‘So Facebook has bought Instagram, a company with a single product – a photosharing app – for $1bn in cash and (FB) shares. Just to put that in context, Instagram has been in existence for 18 months, employs 13 people, has 30 million users and has had a grand total of $7m in investment funding. Oh, and it has precisely zero dollars in revenue.’

‘We’ve seen in the past months a variety of laws aiming to monitor and censor the internet. The UK (aka Oceania to George Orwell readers) is taking a step further by proposing laws allowing the monitoring of emails, phone calls, text messages and even visited websites in real time. These laws are not a long-term project; they are to be brought in “as soon as parliamentary time allows”. As usual, these big-brotherish laws are justified with noble causes such as “fighting terrorists” but the reality is that the right to privacy of the entire population is being revoked. Furthermore, the definition of “terrorist” has been so distorted in recent years that it will probably end up meaning “someone with an opinion about something” in the near future. Here are two articles from the BBC (who always slightly sugar coat these things) on the proposed web monitoring laws.’

In his Facebook comments Azhar Ahmed, 19, reportedly criticized the amount of attention the deaths of the six soldiers received as compared to the civilians losses Afghanistan has sustained in the NATO-led war. 

A police spokesperson said that the teen “didn’t make his point very well and that is why he has landed himself in bother.” 

Ahmed, who will appear before court on March 20, was detained last Friday and charged over the weekend. He has since been released on bail. 

The six British troops were killed last week after their Warrior armored vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan. Most of the soldiers were between 19 and 21 years of age. The incident is considered the biggest single loss of life for British forces since 2006.’

‘The Associated Press reported November 4 that the CIA has an entire center dedicated to monitoring Facebook and Twitter. They also monitor TV stations and print newspapers.

“The Open Source Center,” established in 2005 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence [4], has been operating since the 9/11 Commission’s call for foreign counterintelligence. Though the CIA claims it only monitors foreign activity, I am skeptical. Not only been the CIA been using proxies, but has devoted an entire center for that operation.’

‘According to CIA Open Source Center (OSC) director Doug Naquin, a team of “vengeful librarians” have the task of studying networks and media outlets that are open to contributions made by individuals across the world, the Associated Press reported.

Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, TV news channels, internet chat rooms, local radio stations, and newspapers are closely monitored, in order to draw a semi-realistic picture of “the mood of a region” at a given time of importance for the US.

Naquin says that any tweet in any given language, regardless of its significance, is closely looked at by analysts. They then cross-reference it with local newspapers or even a “clandestinely interrupted phone conversation.”’

h4x0r3d:

#FB

Section 4 DPA + Art. 12 Directive 95/46/EG <- #Facebook

(Source: seanbonner, via awakentotheuniverse)

‘In the article entitled The London Riots and How They Will be Used to the Elite’s Advantage, it was stated that the riots would be used to justify a greater control, and surveillance censorship of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry Messenger. Well the UK government has recently proposed several drastic measures aiming to control the flow of information through social networks, all of which can easily lead to abuse and state censorship such as: The interception and  disclosure of messages by authorities, the deletion of pro-social unrest messages, the banning of suspected rioters from social networks and even the complete shut down of social networks during periods of unrest.

These measures are being discussed despite studies claiming that social media activities spiked AFTER major riot events (and not before), which is, after all, a normal phenomena (see this analysis of Tweeter traffic during the riots).

Here’s an article from The Guardian describing the several measures considered by David Cameron’s government.’

Full Speed Ahead For Facial Recognition Technology

‘Face.com has been used to tag over 25 billion faces in over 7 billion photos since launching in late 2007. Facebook users had been using the Face.com facial recognition app to tag friends in photos for two years before Facebook stepped on the Israel-based company’s toes by making facial recognition a default feature for photo tagging this year.

Face.com has a nice head start as interest in facial recognition technology heats up. Photo-sites like Picasa and Facebook are making it widely available commercially for easy people-tagging; bars will be using it so that you can check out the gender ratio at your favorite watering holes via smartphone before deciding where to go; digital billboards are using it to target passersby with relevant advertising; and over 40 police stations around the country are adopting an iPhone tool, MORIS, that will allow them to identify criminal suspects with a face scan.

CEO Gil Hirsch, 37, says he isn’t worried about Facebook making his app irrelevant. “Our technology is better,” he says. Plus the social networking site is not the company’s only outlet. They offer a facial recognition technology API that over 20,000 developers are using for their own projects, such as FindYourFaceMate.com, an online dating site with the narcissistic premise that we get along best with people who resemble us. The site matches you with doppelgangers of the sex you’re interested in.

The technology can also be useful for detecting gender or mood or if there’s a face there at all. “One Chatroulette-like client uses it to make sure that there is a face video-chatting and not a….,” Hirsh trails off. “Not a non-face?” I offer delicately, knowing about Chatroulette’s popularity among men who like the idea of anonymous indecent exposure via webcam. “Exactly,” he says.

The key usage, though, still tends to be identity. The company offers “safe alerts” to let users know when new photos of them appear on a given site. “Like Google alerts for your face,” says Hirsch. At this point, the alert is reserved for a contained site like Facebook, rather than the Internet at large – in part for privacy reasons. You probably wouldn’t want someone else setting up a Google alert for your face; on a site like Facebook, the company knows you are who you say you are and limits searches to photos that have been shared with you by contacts within your social network.

The idea for Face.com bubbled up out of meetings of the “Garage Geeks,” an Israeli group of over 3500 tech enthusiasts. They raised money from angel investors and secured a $4.3 million round of venture funding in September 2010.

“This is just the beginning,” says Hirsch. “You’re going to see facial recognition being used in more and more places.”’