Damien Mulley

Only noticed Google Dashboard now, interesting way of showing you if you depend on Google a lot. Some of my stats:

Contacts:
Contacts 3522 entries

Docs:
Owned by me 146 documents
Shared with me 14 documents
Opened by me 112 documents
Trashed 3 documents

GMail:
Inbox 93 conversations
All mail 51716 conversations
Sent mail 13921 conversations
Saved drafts 77 conversations
Chat history 600 conversations
Spam 54 conversations
Trash 262 conversations

The scary one though is Google Web History but I stopped it years back. (Twice actually, it restarted without permission)

Photo owned by We-Present: Travel-UggBoy-The-Photographer! (cc)

via here and here.

Some horsetrading last night saw this text on file sharing and the three strikes rule. It means you can still get disconnected but it’ll be a little harder. Web is still not fundamental right so Finland stays well ahead of Europe so far but the EU is on the path to make it a right. Once ratified states will have about 18 months to knock this out.

measures regarding end-users access to or use of services and applications through electronic communications networks liable to restrict those fundamental rights or freedoms may only be imposed if they are appropriate, proportionate and necessary within a democracy society and their implementation shall be subject to adequate procedural safeguards in conformity with the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms … including effective judicial protection and due process …may only be taken with due respect for the principle of presumption of innocence and right to privacy

Search traffic to this here blog:

78.63% Google
21.37% Bing

Bing doing quite well here.

Wikileaks have a very interesting document on EU Framework 7 funded spy project that scans blogs, social networks, websites and discussion forums for stuff they don’t like:

This file, marked “confidential”, describes development of an EU-funded intelligence gathering system (”INDECT work package 4″) designed to comb webblogs, chat sites, newsreports, and social-networking sites to in order to build up automatic dossiers on individuals, organizations and their relationships.

Name of report:

Report on methodology for collection, cleaning and unified representation of large textual data from various sources: news reports, weblogs, chat.

Extract:

D4.1 aims to focus on analysis of security related data from websites, blogs, chats and other social medium. The project aims to analyse data related to hooliganism, terrorism and other types of crime. The AGH (Prof. Wieslaw Lubaszewski’s) team has initiated the task of data collection. This section describes the ongoing effort and the methodology employed. It does not include the actual data as this is currently being collected. The current effort is directed towards collecting data on football hooliganism and sale of human organs. In parallel to this, the Ostrava team (Mr Adam Nemcek) has also started work on data collection on similar topics.

This is their video showing their system in action. Machine guns and jackboots all the way:

It seems that there are Irish reps for security research projects like these so it’s not like the Government doesn’t know what’s happening. According to the EU too there’s meant to be an ethics committee watching these things:

As a general rule, the Commission also ensures that the most sensitive projects systematically include an ethics committee, to enable researchers to develop technologies that respect individual freedoms.

But sure, we have nothing to hide if we’re innocent…