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Stanford's MetaPhone Project: Crowdsourcing Metadata To Challenge the NSA
An anonymous reader writes "'When the first NSA surveillance story broke in June,' writes Dennis Fisher at Threatpost, 'most people likely had never heard the word metadata before. Even some security and privacy experts weren't sure what the term encompassed.' The NSA and its supporters have, of course, emphasized that phone records collection is 'not surveillance.' Researchers at Stanford are now crowdsourcing data to incontrovertibly establish just how much the NSA knows. 'Phone metadata is inherently revealing,' says a study author. 'We want to rigorously prove it—for the public, for Congress, and for the courts.' If you have an Android phone and a Facebook account, you can grab the MetaPhone app on Google Play."
HHS: We Can't Tally A Sequence Of Positive Integers
But We Can Still Totally Make Your Private Health Decisions For You
So this multimillion dollar piece of sophisticated programming can't count customer transactions. The way even the cheapest and most basic Casio cash register does. Okay.
Yes, it's obviously a lie: but it's a lie that still shatters any claim they may have to elementary competence. First, because they are claiming they can't count. Ouch. I want them to handle my complex insurance?
But also the lie itself is an act of incompetence at covering butt. Because it is far worse than telling the truth about how messed up everything is.
The big Obamacare website story about how everything is f*cked up is already out there. It's making the rounds and is generally well-understood. One cannot ruin a flaming train wreck more. Better to say the site is not functioning. That would be believable and really not change the situation too much, while buying some time.
But no, HHS says things are going swimmingly and decides to invent this story about just not being able to sum up the number of actual sales. The way a child running a lemonade stand can.
It's counting. Nothing fancy. 1, 2, 3...follow the trend here. We have machines for this, but we don't really need them.
How about asking the financial agent that processes the money? Usually these places are pretty good about counting transactions. You could say it is a vital part of their core mission.
The truth must be worse than we can imagine, if it produced this embarrassing display of flopsweat.
Somewhere near you, there is a community college offering Remedial Reading 101. You should check it out.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br