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AT&T Invents Surveillance Programming Language
An anonymous reader writes "AT&T has long been associated with advances in the programming arts as well as communications. They've recently brought those disciplines together to create a powerful datamining language called Hancock. Hancock is a C variant developed to mine gigabytes of the company's telephone and internet records for surveillance purposes. 'The manual for the language includes a Hello World variant that shows you how to write a program that will parse logs of IP addresses and record them into permanent hashes. The program for parsing millions of records as they flow into permanent data farms sounds oddly close to the data mining the NSA performed after 9/11 to find targets for its warrantless spying on American citizens calls and emails."
Normally I don't comment on stuff like this, but the incessant trolling by Zonk at the end of summaries is too blatant. As TFA itself states, this language was written for marketing and business reasons. That sounds like a tool. Now if if someone is using a tool in a way you don't like, then just say so, don't try to cast aspersions on the tool itself. It makes Zonk and /. by association appear downright Luddite. The summary might as well end with an appeal for people to think of the poor children exposed to the dangerous PSTN. Which is a series of tubes, filled with trucks.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
In Europe, Hancock is the name of a famous British Comedian, Hancock's Half Hour
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Seriously, why would you be curious about something as mundane...oh, wait, geek, /., anal retentive...nevermind.
Sorry, just my kettle and pot moment. Ooops.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.