London orders rubbish bins to stop collecting smartphone data
Good call.
AUTHORITIES IN LONDON’S financial district have ordered a company using high-tech rubbish bins to collect smartphone data from passers-by to cease its activities, and referred the firm to the privacy watchdog. The City of London Corporation, which manages the so-called “Square Mile” around St Paul’s Cathedral, said such data collection “needs to stop” until there could be a public debate about it.
(via Daragh O’Brien)(tags: via:dobrien privacy phones wifi mac-address data-protection data-retention renew london bins snooping sniffing)
The Irish State wishes to uninvent computers with new FOI Bill
Mark Coughlan noticed this:
The FOI body shall take reasonable steps to search for and extract the records to which the request relates, having due regard to the steps that would be considered reasonable if the records were held in paper format.
In other words, pretend that computerised database technology, extant since the 1960s, does not exist. Genius (via Simon McGarr)(tags: funny irish ireland foi open-data freedom computerisation punch-cards paper databases)
Hamlet is Banned in the British Library
Pretty hilarious account of the usual, run-of-the-mill overblocking in the British Library from last weekend:
I asked [the information desk] if they saw the problem, perhaps just the symbolism, of Hamlet being banned in the British Library. They shrugged. The IT department said there was nothing to be done, as it was only the British Library’s wifi service that was blocking Hamlet, and the British Library’s wifi service, they seemed sure, had nothing to do with the British Library. They were merely ships that passed in the night. Children crying to each other from either bank of an uncrossable river.
(tags: censorship filters overblocking hamlet shakespeare literature funny sad british-library blocking)
The algorithm for a perfectly balanced photo gallery – Summit Stories from Crispy Mountain
Nice application of a partitioning exhaustive search algorithm using dynamic programming (via Tom)
(tags: algorithms javascript python dynamic-programming partitioning images gallery)
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An amazing Soviet map of the US economy from 1979. Wonderful piece of cold war memorabilia
(tags: cold-war ussr usa mapping maps soviet economy memorabilia)