Tag Archives: big data

U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program

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Congress obliged with the Protect America Act in 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which immunized private companies that cooperated voluntarily with U.S. intelligence collection. PRISM recruited its first partner, Microsoft, and began six years of rapidly growing data collection beneath the surface of a roiling national debate on surveillance and privacy. Late last year, when critics in Congress sought changes in the FISA Amendments Act, the only lawmakers who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

via U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program – The Washington Post.

That will teach people not to put so much trust into the cloud.

Robert McNamara and the Dangers of Big Data at Ford and in the Vietnam War

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The use, abuse, and misuse of data by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War is a troubling lesson about the limitations of information as the world hurls toward the big-data era. The underlying data can be of poor quality. It can be biased. It can be misanalyzed or used misleadingly. And even more damning, data can fail to capture what it purports to quantify.

via Robert McNamara and the Dangers of Big Data at Ford and in the Vietnam War | MIT Technology Review.

Fast Database Emerges from MIT Class, GPUs and Student’s Invention

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During the class in the spring of 2012 he learned the graphics programming language CUDA, and that opened the doors for tweaking GPUs to divide advanced computations across the GPUs massively parallel architecture.

He knew he had something when he wrote an algorithm to connect millions of points on a map, joining the data together spatially. The performance of his GPU-based computations compared to the same operation done with CPU power on PostGIS, the GIS module for the open-source database PostgreSQL, was “mind-blowing,” he said.

via Fast Database Emerges from MIT Class, GPUs and Student’s Invention.

Massive data leak exposes offshore financial secrets

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The files contain information on over 120,000 offshore entities — including shell corporations and legal structures known as trusts — involving people in over 170 countries. The leak amounts to 260 gigabytes of data, or 162 times larger than the U.S. State Department cables published by WikiLeaks in 2010.

via Massive data leak exposes offshore financial secrets – World – CBC News.

Google BigQuery is now even bigger

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BigQuery is a cloud service that lets users analyze terabyte-sized data sets using SQL-like queries. It’s based on Google’s Dremel querying system, which can analyze data where it’s located (i.e., in the Google File System or BigTable) and which Google uses internally to analyze a variety of different data sets.

via Google BigQuery is now even bigger — Tech News and Analysis.

Game Studios at the Forefront of Big Data, Cloud

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If you want to see the future of Big Data, look no further than the nearest gaming-development studio. It isn’t all fun and first-person-shooting. Game developers are the sentinels of a variety of advanced IT techniques, placing them in front of the general IT population with regard to using real-time analytics and cloud computing, among other areas.

via Game Studios at the Forefront of Big Data, Cloud.

Intel Launches Hadoop Distribution And Project Rhino, An Effort To Bring Better Security To Big Data

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Intel says the distribution is optimized for the Intel Xeon processor platform. In its announcement, the company states it can analyze one terabyte of data, which would previously take more than four hours to fully process, can now be done in seven minutes.

via Intel Launches Hadoop Distribution And Project Rhino, An Effort To Bring Better Security To Big Data | TechCrunch.

Start-Up Tawkon Rides Radiation Scare To Build Phone Coverage Maps

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It also gives other data. According to the findings, Latin Americans tended to answer their calls significantly quicker than the rest of the world. In Panama, the average time the phone is left ringing before an answer is 6.42 seconds, while in Libya it’s almost double that – 11.16 seconds.

via Start-Up Tawkon Rides Radiation Scare To Build Phone Coverage Maps.

Data is the new currency.