MetaFilter posts tagged with digital and data

Digital Images are SomeThing to aspire to? (A reflection on Hito Steyerl's proposal)

0bvious — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 05:13:43 -0800

Artist and film-maker, Hito Steyerl, asks us to stand shoulder to shoulder with our digital equivalents. Digital images are Things (like you and me) - a plethora of compressed, corrupted representations pushed and pulled through increasingly policed and capitalised information networks. If 80% of all internet traffic^* is SPAM - a liberated excess withdrawn^** from accepted channels of communication - perhaps it is in The Poor Image we find our closest kin? * In her recent October Journal article (Digital Debris: Spam and Scam), Steyerl claims that "80% of today's email messages are spam" ** This piece by Finn Brunton, (Roar so wildly: Spam, technology and language), is referenced by Steyerl in the same October Journal article

Question? RTFAQ (Read the F*cking Al Qaeda)!

rzklkng — Wed, 04 May 2011 06:54:44 -0800

Mining the Mother of all Data Dumps We now have a relatively massive haul of digital data from the OBL strike. There are several forensic toolkits in use by the private (commercially available) and public sector as well as open-source. Best practices include inventorying all the sources, cloning the sources so as to not damage pristine data, recovering any partial or damaged content, making the cloned sources read-only, adhering to legally-admissible tools standards, and documenting everything. There is an excellent source titled Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content from the Council on Library and Information Resources [pdf, Resource Shelf]. But what to do next*? I’d immediately parse the data, looking for anything that resembled encrypted text-strings, urls, logins, or passwords, and immediately access, subpoena, compromise, and archive any mentioned sites or services, adding that information to the digital warehouse. The Anonymous hack of HBGary is a well documented narrative of the process. I would then index the data contextually and semantically, looking for date and time stamps, languages used, file types, bank accounts, email addresses, IP addresses, place names, person names, indices from the 9/11 Commission both published and unpublished, known keywords (targets, weapons systems, known methods, etc.), and certainly others. It would also be useful to examine machine-created data on machines such as access and activity logs as well as the registry for machine and user-specific data. My suggestion would be to centrally locate the source data, and to then index it and slap a front-end on (see AOL data dump, previously). I’d also apply analytics to the front end to see what the crowd was looking for, and optionally aggregate and share that data (with some careful thought as to designing a system to avoid a Private Manning-type scenario), creating an internal-honeypot for capturing analysts interests and ideas. The dataset is likely not large enough for true data mining (previously), but Social Network Analysis (previously) could still be employed beyond searching for keywords. I’d also look for patterns of activity (and gaps), and compare that with known plots to identify patterns. Most importantly, I’d work backwards, as old date is likely stale as far as actionable intelligence. I’d further suspect that any data from the 9/11 period would be beyond priceless. Most technology enthusiasts are protective of their privacy and skeptical of data mining. This appears to be a situation where this technology can be used for good. *Disclaimer – everything after this point assumes access is limited to secured machines, accessed by authorized users of the United States military, law enforcement, and employees (and contractors).

Why Your Digital Data Could One Day Disappear

Blake — Sun, 17 Feb 2002 17:54:58 -0800

Why Your Digital Data Could One Day Disappear HBS Working Knowledge has a Story (actually it's an Excerpt of Dark Ages II: When the Digital Data Die, by Bryan Bergeron) that says data stored on discs and other forms of computer storage are anything but permanent. Not only are the disks themselves the trouble (they last 5-20 years), the computers that read/write them are an added problem, tried opening a Commodore 64 file lately, or a 5 ¼ inch disc?

SSSCA

donkeymon — Sat, 08 Sep 2001 22:35:10 -0800

Have you heard about the SSSCA? It is the sequel to the universally-reviled Digital Millenium Copyright Act and is 1000 times more heinous. It would require that any device even remotely capable of transmitting digital data contain security hardware approved by the US Department of Commerce. I can't say I have ever heard of anything more ridiculous. Here is a draft of the bill.