Tuesday, August 27, 2013

More on storing "all that stuff'

In a post last May I expressed skepticism about the claims that the organizations on the dark side could store yottabytes of data, for example at the Utah data center. I wasn't alone; here for example from June is Mark Burnett on the same theme. The skeptical chorus has had some effect; the Wikipedia article has been edited to remove this hyperbolic claim:
a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to be a primary storage resource capable of storing data on the scale of yottabytes.
In this clip from a NOVA documentary from last January entitled "Rise of the Drones", Yannis Antoniades of BAE Systems discusses the Argus camera used for drone surveillance. The video claims:
Argus streams live to the ground and also stores everything, a million terabytes of video a day, ...
Below the fold, lets look at this seemingly innocuous claim.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Annotations

Caroline O'Donovan at the Nieman Journalism Lab has an interesting article entitled Exegesis: How early adapters, innovative publishers, legacy media companies and more are pushing toward the annotated web. She discusses the way media sites including The New York Times, The Financial Times, Quartz and SoundCloud and platforms such as Medium are trying to evolve from comments to annotations as a way to improve engagement with their readers. She also describes the work hypothes.is is doing to build annotations into the Web infrastructure. There is also an interesting post on the hypothes.is blog from Peter Brantley on a workshop with journalists. Below the fold, some thoughts on the implications for preserving the Web.

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Winston Smith Lives!

Three years ago I wrote a post on the importance of a tamper-resistant system for government documents, and another a year ago. Governments cannot resist the temptation to re-write history to their advantage, and every so often they get caught, which is an excuse for me to repeat the message. Below the fold, this year's version of the message.