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As we noted last week, Senator Ron Wyden has been repeatedly asking the intelligence community about whether or not they’re tracking the location on any Americans, and the intelligence community has steadfastly avoided giving a straight answer (as they do). Specifically, he was asking about whether or not the NSA has in the past, or has plans to, get location data on Americans in bulk. The NSA’s Keith Alexander did his "under this program" two step, in which he insists that they are not doing so under this program and at this time. That leaves open other programs and at other times.

Earlier today, we discussed the NYT’s coverage of how the NSA has set up its own shadow social network, including information from Americans (none of which involves a warrant). In that piece, they describe how location info is part of what’s included:

A 2009 PowerPoint presentation provided more examples of data sources available in the “enrichment” process, including location-based services like GPS and TomTom, online social networks, billing records and bank codes for transactions in the United States and overseas.

At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday, General Alexander was asked if the agency ever collected or planned to collect bulk records about Americans’ locations based on cellphone tower data. He replied that it was not doing so as part of the call log program authorized by the Patriot Act, but said a fuller response would be classified.

So, apparently they are getting GPS data. And if they were getting it from TomTom and other GPS services, then you have to imagine that they might now also include GPS data from the phones that so many of us carry around today. GPS data is even more accurate than cell-site data. And, of course, the data in "this program" appears to mostly come via Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. The program that Keith Alexander was referring to in his remarks was the dragnet collection of business records under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. So, it’s not difficult to see how Alexander might be technically "accurate" with the "not this program" dance, even as lots of Americans’ location data is being sucked up via GPS (and potentially cell-site locations) under 702…

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via Techdirt.
NSA May Not Be Collecting Your Location Data From Telco Dragnet… Because It Gets It From Your GPS

DeviantART member DirkLoechel recently updated his starship size comparison table, which includes ships from many popular science fiction favourites like Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Farscape, Titan A.E., and Battlestar Galactica. If you and your mates are constantly arguing over the sizes of starships, this handy cheatsheet will decisively end the debate. Head over to DeviantART for the full resolution image.

Read the full article: Which Is The Largest Science Fiction Starship?

via MakeUseOf
Which Is The Largest Science Fiction Starship?

Siri got a ton of improvements in iOS 7 and a bunch of new features as well. Now, you can ask it all sorts of things, from launching apps to getting sports scores. Redditor Cheeziz_Chrust put together a list of pretty much everything you can ask Siri these days.

The list includes some common questions, like the time, sending a text, or getting directions. In fact, Siri has all kinds of new tricks up its robotic sleeves these days. You can now ask for specific sports scores, the weather, how many calories are in food, to turn on specific settings, make a note, and plenty more. My favorite? Have Siri search your mail for you with a query like, "Show email about dinosaurs." Cheeziz_Chrust’s list doesn’t include everything, but it’s a pretty good place to start.

Everything you can ask Siri in iOS 7 | Reddit

via Lifehacker
Here’s a Massive List of Stuff You Can Ask Siri to Do in iOS 7

Surfeit of unlicensed intellectual property pushes research institutions into unseemly partnerships.
via NatureNews – Most recent articles – nature.com science feeds
Universities struggle to make patents pay

I have been using various Italian Gun Grease products for about 6-months now, and I can say that these are hands down the best gun lubes I’ve ever used, and I’ve tried just about everything out there. Tactical lube The first product I tested from IGG is their “tactical” lube, and there is nothing quite[…..]
via AllOutdoor.com
Italian gun grease

So how does this whole world wide web thing work? Cables, man. Websites, h tee tee pees and computers. And it’s all a pretty new thing, right? Well not quite, the history of the web is a lot longer than you’d expect. John Allsopp of Web Directions created a timeline showing the "key dates, browsers, technologies and ideas in the history of the World Wide Web" that dates back to 1910 and goes right up until today. Even if you consider yourself a professional Internet surfer, you’ll probably learn a thing or two cruising through the timeline here. [Web Directions via The Presurfer]

Read more…

via Gizmodo
Learn the Complete History of the Web with This Timeline

From time to time we have to work with live environments and production databases. For some of us this is day-to-day job. And most of the time cost of a mistake is way higher than expected improvement especially on the databases. Because issue on the database side will affect everything else.
I heard enough war stories about ruined productions and can imagine well enough speed of DROP DATABASE command replicating across the cluster. So I’m scared to make changes in production. The more loss expected if things go wrong the more I’m going to be scared planning every change. But I still love to make improvements so the only question is how to make them safer.
This post is not intended to be a guide or best practices on how to avoid issues at all, it’s more invitation to discussion that started between me and @randomsurfer in twitter on how to avoid production failures. It was hard for me to fit to 150 characters so I’m switching to more comfortable environment.
So here is a few practices that I use while working with remote servers:
Do not use rm -rf with leading wildcards. Ever. If you need to delete all subdirectories go with rm -rf dir1 dir1 dir2 etc. I’m also trying to avoid even trailing slashes near to rm -rf to be honest, just because.
Commandline history is convenient but could be dangerous if your connection is slow (it happens often when you work coast to coast or trans-Atlantic) so you could press enter on wrong command. To avoid this I’m hitting <space> at the end of command line before hit enter and wait for terminal response to make sure that command appearing on the command line will not scroll away.
I do my best to not make changes while sick. Sometimes it’s hard to reschedule a change, but most of the time it’s worth to move it to later time (even few hours could help sometimes) or hand off to someone else than put customer’s environment to risk.
Work with a single server at a time. If you have several open SSH windows with different server there is possibility to mess up the window and issue right command in wrong place. Especially when one window is a master and another is slave – same DB names, same tables, easy to mess up. If you still need to work on different hosts at the same time – change terminal’s background. I usually use red color (128,0,0) for master SSH window.
If you have your own tricks on how to not run DROP DATABASE in wrong place (yeah, I know pt-slave-delay helps in this case, but still!) please feel free to share them!
Thank you!
via Planet MySQL
Tips and tricks while working with Production DBs