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Tuesday, August 15, 2006

The Morning News

Posted by on August 15 at 8:08 AM

“Fresh data” from the census! The immigrant population grew in the U.S. by 16% in the last five years — and they’re increasingly likely to settle in weird states like Indiana and South Dakota.

Fresh Fears:Web sites track you by the ads you click and the phrases you search for— and they remember (so definitely don’t click here).

Fresh Findings: Nickels backs the “most aggressive” of four growth scenarios for Seattle — 60% increase by 2040.

Fresh Fall: WalMart’s profit declines for the first time in a decade, mostly due to ditching its German branch (the store still netted an astronomical $85.43 billion last quarter).

Fresh Faced: Lebanese feel “a defiant sense of victory” as Israeli troops head home.

Fresh Fascism Fantasies?: The Japanese Prime Minister possibly panders to the militaristic far-right by marking the anniversary of WWII with a visit to a shrine where famous WWII criminals are interred.

Freshest Poll: War in Iraq, Terrorism are America’s most important problems.

Not Fresh
Today in History: August 15th, 1961 — East Germany begins building the Berlin Wall to keep out dirty capitalists, Wal Mart.


CommentsRSS icon

Not only do search engines track what you search for, sometimes they get really stupid and make their logs public (AOL). Click on the link and try checking out what user 927 spends most of their time looking for on the Web. Enjoy!

Wal-Mart's revenues were 85 billion, not their "net". Their net was down (2.08 billion, down from 2.81 billion). Their revenues were up significantly...

Revenue, shemevenue, I think we all know that what really matters here is that Wal-Mart's quest to bring affordable goods to its consumers and profits to its investors is the ultimate embodiment of capitalist evil and must be decried shrilly at every opportunity.

Dam you Sam Walton!!!! (shakes fist angrily)

"A responsible bomb maker considers it impolite to accidentally destroy more of the neighborhood than absolutely necessary."

Brilliant!!!

Personally, I think the weirdest news of the day is that the Iranian prez has his own blog.

The site has this spiffy lil' intro:
‘Describing himself as a “distinguished student”, the president tells how he excelled at school, coming 132nd out of more than 400,000 students to take a university entrance test - despite suffering from a nose bleed at the time.’

It does need a comments section. =)


http://www.ahmadinejad.ir/index.aspx

Wow, 927 likes "rape porn", "mold on humans" and "paul rodgers". Is that you, Charles?

When they say it can't be linked to personal identities, they're lying through their teeth. Of course it can. These databases are cross-linked to other databases used by bulk-mailers, and bulk mail has your name and address on it. All you need is one cross-linked hit on one field and they have your whole life story in front of them -- SSN, job history, debt history, car history, rent/own history, school history, criminal history, shopping history, where you get your hair done, where you buy your gas, where you buy your greeting cards and sex toys -- not just online but on the ground as well. Every single step of your life that's not completely off the grid -- cash -- is in a database than can be and IS linked together by marketers. And since marketers don't have souls, the chances of this info staying out of the hands of just about anyone else who wants it is nil.

This is what the web is FOR; it's why there is a web in the first place.

I firewall off ad and marketing servers like coremetrics and atdmt as I discover them.

Fnarf is right, pretty much anything that is keyed with a unique ID can be joined with any other table to return all kinds of specific data... including your personal info.

While there is the marketing aspect to search logs (and all the scary things that portends), I think it would also be really cool to let some psychologists or anthropologists have access for research purposes.

For example, someone could do a dissertation on the psychological makeup of the kind of person 927 is. Is this kind of person common? A full analysis of search logs would show if it is true. Could it be that contrary to social mores and the commonly accepted description of what constitutes "normal" behavior, perhaps 927 is representative of more people than we think?

I bet that some of the marketers and dbas that comb through all this data have a deeper insight into the current condition of the computer using masses than many who spend their time studying such things.

or maybe 927 is representative of the average AOL user.

And no, Fnarf, while I happened to find 927s search logs particularly juicy, you're not going to find out what kind of shit I search for in there. You'll have to wait for Google to publish THEIR log before you can try to weed me out ;)

If the feds or whoever were out to get someone, it couldn't be all that difficult to upload or "discover" any evidence they want from particular user's computer files.

That's not to say they shouldn't go after someone who, for example, is a convicted or suspected kiddie porn distributor, but that's what reasonable cause and a legitimate court order are supposed to warrant.

Gee, I thought the census item that stood out was the Mayor's signing off on our increasing our population by more than 250,000 by 2050.

Think Vancouver, BC - Wallingford as the center for new towers.

oh, and I didn't see the link on the SLOG, it was buried there. my bad.

but that's what reasonable cause and a legitimate court order are supposed to warrant.... they're already watching you. because data mining is all we're talking about here. whether its for marketing, academic research, or national security the process is all the same. People made this big fuss about "tapping" phones when they don't realize that you don't really tap anything anymore. Now everything is just data moving through a network. whether that data is voice or email, its all just a packet of data moving through a series of systems, and creating a log like the AOL one is pretty straight forward. these logs exsit all over the place. its what is done with it after the fact that is really at issue.

unless the data doesn't move thru the network in the Frist place ...

I work all day on data you never get to see.

Unless I call up your secretary and social-engineer a password out of her. Or you leave your laptop on top of a mailbox somewhere. Or a P.I. slips somebody $100 to have a peek.

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