can't transfer our souls into these robots.

We are certainly being conditioned to this Orwellian end. I know I spend far too much time on the Internet, in this virtual world that often displaces the real one.  The illusion of freedom lures me in and makes me feel I can go anywhere I want, explore anything I want.   I'm sorry but, often times, the real world kind of pales in comparison. The sad thing is, I'm aware of this dangerous illusion, yet I still capitulate, whereas children raised in the virtual world--television, video games, iPhones, Internet, etc--since birth will embrace this Orwellian technology without question, and with open arms as adults. They will know nothing else.

So yes, I'm fully aware that I'm using a Google platform to bash Google, that I'm using the technology that's enslaving us to preach about our technological enslavement, that everything I post can be traced back to me. I feel like one of those self-righteous evangelicals who preach on the evils of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll, at the same time they're banging the drugged out rock 'n roller down the hall. However, I justify it by telling myself I'm taking advantage of this technology while I still can, before they either shut if off or make it so the only thing that's accessible is intelligence collecting social network sites. I tell myself that this is where I discovered I was not educated, but indoctrinated, rationalizing that I'd rather use their technology to educate myself and the occasional other who might accidentally land here.  That's what I tell myself.

Back to the Singularity.  It is being sold as this ulta-cool utopia, as part of our inevitable evolutionary path that will one day make gods out of men. What they don't tell you is that this only applies to the technocratic elite. They don't tell you that the world will be divided between the super-human "gods" and the poor pitiful slaves who can't afford to transform themselves into Nietzsche's Übermensch (overman).  They conveniently leave that part out.

Without question, we've been heading in the direction of the soul-killing commoditization of human-beings for a very long time as we've been led to embrace scientism through materialistic reductionism as the only avenue to truth.  It's just now that we have the technology to make this Orwellian agenda real.  Sold as "cool", but in reality, creepy, here are a few tidbits that will no doubt effect our future as human beings: Biometrics at a distance (sense your heartbeat through a wall); algorithms that predict your next move;  brain-link, controlling your brain through the Internet; autonomous humanoid robots, and/or, robots with real brains;  Pentagon's Project Avatar, robotic soldiers; Narrative Networks, high-tech, chemically enhanced propaganda; the embryonic LifeLog program; and electronic tattoos and ingested pills that make you a walking password.

Former DARPA (gave birth to the Internet) head, Regina Dugan, now the leader for special projects for Motorola, a Google subsidiary, came out with her electronic tattoo, an RFID bar code,  that can be used to authenticate oneself, not to mention a pill that can be ingested and then battery-powered by digestive acids to make one's whole body a password.  As she said, “your entire body becomes your authentication token.” Mark of the beast, anyone?

And let's not forget smart dust and/or neural dust. These nano-particles embed themselves in your brain, functioning as an MRI inside your brain. In other words, "tiny implantable sensors could function like an MRI inside the brain, recording data on nearby neurons and transmitting it back out." Tinfoil hats, anyone?

Will we willfully choose such an evolutionary direction? Will self-aware machines evolve before humans become self-aware?  Oh, we are already self-aware?  Sorry, my bad.



Links:

Intelligent neural dust embedded in the brain could be the ultimate brain-computer interface

IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity)   , a little-known U.S. government organization, is developing analytic programs for the National Security Agency that could make recent revelations about the NSA’s activities look antiquated by comparison. Rather than reviewing archival data, it may use current data to predict the future.

We'll be uploading our entire MINDS to computers by 2045 and our bodies will be replaced by machines within 90 years, Google expert claims

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A Note of Appreciation From the Rich

From the creators of the search engine that did not track your every move, Scroogle - Google Watch - now blocked by Google: A Note of Appreciation From the Rich.

"Let's be honest: you'll never win the lottery.

On the other hand, the chances are pretty good that you'll slave away at some miserable job the rest of your life. That's because you were in all likelihood born into the wrong social class. Let's face it -- you're a member of the working caste. Sorry!

As a result, you don't have the education, upbringing, connections, manners, appearance, and good taste to ever become one of us. In fact, you'd probably need a book the size of the yellow pages to list all the unfair advantages we have over you. That's why we're so relieved to know that you still continue to believe all those silly fairy tales about "justice" and "equal opportunity" in America.

Of course, in a hierarchical social system like ours, there's never been much room at the top to begin with. Besides, it's already occupied by us -- and we like it up here so much that we intend to keep it that way. But at least there's usually someone lower in the social hierarchy you can feel superior to and kick in the teeth once in a while. Even a lowly dishwasher can easily find some poor slob further down in the pecking order to sneer and spit at. So be thankful for migrant workers, prostitutes, and homeless street people.

Always remember that if everyone like you were economically secure and socially privileged like us, there would be no one left to fill all those boring, dangerous, low-paid jobs in our economy. And no one to fight our wars for us, or blindly follow orders in our totalitarian corporate institutions. And certainly no one to meekly go to their grave without having lived a full and creative life. So please, keep up the good work!

You also probably don't have the same greedy, compulsive drive to possess wealth, power, and prestige that we have. And even though you may sincerely want to change the way you live, you're also afraid of the very change you desire, thus keeping you and others like you in a nervous state of limbo. So you go through life mechanically playing your assigned social role, terrified what others would think should you ever dare to "break out of the mold."

Naturally, we try to play you off against each other whenever it suits our purposes: high-waged workers against low-waged, unionized against non-unionized, Black against White, male against female, American workers against Japanese against Mexican against.... We continually push your wages down by invoking "foreign competition," "the law of supply and demand," "national security," or "the bloated federal deficit." We throw you on the unemployed scrap heap if you step out of line or jeopardize our profits. And to give you an occasional break from the monotony of our daily economic blackmail, we allow you to participate in our stage-managed electoral shell games, better known to you ordinary folks as "elections." Happily, you haven't a clue as to what's really happening -- instead, you blame "Aliens," "Tree-hugging Environmentalists," "Niggers," "Jews," Welfare Queens," and countless others for your troubled situation.

We're also very pleased that many of you still embrace the "work ethic," even though most jobs in our economy degrade the environment, undermine your physical and emotional health, and basically suck your one and only life right out of you. We obviously don't know much about work, but we're sure glad you do!

Of course, life could be different. Society could be intelligently organized to meet the real needs of the general population. You and others like you could collectively fight to free yourselves from our domination. But you don't know that. In fact, you can't even imagine that another way of life is possible. And that's probably the greatest, most significant achievement of our system -- robbing you of your imagination, your creativity, your ability to think and act for yourself.

So we'd truly like to thank you from the bottom of our heartless hearts. Your loyal sacrifice makes possible our corrupt luxury; your work makes our system work. Thanks so much for "knowing your place" -- without even knowing it!

Links

CIA on Campus

Great Google Book Grab

Namebase is a proper name index only -- it contains names of individuals, groups, and corporations, but no subject categories.

Wikipedia Watch

"Jimmy Wales, the man behind Wikipedia, probably approves of this practice. After he made a fortune in futures trading, he started up Bomis.com in the mid-1990s. Bomis was one of the first sites to scrape the ad-free Open Directory Project, and turn it into a huge mass of paid links and ads, mixed together with porn.

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Big Brother Rules NSA Can Stay Silent on Google Ties

A US Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia, upheld a lower court decision, in EPIC v. NSA ruling that the NSA does not need to confirm nor deny (known as a “Glomar” response, a controversial legal claim that allows federal agencies to conceal the existence of records that might otherwise be subject to public disclosure) its collaborations with Google; how the two work together to spy on American citizens in the name of protecting the public from false flag “cyber-attacks”.

The ruling came in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the public interest group, EPIC, which stated the public has a right to know about the government spying on citizens.

"Any information pertaining to the relationship between Google and NSA would reveal protected information about NSA's implementation of its information assurance mission," Judge Janice Rogers Brown wrote in the appeals opinion.

Then, there is the NSA's "Perfect Citizen" - how Orwellian - program. According to the Wall Street Journal, the program "would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack," although the agency has claimed that there "is no monitoring activity involved, and no sensors are employed in this endeavor" but has refused to release the details of the program.

Suffice to say, they have been tapping into domestic communications since the 1950s, if not before. However, the ever increasing technology combined with the current civil-liberty-eliminating legislation - starting with the Patriot Act - provides the perfect infrastructure for some Hitler/Stalin wannabe to take Nazi like control of your daily existence. 

The bottom line is "Perfect Citizen" and this growing convoluted web of bureaucracies to surveil and control the flow of information on the Internet has nothing to do with protecting critical infrastructure and utilities from being hacked, because all that is required to defend or guard against attack is to disconnect command and control systems for critical infrastructure from the Internet ...a dedicated line that is closed to the net. In other words, this is a ruse to expand the scope of government and domestic spying.

The incremental loss of liberty and privacy marches on as we frogs, distracted by bread and circus, slow-boil in our pots.

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The Knowledge Graph: Google's Ministry of Truth.

If you remember, Orwell's "Ministry of Truth" concerned itself with spreading lies in order to manipulate public opinion; film and radio carried this process even further. The Ministry of Truth coined phrases like "War is Peace", Freedom is Slavery" and "Ignorance is Power". In other words, fiction became truth. So, what does this have to do with Google?

Well, anyone with an IQ of a bat - a baseball bat, that is -  knows Google has a monopoly on information distribution. It's hard to come up with anything on the net that Google hasn't, at the very least, tried to take over. Take YouTube, for example. Prior to Google's takeover, censorship was not an issue on YouTube. Today, it most certainly is. "Copyright School", anyone?

So, now, under the guise of of trying to produce semantically meaningful results, I suppose, Google will replace the old strategy of matching keywords to webpages, and employ Metaweb algorithms to generate search results in the form of a new search tool,  "The Knowledge Graph". This tool will return answers or “facts” from pre-selected sources  such as the CIA Factbook, Wikipedia, the World Bank, and Freebase, an open database generated by Metaweb, which Google acquired in 2010.

In addition to providing traditional search results, the Knowledge Graph results will offer a wide range of answers to search queries directly on the results page. In other words, instead of finding the correct Wikipedia article that has the answer, the information will appear in a type of Googlepedia display.

Instead of using the typical search strength of a particular answer, this new feature will draw "facts" from places like Wikipedia for historical information, CIA World Factbook for geopolitical answers, the World Bank for economic facts, Freebase for information about people and other predetermined

But, do we really want to abdicate the role of "decider" to Google, who plans to supply lowest common denominator search results, considering the aforementioned underlying sources that will embed meaning into the content?  Not me. Personally, I prefer unstructured ambiguity. It assures better access to unbiased information.

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FBI Pushing Plan to Force Surveillance Backdoors on Social Networks, Web Email Providers and VOIP

The FBI wants Internet companies to support a proposal that would require firms like Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance. If passed, these ompanies would have to provide the bureau with decryption tools to make sense of the information that it captures.

The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) already provides assistance to law enforcement by requiring that they cooperate with police in order to conduct lawfully-authorized electronic surveillance.  The FCC extended CALEA in 2004 to apply to broadband providers, but web companies are not covered under this law.  

Of course, once again, it's all in the name of national security and public safety.

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How to Remove Your Google Search History Before New Privacy Policy Takes Effect

On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy, which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future. Until now, your Google Web History (your Google searches and sites visited) was cordoned off from Google's other products. This protection was especially important because search data can reveal particularly sensitive information about you, including facts about your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, and more. If you want to keep Google from combining your Web History with the data they have gathered about you in their other products, such as YouTube or Google Plus, you may want to remove all items from your Web History and stop your Web History from being recorded in the future.

Click here to see how you can do that.

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What Google and Facebook are Hiding From the World

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Google and Facebook: Two Largest Big Brother Entities?

Google's top executives, CEO Larry Page and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt have dodged requests to testify   at a hearing by the Senate's antitrust subcommittee for over a year; however, it appears that's about to come to an end. The Wall Street Journal claims the FTC is planning to issue subpoenas to both Page and Schmidt, who are getting prepared by turning to none other than a former Microsoft prosecutor.

As Google tries to fend off a U.S. probe of its multibillion-dollar search business, it has been quietly adding to its stable of antitrust advisers, which, Reuters has learned, includes a former Microsoft prosecutor.

At the same time, Google is proving itself extraordinarily useful to the US government, who has filed more than twice as many demands for data about Google users than any other other country in the past six months, and Google has complied 94% of the time. Google's cozy relationship with the government is a little disconcerting, considering there is no doubt that the government wants to censor the Internet as much as possible.

Google Transparency Report

Google CEO Eric Schmidt claimed that Google “will know so much about its users that the search engine will be able to help the government them plan their lives.”

And, Facebook is the greatest spy vehicle ever created according to Julian Assange.

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The Ministry of Truth: Weeding-Out Pre-Criminals for the Secret State.

42-years ago, in 1968, the essential apparatus for a police state was in place...a reporting structure in line with the technology of the day: old-fashioned shoe leather and manila folders.  This organization of activities, functions, processes, etc., was created in order to cover millions of Americans, conducting law-abiding lives. In other words, agents who normally did security checks, also monitored dissent.  7-years later, in 1975, Senator Frank Church headed a congressional commission to investigate widespread abuses by US intelligence and law enforcement agencies, laying the groundwork for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.  Imagine that kind of time-frame in today's world!

Senator Church warned about government’s power to turn surveillance technologies on its own citizens, a warning, even more crucial as we transform into the digital age. On the one hand, ultimate first amendment-enabling technology has leveled the playing field like never before. On the other hand, the foundation for an Orwellian type of investigative government exists like never before.

“ . . . the Internet of Things refers to the seamless connection of devices, sensors, objects, rooms, machines, vehicles, etc, through fixed and wireless networks. Connected sensors, devices and tags can interact with the environment and send the information to other objects through machine-to-machine communication . . . The Semantic Web promotes this synergy: even agents that where not expressly designed to work together can transfer data among themselves when the data come with semantics.” -- Internet Governance and critical Internet resources

Anyway, remember the concept of "pre-crime" -  part of the predictive behavior model that describes stopping crimes before they happen - in the movie Minority Report, set in the year 2054? Well, the electronic police state, if not already here, arrived... a few years early.

The stage was set in the 1990s, when the data industry mushroomed. Vast computer systems quietly gathered staggering amounts of personal information we the people willingly feed to cell-phone networks, really surveillance networks, that continuously track us through sensors on ATM machines, credit card readers, the Internet, electronic fingerprint readers, convenient tollbooths that sense transponders on cars, etc.

Then, on 9/11/2001, the largest terrorist attack, on U.S. mainland in history, occurred.  This gave the powers the perfect excuse to merge the government and private data mining companies.  Choicepoint won a $67 million contract with the Justice Department, and other data companies serve/served as a private intelligent operation for the government. As you can see, data is a valuable commodity.

Fast forward 45 days to October 26, 2001, and with very little public debate, lawmakers passed the Patriot Act, dismantling limits Congress created in the 1970s in response to widespread abuse on the monitoring of citizens. National security officials began using the data mining system, Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX)— a powerful tool for tracking terrorists.

Data mining tools like MATRIX create new information by giving investigators the power to discern patterns and apply profiles, thus creating the ability to cut across sales and police records, coming up with links in an instant instead of days, weeks, months and sometimes, years.

So, what's the big deal?

Well, if the FBI suspects one person they are going to try to round up as much information on every single person the suspected person has come into contact with. In other words, "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" transforms from harmless fun to potentially deadly serious.

Why deadly serious?

Everyone is familiar with Google Earth, right? And drones? And the CIA?  Google who knows more about all of us than God is linked to the U.S. spy and military systems through the technology behind Google Earth software.   You see, the software was originally developed by Keyhole Inc., a company funded by  In-Q-Tel,  the CIA's semi-private investment company.  This same technology is currently used by U.S. military and intelligence systems for “full-spectrum dominance” of the planet and geospatial intelligence used in drone attacks that kill people.

The CIA and Google are both backing the company, Recorded Future, that monitors the web in real time.  They say  it uses that information to predict the future. The CIA’s semi-private investment company, In-Q-Tel, and Google Ventures, the search giant’s business division had partnered-up with Recorded Future, which scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the "invisible links" between people, institutions, actions and incidents, here and now, and the "predicted future".  In-Q-Tel also invested in Visible Technologies, a software firm specializing in monitoring social media.

The ‘Visible’ technology can automatically examine more than a million discussions and posts on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, and so forth each day. The technology also ‘scores’ each online item, assigning it a positive, negative or mixed or neutral status, based on parameters and terms set by the technology operators. The information, thus boiled down, can then be more effectively scanned and read by human operators.

Privacy International rated eight countries as 'endemic surveillance societies' and the U.S. is one.

No, this is not the surveillance society George Orwell wrote about. We feed our personal information to Big Brother, voluntarily. Why?  For a variety of conveniences, discounts, and because we don't want to be left out, but we don’t want to know how the electricity gets to the light switch; we just want to flick it on.

The bottom line is that we are fast approaching a genuine surveillance society in the U.S. Already, our every move, transaction, communication is recorded, compiled, and stored away, ready to be accessed and used against us by the authorities on demand. No court order needed.

Links: 

10 Ways We are Being Tracked and Traced

Authorities Plan To Trawl Phone Calls And E Mails For Signs Of “Resentment Toward Government”

Data Mining and Homeland Security

E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress

Feds Use Pre-Crime To Target Disgruntled Veterans

Google and NSA The world's largest Internet search company and the world's most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity.

Mind Machine Project at MIT

Pinwale still going strong under Obama.

Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Assessment - debunked the utility of data-ming and link analysis as effective counterterrorism tools.

Recorded Future A White Paper on Temporal Analytics

Social Intelligence - data-mines the social networks to help companies decide if they really want to hire you.”

State Electronic Harrassment or "Cyberstalking" Laws

Top Secret America  investigation disclosed that the government has built a huge, complex and hard to manage national security and intelligence system.  Google supplies mapping and search products to the U.S. secret state and that their employees, outsourced intelligence contractors for the Defense Department, may have filched their customers’ wi-fi data as part of an NSA surveillance project

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Wi-Spy: Is Google Watching You?

37 state Attorneys General are demanding answers from Google after the company sucked up 600 gigabytes of data from open Wi-Fi networks as it snapped pictures for Google Maps. Google claims it was just an accident. Well then, as Google contracts more extensively with the federal government, why are the FBI and the DEA making extensive use of Google Earth? What are Google’s ties with the intelligence agencies?

Apparently, fairly significant.

From Wired: Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

So let FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski know you want the FCC to take action on net neutrality. His e-mail is Julius.Genachowski@fcc.gov.

His views on Net Neutrality:

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Genachowski showed his support for net neutrality, which basically means equal access to the Internet for all Web site providers. In a blog post, Genachowski wrote “Open Government. Open Networks. Open Markets.”Genachowski, Julius, "The Obama Tech & Innovation Plan," Change.gov blog, Dec. 8, 2007

The net neutrality debate centers on the Internet providers wanting to charge fees for use of their cable lines. Such fees would determine how fast a Web site downloads and could significantly affect the user experience. While content providers fiercely oppose these fees, Internet providers argue that the fees would actually give consumers better services like easier and crisper Internet telephone calls.http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,188930,00.html

Genachowski said very little else on net neutrality during the campaign, but he quickly let his feelings be known once he joined the FCC. In Sept. 2009, Genachowski proposed two rules that would solidify the stance that Internet providers can't charge or discriminate by using download speeds. The rules are:

1. Broad band providers can't discriminate against any Internet content or application.
2. Internet providers must be open about their network-managment.Richman, Dan, "Wireless carriers uneasy about ‘Net neutrality,’" MSNBC, Oct. 6, 2009

These rules would apply, even if the consumer was accessing the Internet through a wireless device.

Links:
 
Google WIFI snafu

Google can be trusted to respect the privacy

Recorded Futures 

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Is Google Worse than the Banksters?

Don't be evil?  Really?

How is making a deal with the devil itself, (Verizon) to take over the Internet so they can get special privileges on Verizon's network considered not evil?

How is drastically tilting the playing field so far toward yourself - prioritizing Google's traffic, giving them an advantage over any other content online - that no one else  has a chance to succeed, not evil?

How is stripping the FCC of its powers to act as a watchdog for consumers and regulate violations of network neutrality not evil?

How is helping Verizon protect its ability to profit over the control of its pipes (advanced network services) not evil?

How is threatening to close the Internet off - for all practical purposes - to future innovators and creators not evil?

So, Google's pledge not to be evil didn't last long, if it ever began. Gee, what a surprise. As if they haven't advanced their own interests enough already. Let's see... expanding and taking over every market that is not 100% nailed down; threatening the livelihood of people and small businesses as they take and provide all their creative content for free;  exposing people's private information, etc.  Now, of course, all the while, Google continues to profit immensely by establishing themselves as the gatekeepers of the greatest amount of information ever collected in the history of the world.

Yep. Google is acting just like the banksters. In fact, Google is worse than the banksters.  Google promised to do no harm. Yet here they are, helping to set up an infrastructure that will devastate competition at a time when the unemployment rate is higher than it's been in 70 years. 

Isn't it time we put the corporate behemoths in their place? Isn't it time to guarantee an open Internet from this day forward? And finally, isn't it time to put the interests of we, the people ahead of the interests of big money and the corporate elite?

“Google and Verizon can try all they want to disguise this deal as a reasonable path forward, but the simple fact is this framework, if embraced by Congress and the Federal Communications Commission, would transform the free and open Internet into a closed platform like cable television. This is much worse than a business arrangement between two companies. It’s a signed-sealed-and-delivered policy framework with giant loopholes that blesses the carving up of the Internet for a few deep-pocketed Internet companies and carriers.” -- Joel Kelsey, political advisor for media watchdog Free Press

Click here to take action. Tell the FCC they work for you, not AT&T and Verizon.
The Google-Verizon deal will kill the open Internet as we know it.

Google: Don't Be Evil from MoveOn.org Official Channel on Vimeo.

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Is the Fox Guarding the Henhouse?

Digital Due Process is an initiative set up by 40 of the major telecoms (Google, Microsoft, AOL, Intel, Salesforce, Loopt, AT&T, etc.) along with about a dozen non-profits interested in public information, in an effort to revise and update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act which defines the laws that govern online privacy and how law enforcement can retrieve information from online service providers, to fit today's technology, in hopes of ensuring more privacy for users.

That's what they claim anyway. However, considering that the people behind this coalition are the very same people who are already putting into practice what they say they're going to guard against, it's a little hard to believe this is nothing more than an effort to shape the law to fit their interests. Hopefully, the non-profits involved (EPIC, ACLU, etc) will keep an eye on the foxes.  
Here are the four core principles on the DDP website:

• A governmental entity may require an entity covered by ECPA (a provider of wire or electronic communication service or a provider of remote computing service) to disclose communications that are not readily accessible to the public only with a search warrant issued based on a showing of probable cause, regardless of the age of the communications, the means or status of their storage or the provider’s access to or use of the communications in its normal business operations.
• A governmental entity may access, or may require a covered entity to provide, prospectively or retrospectively, location information regarding a mobile communications device only with a warrant issued based on a showing of probable cause.
• A governmental entity may access, or may require a covered entity to provide, prospectively or in real time, dialed number information, email to and from information or other data currently covered by the authority for pen registers and trap and trace devices only after judicial review and a court finding that the governmental entity has made a showing at least as strong as the showing under 2703(d).
• Where the Stored Communications Act authorizes a subpoena to acquire information, a governmental entity may use such subpoenas only for information related to a specified account(s) or individual(s). All non-particularized requests must be subject to judicial approval.

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Amazon the Big Hypocritical Bully on the Block.

Amazon recently filed in opposition to Google’s landmark settlement with publishers and authors stating, "the settlement would violate antitrust laws by giving Google a monopoly over millions of so-called orphan works and create a cartel controlled by authors and publishers for setting prices for e-books". The Author's Guild fired back with the following statement.

Keep in mind, Amazon requires all websites, as a condition of getting any data from them, to have the primary page link to Amazon alone, prohibiting links to other booksellers, eliminating any type of competition, it seems their filing against Google is the epitome of hypocrisy as it monopolizes online bookselling and the e-book industry. If this seems unbelievable, ask Library Thing., amongst the multitude of victims of Amazon's bullying tactics.

Here's an article by Angela Hoy about the Amazon bullying:

Amazon Tightens Grip on Long Tail

Last week Amazon announced that it would be requiring that all books that it sells that are produced through on-demand means be printed by BookSurge, their in-house on-demand printer/publisher. Amazon pitched this as a customer service matter, a means for more speedily delivering print-on-demand books and allowing for the bundling of shipments with other items purchased at the same time from Amazon. It also put a bit of an environmental spin on the move -- claiming less transportation fuel is used (this is unlikely, but that's another story) when all items are shipped directly from Amazon.

We, and many others, think something else is afoot. Ingram Industries' Lightning Source is currently the dominant printer for on-demand titles, and they appear to be quite efficient at their task. They ship on-demand titles shortly after they are ordered through Amazon directly to the customer. It's a nice business for Ingram, since they get a percentage of the sales and a printing fee for every on-demand book they ship. Amazon would be foolish not to covet that business.

What's the rub? Once Amazon owns the supply chain, it has effective control of much of the "long tail" of publishing -- the enormous number of titles that sell in low volumes but which, in aggregate, make a lot of money for the aggregator. Since Amazon has a firm grip on the retailing of these books (it's uneconomic for physical book stores to stock many of these titles), owning the supply chain would allow it to easily increase its profit margins on these books: it need only insist on buying at a deeper discount -- or it can choose to charge more for its printing of the books -- to increase its profits. Most publishers could do little but grumble and comply.

We suspect this maneuver by Amazon is far more about profit margin than it is about customer service or fossil fuels. The potential big losers (other than Ingram) if Amazon does impose greater discounts on the industry, are authors -- since many are paid for on-demand sales based on the publisher's gross revenues -- and publishers.

We're reviewing the antitrust and other legal implications of Amazon's bold move. If you have any information on this matter that you think could be helpful to us, please call us at (212) 563-5904 and ask for the legal services department, or send an e-mail to staff@authorsguild.org.

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Copyright 2008, The Authors Guild is the nation's largest society of published book authors.

Google's intentions should be scrutinized, as I'm sure their intentions are not pure, therefore it's not out of the question to suspect they too, are trying to establish a monopoly in the book world.

In the view of its critics, which includes the Justice Department:

"gives Google far too much of a role in determining the digital fate of an enormous trove of books; in effect, an immediate virtual monopoly and too much of an advantage going forward."

So, on October 7, 2009, a hearing will be held to consider objections to Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers in the matter of the "the accord reached a year ago that gave Google vast rights to scan books and devised a system for paying authors and publishers for the right to do so. The pact--actually the settlement of a suit filed by the authors and publishers to stop Google from what they saw as uncontrolled digitizing of their work--is a fundamental step in the world of letters' adjustment to all the new ways literature and information are distributed."

This determination will profoundly affect the digital future of books.

Amazon's BookSurge Information Clearinghouse

Judgment Day for the Google Book Pact

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Is It Possible to Build a Fortune and Keep Your Soul?

Publisher, mogul Felix Dennis, founder of Dennis Publishing Ltd. who publishes Maxim Magazine as well as nineteen other publications, and author of How to Get Rich, amassed a fortune, estimated at around $1 billion. Mr. Dennis claims one must be ruthless and that the "sliver of ice" present in all of us must surface and expand in order to become super-wealthy, filthy-rich or insanely affluent...well, you get the point.

Mr. Dennis asserts that the pie is finite. If a person wants to join the very few whose single portion is larger than half the population's portion combined, he or she must hog his piece of the pie at the expense of many...it's common sense. In other words, "Don't be evil" is more than naive when you choose to join the ranks of those who rule the world.

As I was listening to Tom Ashbrook, host of On Point, interview Mr. Dennis about his book, Mr. Dennis made it abundantly clear that he was not talking about successful, or well-off, or even rich people...in fact, he considers millionaires poor. That should give you an idea of the scale of wealth he is targeting.

Then, along comes Ms. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, an Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration at Harvard, and author of more than seventeen books, and who I'm sure is brilliant. She totally dismissed what Mr. Dennis has to say without attempting to understand his point. I think after she heard drugs and whores, everything else Mr. Dennis had to say went in one ear and out the other. Immediately, after calling him a pig, she defended Bill Gates, the Google boys and others, claiming they had stable families, stable lives and remained drug/whore free. In addition, she didn't seem to grasp Mr. Dennis was referring only to those who have amassed a huge fortune. Tom Ashbrook, who is one of my favorites, didn't seem to get it either.

What is there to get? Aside from the fact that Mr. Dennis repeatedly made it clear he was only referring to the infinitesimally small percentage at the top of the "food chain" and that people (a woman who called into the show who did seem to comprehend) who were trying to accumulate wealth to take care of their disabled children's future - who own one house with a mortgage, and that even though they can afford two nannies, this sector of the population are not the focus of Mr. Dennis' book.

Even more importantly, both Mr. Ashbrook and Professor Kanter seemed to focus only on ruthless behavior that blatantly manifests itself as addiction to sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Never mind, the "invisible" brutal, cutthroat decisions individuals en route to King Midas status must make fairly often. You know, those decisions that might result in the destruction, and possibly the death of thousands here and around the globe; those decisions that compromise the integrity of our Constitution; those decisions that might contribute to the collapse of our financial system...little things like that.

It is impossible to profit on the scale Mr. Dennis is talking about without first, activating that "sliver of ice" he mentioned, so that ice water can mingle and flow freely through the veins of those driven toward that goal. Relatively speaking, the Google boys and Bill Gates may appear to be teddy bears in comparison with the robber barons of previous centuries, however it's very difficult to measure the "ruthlessness" of the hyper elite today versus a time when the people's sense of morality was limited by ignorance; the level of technology only slightly more advanced than Bedrock; and a decent education, rare.

Let's forget the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; the decisions that lead to atrocity and annihilation. Isn't the act of acquiring the level of excess wealth Mr. Dennis refers too, a little ruthless in and of itself, considering the number of people suffering from the lack of basic necessities? Remember, Mr. Dennis is not questioning the value of people like Bill Gates and the Google boys to society, as they have literally transformed and revolutionized our world in ways we could only imagine a few years ago. They may be worth every penny, however, a certain degree of an individual's humanity must be sacrificed in the process. I believe that's all Mr. Dennis was trying to say and I admire him for having the courage to illuminate the pitfalls and unsavory aspects of creating immense wealth.

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Not All Brands Are Created Equal

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Starbucks seem to dominate the results from Interbrand's Brand channel 2008 Brandjunkie Survey:

What brand would you most like to sit next to at a dinner party?
Top answers:

Apple Virgin Google Coca-Cola Nike

Chanel Victoria's Secret Microsoft Nokia Absolut

ARMANI Diesel innocent BMW adidas

Disney PRADA Starbucks None Louis Vuitton

What brand, if sent back 100 years would have the biggest impact on the course of history?
Top answers:

Apple Microsoft Google Coca-Cola Ford

IBM McDonald's Virgin Nokia Nike

None Sony Greenpeace Toyota Durex

Boeing Intel USA GE Starbucks

What brand that no longer exists would you resurrect?
Top answers:

None Pan Am ATARI TWA Cingular

Oldsmobile Marathon Compaq IBM MG

Polaroid Baniff Eaton's Studebaker Netscape

Ansett Fresca Amena Plymouth TAB

Which brand do you want to argue with?
Top answers:

Microsoft Apple None Coca-Cola McDonald's

Wal-Mart Starbucks Nike Sony Google

General Motors Dell Pepsi AT&T BP

USA Ford Yahoo! Levi's Shell

Brandchannel If you were to describe yourself as being a brand, what brand would you be?
Top answers:

Apple Nike Coca-Cola Virgin BMW

Audi Target Toyota None Google

Sony adidas Mercedes Chanel Pepsi

Volkswagon Puma MINI Starbucks Disney

Which brand inspires you the most?
Top answers:

Apple Nike Coca-Cola Google Starbucks

Virgin BMW None Target Nokia

Innocent adidas Dove Barack Obama Mercedes

Disney Chanel Toyota Sony IKEA

If you could rebrand any brand, what brand would it be?
Top answers:

Microsoft USA Ford Coca-Cola Pepsi

General Motors None Gap Starbucks Sony

BMW Nike Apple Reebok McDonald's

Wal-Mart Levi's Mercedes Avon Sears

What brand can you not live without?
Top answers:

Apple None Coca-Cola Google Starbucks

Nokia Microsoft Pepsi Nike Sony

McDonald's Colgate Nestlé Blackerry adidas

Intel Procter & Gamble Dell BBC Target

What brand is most likely to revolutionize the branding industry in the next five years?
Top answers:

Apple Google Doesn't exist yet Facebook Nike

Nokia Virgin Microsoft YouTube Barack Obama

Sony Toyota Coca-Cola Interbrand Starbucks

Target Second Life China Samsung innocent

What brand do you think is truly (going) "green"?
Top answers:

None Toyota BP The Body Shop Honda

General Electric Virgin Patagonia Greenpeace Whole Foods Market

Marks & Spencer Apple Wal-Mart Starbucks Innocent

Shell BMW Seventh Generation Aveda Clorox

2007 Best Global Brands

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Cool Interactive Health Map and Mapping Disease Hotspots

Health Map: Global disease alert map is really cool! It can be used like Google Map, and you can choose the map, satellite or hybrid view. To get to a part of the world, use one of the links at the top of the map to zoom in by content and/or region.


There are four separate menus that provide options for customization.


Below the map, you’ll see a slider that lets you display alerts by date range. You’ll also see a bar labeled “Heat Index,” that includes the spectrum from yellow to red.

* Marker color represents a composite score based on the recency of alerts, the number of disease outbreaks, and the number of sources providing information at a particular location. Our algorithm applies an exponential weighting, yielding increased heat (redness) for more recent outbreak news.

* The source of the alert is represented by an icon next to the alert headline.

* The square-shaped marker icon indicates a country-level marker, while state, province and local markers are round . We currently have administrative divisions and some major cities for USA, UK, Canada, China, India, Australia, Mexico and Russia, with more coming soon.







Use check boxes to select news feeds and different diseases. The third menu provides links that allow you to display alerts by country. The menu at the bottom offers links to the full text of the most recent alerts, displayed in a separate, smaller window.

HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. HealthMap provides a jumping-off point for real-time information on emerging infectious diseases and has particular interest for public health officials and international travelers.

Below is a world map highlighting hot spots for diseases passed from animals to humans.


Researchers say that areas in which humans and animals come in very close contact are a key grounds for emerging diseases. Above,
Outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases such as Ebola, SARS, HIV and avian influenza are on the rise around the world, researchers report in the journal Nature.

The team found that the developing world was a key ground for emerging diseases, especially in areas in which humans and animals are in very close contact.

"These maps show that the key threat to public health is where human population growth and wildlife diversity clash," says Peter Daszak, one of the authors of the report.

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Google Will Hand Over Anonymous Blogger's IP Address

This is a little scary.

"In an unprecedented move, Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG) has agreed to supply the IP address of an Israeli blogger who used "Google Blogger" for a blog in which he slandered Shaarei Tikva council members running for reelection. The election is being held today. So far as is known, this is the first time that Google forewent legal action in such a case."

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10 Largest Databases in the World

10. Library of Congress

Not even the digital age can prevent the world's largest library from ending up on this list. The Library of Congress (LC) boasts more than 130 million items ranging from cook books to colonial newspapers to U.S. government proceedings. It is estimated that the text portion of the Library of Congress would comprise 20 terabytes of data. The LC expands at a rate of 10,000 items per day and takes up close to 530 miles of shelf space -- talk about a lengthy search for a book.

If you're researching a topic and cannot find the right information on the internet, the Library of Congress should be your destination of choice. For users researching U.S. history, around 5 million pieces from the LC's collection can be found online at American Memory.

Unfortunately for us, the Library of Congress has no plans of digitizing the entirety of its contents and limits the people who can check out materials to Supreme Court Justices, members of Congress, their respective staff, and a select few other government officials; however, anyone with a valid Reader Identification Card (the LC's library card) can access the collection.

By the Numbers

* 130 million items (books, photographs, maps, etc)
* 29 million books
* 10,000 new items added each day
* 530 miles of shelves
* 5 million digital documents
* 20 terabytes of text data

9. Central Intelligence Agency

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is in the business of collecting and distributing information on people, places and things, so it should come as no surprise that they end up on this list. Although little is known about the overall size of the CIA's database, it is certain that the agency has amassed a great deal of information on both the public and private sectors via field work and digital intrusions.

Portions of the CIA database available to the public include the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Electronic Reading Room, The World Fact Book, and various other intelligence related publications. The FOIA library includes hundreds of thousands of official (and occasionally ultra-sensitive) U.S. government documents made available to the public electronically. The library grows at a rate of 100 articles per month and contains topics ranging from nuclear development in Pakistan to the type of beer available during the Korean War. The World Fact Book boasts general information on every country and territory in the world including maps, population numbers, military capabilities and more.

By the Numbers

* 100 FOIA items added each month
* Comprehensive statistics on more than 250 countries and entities
* Unknown number of classified information

8. Amazon

Amazon, the world's biggest retail store, maintains extensive records on its 59 million active customers including general personal information (phone number address, etc), receipts, wishlists, and virtually any sort of data the website can extract from its users while they are logged on. Amazon also keeps more than 250,000 full text books available online and allows users to comment and interact on virtually every page of the website, making Amazon one of the world's largest online communities.

This data coupled with millions of items in inventory Amazon sells each year -- and the millions of items in inventory Amazon associates sell -- makes for one very large database. Amazon's two largest databases combine for more than 42 terabytes of data, and that's only the beginning of things. If Amazon published the total number of databases they maintain and volume of data each database contained, the amount of data we know Amazon houses would increase substantially.

But still, you say 42 terabytes, that doesn't sound like so much. In relative terms, 42 terabytes of data would convert to 37 trillion forum posts.

By the Numbers

* 59 million active customers
* More than 42 terabytes of data

7. YouTube

After less than two years of operation YouTube has amassed the largest video library (and subsequently one of the largest databases) in the world. YouTube currently boasts a user base that watches more than 100 million clips per day accounting for more than 60% of all videos watched online.

In August of 2006, the Wall Street Journal projected YouTube's database to the sound of 45 terabytes of videos. While that figure doesn't sound terribly high relative to the amount of data available on the internet, YouTube has been experiencing a period of substantial growth (more than 65,000 new videos per day) since that figures publication, meaning that YouTube's database size has potentially more than doubled in the last 5 months.

Estimating the size of YouTube's database is particularly difficult due to the varying sizes and lengths of each video. However if one were truly ambitious (and a bit forgiving) we could project that the YouTube database will expect to grow as much as 20 terabytes of data in the next month.

Given: 65,000 videos per day X 30 days per month = 1,950,000 videos per month; 1 terabyte = 1,048,576 megabytes. If we assume that each video has a size of 1MB, YouTube would expect to grow 1.86 terabytes next month. Similarly, if we assume that each video has a size of 10MB, YouTube would expect to grow 18.6 terabytes next month.

By the Numbers

* 100 million videos watched per day
* 65,000 videos added each day
* 60% of all videos watched online
* At least 45 terabytes of videos

6. ChoicePoint

Imagine having to search through a phone book containing a billion pages for a phone number. When the employees at ChoicePoint want to know something about you, they have to do just that. If printed out, the ChoicePoint database would extend to the moon and back 77 times.

ChoicePoint is in the business of acquiring information about the American population -- addresses and phone numbers, driving records, criminal histories, etc., ChoicePoint has it all. For the most part, the data found in ChoicePoint's database is sold to the highest bidders, including the American government.

But how much does ChoicePoint really know? In 2002 ChoicePoint was able to help authorities solve a serial rapist case in Philadelphia and Fort Collins after producing a list of 6 potential suspects by data mining their DNA and personal records databases. In 2001 ChoicePoint was able to identify the remains of World Trade Center victims by matching DNA found in bone fragments to the information provided by victim's family members in conjunction to data found in their databases.

By the Numbers

* 250 terabytes of personal data
* Information on 250 million people

5. Sprint

Sprint is one of the world's largest telecommunication companies as it offers mobile services to more than 53 million subscribers, and prior to being sold in May of 2006, offered local and long distance land line packages.

Large telecommunication companies like Sprint are notorious for having immense databases to keep track of all of the calls taking place on their network. Sprint's database processes more than 365 million call detail records and operational measurements per day. The Sprint database is spread across 2.85 trillion database rows making it the database with the largest number of rows (data insertions if you will) in the world. At its peak, the database is subjected to more than 70,000 call detail record insertions per second.

By the Numbers

* 2.85 trillion database rows.
* 365 million call detail records processed per day
* At peak, 70,000 call detail record insertions per second

4. Google

Although there is not much known about the true size of Google's database (Google keeps their information locked away in a vault that would put Fort Knox to shame), there is much known about the amount of and types of information Google collects.

On average, Google is subjected to 91 million searches per day, which accounts for close to 50% of all internet search activity. Google stores each and every search a user makes into its databases. After a years worth of searches, this figure amounts to more than 33 trillion database entries. Depending on the type of architecture of Google's databases, this figure could comprise hundreds of terabytes of information.

Google is also in the business of collecting information on its users. Google combines the queries users search for with information provided by the Google cookies stored on a user's computer to create virtual profiles.

To top it off, Google is currently experiencing record expansion rates by assimilating into various realms of the internet including digital media (Google Video, YouTube), advertising (Google Ads), email (GMail), and more. Essentially, the more Google expands, the more information their databases will be subjected to.

In terms of internet databases, Google is king.

By the Numbers

* 91 million searches per day
* accounts for 50% of all internet searches
* Virtual profiles of countless number of users

3. AT&T

Similar to Sprint, the United States' oldest telecommunications company AT&T maintains one of the world's largest databases. Architecturally speaking, the largest AT&T database is the cream of the crop as it boasts titles including the largest volume of data in one unique database (312 terabytes) and the second largest number of rows in a unique database (1.9 trillion), which comprises AT&T's extensive calling records.

The 1.9 trillion calling records include data on the number called, the time and duration of the call and various other billing categories. AT&T is so meticulous with their records that they've maintained calling data from decades ago -- long before the technology to store hundreds of terabytes of data ever became available. Chances are, if you're reading this have made a call via AT&T, the company still has all of your call's information.

By the Numbers

* 323 terabytes of information
* 1.9 trillion phone call records

2. National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center

The second largest database in the world belongs to the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in Oakland, California. NERSC is owned and operated by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy. The database is privy to a host of information including atomic enegry research, high energy physics experiements, simulations of the early universe and more. Perhaps our best bet at traveling back in time is to fire up NERSC's supercomputers and observe the big bang.

The NERSC database encompasses 2.8 petabytes of information and is operated by more than 2,000 computational scientists. To put the size of NERSC into perspective, the total amount of spoken words in the history of humanity is estimated to be at 5 exabytes; in relative terms, the NERSC database is equivalent to 0.055% of the size of that figure.

Although that may not seem a lot at first glance, when you factor in that 6 billion humans around the globe speak more than 2,000 words a day, the sheer magnitude of that number becomes apparent.

By the Numbers

* 2.8 petabytes of data
* Operated by 2,000 computational scientists

1. World Data Centre for Climate

If you had a 35 million euro super computer lying around what would you use it for? The stock market? Building your own internet? Try extensive climate research -- if there's a machine out there that has the answer for global warming, this one might be it. Operated by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and German Climate Computing Centre, The World Data Centre for Climate (WDCC) is the largest database in the world.

The WDCC boasts 220 terabytes of data readily accessible on the web including information on climate research and anticipated climatic trends, as well as 110 terabytes (or 24,500 DVD's) worth of climate simulation data. To top it off, six petabytes worth of additional information are stored on magnetic tapes for easy access. How much data is six petabyte you ask? Try 3 times the amount of ALL the U.S. academic research libraries contents combined.

By the Numbers

* 220 terabytes of web data
* 6 petabytes of additional data


* Additional Databases

The following databases were unique (and massive) in their own right, and just fell short of the cut on our top 10 list.

Nielsen Media Research / Nielsen Net Ratings

Best known for its television audience size and composition rating abilities, the U.S. firm Nielsen Media Research is in the business of measuring mass-media audiences including television, radio, print media, and the internet. The database required to process such statistics as Google's daily internet searches is nothing short of massive.

Myspace

It would seem appropriate that the world's largest social networking site, Myspace, has a rather large database to keep up with all of its user's content.

United States Customs

The U.S. Customs database is unique in that it requires information on hundreds of thousands of people and objects entering and leaving the United States borders instantaneously. For this to be possible, the database was special programmed to process queries near instantaneously.

HPSS

There are various databases around the world using technology similar to that found in our countdown's second largest database NERSC. The technology is known as High Performance Storage System or HPSS. Several other massive HPSS databases include Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique Direction des Applications Militaires, and more.

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