(CoasttoCoast) – Former commodity trading advisor Walter Burien revealed the massive scope of government finance and investments, all funded by U.S. taxpayers, and argued for an alternative path without taxation. There are some 184,000 separate government entities in the US, each with their own assets, and “when you look at collective government, both federal and local, they’ve taken over the banking industry, the brokerage industry,” and corporations that trade on the stock market are 60-85% owned by collective government, he claimed. Read the rest of this entry »

(MailOnline) – A software company is developing revolutionary software which provides the ability to identify people from photographs posted on the internet.

Face.com has produced technology that can identify individuals on social networking sites and online galleries by comparing their image against a known picture of them.

It means detailed profiles of individuals can be built up purely from online photographs and critics have said it could lead to exploitation by employers. Read More Here

(ABC27) – Harrisburg, Pa. – The state attorney general’s office has issued a subpoena threatening officials of the social networking service Twitter with arrest unless they reveal the names of two bloggers who have been critical of Attorney General Tom Corbett and his public corruption investigation.

The subpoena orders Twitter’s custodian of records to provide “any and all subscriber information” pertaining to the accounts “bfbarbie” and “CasablancaPA,” including name, address, contact information, creation date, and Internet protocol address.

The accounts have criticized Corbett’s use of grand juries, suggesting he used the investigations for political gain and to go after political opponents.

The Twitter representative was supposed to appear before the statewide investigating grand jury on May 14 to “give evidence regarding alleged violations of the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.” The court document does not specify what crime is being investigated. Read entire article

(ElectronicFrontierFoundation) – Since its incorporation just over five years ago, Facebook has undergone a remarkable transformation. When it started, it was a private space for communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it transformed into a platform where much of your information is public by default. Today, it has become a platform where you have no choice but to make certain information public, and this public information may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites and used to target ads.

To help illustrate Facebook’s shift away from privacy, we have highlighted some excerpts from Facebook’s privacy policies over the years. Watch closely as your privacy disappears, one small change at a time! Read the rest of this entry »

“Computers have reached the point in which continuous, verbatim recording of an individual’s life experiences is technologically feasible. The challenge now is turning vast repositories of such recordings into a useful resource while respecting the social, legal, and ethical ramifications of ubiquitous recording. We have built a “memory prosthesis” that can be used to amass such data for the purpose of helping people with common, everyday memory problems.” –Sunil Vemuri
The internet initially began as a researching tool and a networking test bed. The internet has evolved over the years and with the click of a button you can find information on nearly any subject that strikes your fancy. The internet of today is a networking tool more than anything else. The rise of social networking websites allows netizens to use these networks like a virtual diary and discuss every sordid detail of their lives with ease.  The internet of tomorrow is being constructed today and I believe you should be informed as you have invested much time and energy into it. Read More Here

(Reuters) – U.S. health authorities are turning to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter in a bid to prepare people to be vaccinated against the pandemic H1N1 virus. Read the rest of this entry »

(WPost) – The Obama administration is proposing to scale back a long-standing ban on tracking how people use government Internet sites with “cookies” and other technologies, raising alarms among privacy groups. Read the rest of this entry »

(FinancialTimes) – Rupert Murdoch has vowed to charge for all the online content of his newspapers and television news channels, going well beyond his prediction in May that the company would test pay models on one of its stronger papers within the year. Read the rest of this entry »

In a move destined to garner less attention than cap-and-trade or health care, Barack Obama’s choice for the position of Information Czar could have drastic implications for the conservative blogosphere. Read the rest of this entry »

Mimicking synapses like this one is crucial to the effort. Part of a field called “cognitive computing”, the research will bring together neurobiologists, computer and materials scientists and psychologists. As a first step in its research the project has been granted $4.9m (£3.27m) from US defence agency Darpa.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mimicking synapses like this one is crucial to the effort. Part of a field called “cognitive computing”, the research will bring together neurobiologists, computer and materials scientists and psychologists. As a first step in its research the project has been granted $4.9m (£3.27m) from US defence agency Darpa.

Read the rest of this entry »