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Amazon Launches Public Data Sets To Spur Research
turnkeylinux writes "Amazon just launched its Public Data Sets service (home). The project encourages developers, researchers, universities, and businesses to upload large (non-confidential) data sets to Amazon — things like census data, genomes, etc. — and then let others integrate that data into their own AWS applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all of AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they consume with their own applications. Data sets already available include various US Census databases, 3-D chemical structures provided by Indiana University, and an annotated form of the Human Genome from Ensembl."
Now I have somewhere I can store the index of my massive porn collection. Thanks, Amazon!
One more step to a non private world CHECK
Depends on what you upload. Census data isn't private.
This is true. But the easier it is to obtain datasets like these, the easier it is for anyone to do data mining and correlate the public (presumably non-identified) datasets with any private data they do happen to have.
This just looks like a way to sell there cloud computing services. They provide the free data and you provide the monthly service fee.
The US Census Bureau charges to access much of their datasets.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Note that on Amazon's website they say that you can only access the data if you're paying them to crunch numbers on their cloud computers.
That is, you can't just download the data off their sites, which would be the nice thing to do.
As such, this article is nothing more than a slashvertizement.
Expect a new slew of Amazon patents...
"1-Sick" -- Health Data
"1-Mick" -- Irish Census Data
"1-Dick" -- Porn Movies Database
"1-Lick" -- Lesbian Porn Movies Database
"1-Fick" -- German Porn Movie Database
"1-Hick" -- The George W. Bush Presidential Library catalog.
"1-Kick" -- Pharmaceutical Index
"1-Nick" -- Crime Data
"1-Prick" -- Copyright Law Legal database
"1-Trick" -- List of iKea-nu Reeves Movies.
"1-Tick" -- Camping Places Data set.
"1-Brick" -- The Lego Catalog.
"1-Thick" -- Obesity Index.
One more step to a non private world CHECK
Privacy, as we have experienced in the last hundred years, is on its way out anyway. The sheer volume, immortality, and interconnection of, even publicly available, datasets inadvertently reveal information most of us would rather keep private. Much like how most people don't have a problem with beat cops regularly patrolling an area, but feel threatened by cameras monitoring, recording, analyzing, and storing information about the same public area.
That said, its here to stay. The data's here as long as we use credit cards for most purchases, use I-Pass(or similar) toll paying systems, carry GPS enabled cell phones, and expect the police to protect us from 100% of terrorist and criminal bogeymen. We might as well get some private research done, rather than leave it all to the government and big business.
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
The less privacy we have, the less we have to worry about our privacy. That sounds flip, and along the lines of "if you have nothing to hide..." but it isn't.
We want privacy primarly due to shame.
We have shame because we wear masks almost 100% of the time.
We wear masks don't want people to realize who we 'really are' either mentally or phyically.
We don't want people to really know us because we have been convinced to hold ourselves to standards that no one actually meets.
We hold ourselves to these standards because everyone else is wearing masks and while we can tell ourselves that 'they are just like us', it's hard to grasp that cognatively without actual proof.
If there were no privacy, no one could wear a mask. If no one were wearing a mask, we would realize that the standards we hold ourselves to are unrealistic. If we realize the standards we hold ourselves to are unrealisitic, we are freed from shame. If we are freed from shame, we no longer find privacy necessary.
Privacy, as we have experienced in the last hundred years, is on its way out anyway.
It was only recently on its way in. For most of history people lived in small communities where everyone knew each others' business. Privacy only seemed to become a major concern when technology let us share information across large distances and with many more people.
I'm not commenting on whether that's a good or bad thing.
Developers: We can use your help.
We (or at least some of us) also want privacy to prevent annoyances and for protection.
I certainly don't want to have to answer to the government anytime I say the word "bomb" or "terrorist" on the telephone, in email, or in an IM.
I also don't want some company complaining anytime they see me buy a product from one of their competitors.
I also don't want to have everyone on the internet knowing my social security number, address, license plate number, or telephone number.
That isn't because of "shame" that's because people can be assholes, and some people will abuse information. I don't care if people that I trust know these things, but I don't think shame or masks or whatever has anything to do with getting one's identity stolen, or having the government ensure you don't say anything bad about them.
That said, I don't think this public dataset business really affects individual privacy. This is more a database of already public, but hard to find, data, that doesn't contain personally identifiable anything in it.
Let's just hope they keep it that way.
>users pay only for the compute and storage they
>consume with their own applications
Everything old is new again!
Ah the good old days... when you had to PAY for cycles.... not like the young whippersnappers today with their "desktops" and "laptops" and more cycles than they know what to do with.
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
If the uploaded data is not available for download, but is only available to AWS applications running on Amazon's (paid for) compute service, then Amazon deserves nothing but contempt and an "Up yours" for this.
It seems that working for a living is out of fashion at Amazon. They expect people to supply them with resources so that they can charge them and others for their use. It's creative business bullshit, and not even remotely funny.
Amazon, how about you PAY BACK for the privilege of having the datasets uploaded to you by hosting them freely for the Internet community, and only on the back of that you charge for local, higher-speed access by AWS applications? Or would that be too "fair" for an Amazon business practice?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Which is very different from a large society in which some people know everybody else's business.
Even if this stuff is public, the time and money and knowledge necessary to use it will not be evenly distributed.
You'll recall that Amazon's "cloud computers" (ugh) are by the hour, and are pretty much root access to a VM. Unless there's a specific legal reason you can't, it's always possible to just download the data -- you'd just pay a bit for the time that instance must be up, and for the data transferred.
However, for those of us who already are using EC2, it's nice to not have to download the whole set -- which can be terabytes, for some of these -- and instead be able to simply mount it from wherever it is and work with it right away. Especially when you consider the cost of downloading terabytes worth of data from Amazon's web services, at 17 cents per gigabyte -- reasonable, but still probably more than you wanted to just query the stuff.
I suspect, also, that at least some of these will be made available via a web service of some sort, maybe even free, by some of those people using that service.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Yes, but at least now we are all able to do data mining in large databases.
This is absolutely the case.
The web has made vast amounts of information available, so you would think it would play into the "computers will bring about the age of big brother" that was so prominent during the 60s. But it hasn't. Instead, because everybody can afford computers and bandwidth, is had distributed power rather than concentrating it.
The rich and powerful already have access to vast datasets, and the computing and human power necessary to mine them. Things like Google and Wikipedia and blogs have given everybody a taste of that power, and I'm in favor of anything that helps level the playing field.
If my phone number and address were available, then people could easily contact and harass me. It's true that they could do the same to anyone, but that doesn't mean they will stop harassing people all together. Instead what would (probably) happen, is people would just choose who they want to harass. (Just think about 4chan, for instance, they don't do it because it's difficult, they do it to harass people)
Likewise, the government wouldn't just change laws, instead they would (probably) just use the information they have to go after people they don't like.
I am just speculating of course, and you do have a lot of valid points, like with SSNs for isntance. But I don't agree that if society was completely open, people would suddenly stop abusing their power and stop being assholes to other people. Instead, it would just be easier for them to do these things.