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Submission + - Call to Arms: Automate FCC CALM Act Complaints (fcc.gov) 1

slaingod writes: After seeing the Aaron Swartz JSTOR Liberator [http://aaronsw.archiveteam.org/] I had the idea to build a website myself that eased the complaint process for loud commercials that violate the recently enacted CALM Act. However, when digging into the idea, a better one came to me, and though it is beyond my capacity to implement across the multiple platforms, I wanted to share the idea with the community in the hopes that we could make a difference. The idea is simple: Automate the complaint process in popular open source media center applications, such as MythTV, XBMC, or Plex plugins, with automatic flagging of commercials that are loud, along with the relevant metadata. A review process for the user would allow them to fill in the advertiser as the one non-automatable aspect, though this could theoretically be semi-automated by fingerprinting the commercials as well.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 270

That's if the SMS can actually be sent to Google Voice. I've run into situations where SMSs can't be sent to Google Voice. Just today, I was using a web site that wants to verify your account by sending you an SMS. If I put in my Google Voice number, the site came back with an error. And this is not the first time I've run into this.

Comment Gotta kill Bulverism first (Score 3, Insightful) 326

Good luck getting an evidence-based culture developed in the face of the entrenched Bulverism of modern political discourse. Even more generally, we don't argue over the issues at hand, we argue over why the other side shouldn't be listened to (and Bulverism is just one tool in that arsenal). Not even the geeks or the scientists are immune. If you really want to move to an evidence-based culture, you're going to first have to pull people's focus off of defeating the opposition, and onto actually investigating the truth or falsity of particular issues. As C. S. Lewis put it "Until Bulverism is crushed, reason can play no effective part in human affairs". There's your assignment. Get to it.

Comment Re:Not smart Enough? (Score 1) 1276

President John Adams was just one of many who noted that unless the citizens themselves prize virtue, government will be corrupt and ineffective.

Which doesn't hold out much hope for a culture that denigrates virtue, does it?

We all complain about various political policies on both sides of the ideological spectrum, but at the core of our most important problems lies a big heapin' helping of hypocrisy... on our part. There's no conspiracy about that. We have to look in the mirror.

Our representatives are much more representative than we'd like to admit

Comment Re:Weeks before trip (Score 4, Interesting) 709

A critical detail absent from the summary is that these tweets took place weeks before their trip -- they weren't done at the airport.

This itself I find interesting. This isn't just the TSA involved here, you have to have some of the U.S.'s intelligence apparatus involved, possibly including the NSA(for capture of communications). This essentially exposes the fact that U.S. intelligence has the capability of taking minor tweets (and no doubt other forms of internet communications), correlating them with the real-life identities of their authors, and matching them to people entering the U.S. These statements weren't made where TSA statements could hear them. That the TSA agents knew about them at all implies some sort of ECHELONish mechanism for collecting even minor tweets such as this and matching them to people entering the U.S.

To some degree, this isn't surprising. Give a government organization the task of keeping terrorists out, and this is the type of capability you would expect them to develop. But why 'spend' this kind of capability on such a minor, harmless target? This implies to me a couple of things:

  1. Over reliance on technology vs use of actual human analysis or review. An actual human analyst might well have spotted the cultural references and noted that they were harmless. The implication seems to be that intelligence collected via technical means are presented directly to minor TSA agents who don't have the training or analysis skills to correctly understand them. This is likely done to speed up 'getting the information to where it needs to be used', but increases the risk of failure due to poor quality of information or interpretation..
  2. Is it possible to go from a tweet to the real-life identity of the sender in this kind of time-frame (hooking up a tweet to the identity of a person entering the country within a week or two) without the cooperation of Twitter? Note that there's no questioning if they got it right - the couple in question acknowledge they actually sent the tweets.

Finally, does anyone else get the feel of something out of Person of Interest, except that the computer isn't actually capable of spotting malicious intent?

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