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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."
What, was Palmdong taken?
We are already working on:
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan
This is at least a decade old, was published in 2000 (I like the breathless "unearthed today", like it was some sort of secret -- the original Hancock paper is listed as having 29 cites) and has rather obvious applications for marketing, billing and security. The "oddly close to the data mining the NSA performed after 9/11" seems a bit excessive.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Even more ironic that someone so focused on the rights in the Constitution would mistake it for the Declaration of Independence.
If you haven't done anything wrong, then you have nowhere to hide!
Whoops - I mean nothing. Nothing to hide.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
update Users set Status = 'suspicious' where Username in (SELECT Username, ipAddress, MissleAddress from IncomingCalls ic, OutgoinCalls oc where Volume = 'whispering' and Username not in (select Username from RepublicanDonors));
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
this is a collection of libraries and some domain specific keywords/structures, but to say that this is a new language is a stretch of imagination.
You can't handle the truth.
less inflamitory, later it states:
It seems to have been created with slightly better intent (fraud detection, as well as, unfortunately, marketing - your phone company is spyware!).
A tool may not necessarily be bad, but it can have more bad uses than good, and may be been intended for rathern malevolent purposes. The rack comes to mind (although this language certainly isn't in that league).
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Its basically just C with some generic structures thrown on top of it.
Also, it was created in 2000.
Its intent, as some have mentioned, was marketing.
Basically it does what Google Analytics or WebTrends does for the web.
It actually seems like a nice language, for those who want to quickly run through gigs of data.
I see nothing evil about the language itself.
It, like C, perl, PHP, or any other language you chose to use - Can be used for whatever purpose the programmer chooses.
Its intent was marketing, and almost every company in existence wants to know more about their customers.
But bear in mind, this programming language was invented by people who are so insecure that they're willing to shred the Fourth Amendment to try and assuage their fear of terrorists. I think C=> might be more accurate.