fourstorylimit: These Are The Prices AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Charge For Cellphone Wiretaps Holy fucking shit. They have made a business out of wiretapping cellphones. This reads like an a la carte menu. Wiretaps cost hundreds of dollars per target every month, generally paid at daily or monthly rates. To wiretap a customer’s phone, T-Mobile charges law enforcement a flat fee of $500 per target. Sprint’s wireless carrier Sprint Nextel requires police pay $400 per “market area” and per “technology” as well as a $10 per day fee, capped at $2,000. AT&T charges a $325 activation fee, plus $5 per day for data and $10 for audio. Verizon charges a $50 administrative fee plus $700 per month, per target. Data requests for voicemail or text messages cost extra.AT&T demands $150 for access to a target’s voicemail, while Verizon charges $50 for access to text messages. Sprint offers the most detailed breakdown of fees for various kinds of data on a phone, asking $120 for pictures or video, $60 for email, $60 for voice mail and $30 for text messages. And then they try and pass that off as COGS recovery?  “Fees are charged to law enforcement in other circumstances such as court ordered requests and it’s important to note that any fee charged is for recovery of cost required to support these law enforcement requests 24/7,” she writes. I’m not buying that. That’s way to low of a price, and way to cleanly packaged. If these companies cared about their consumer and their privacy, they would be making it painful  and confusing to get access. They wouldn’t have a clean price structure. These companies want the government business. 
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fourstorylimit:

These Are The Prices AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Charge For Cellphone Wiretaps

Holy fucking shit. They have made a business out of wiretapping cellphones. This reads like an a la carte menu.

  • Wiretaps cost hundreds of dollars per target every month, generally paid at daily or monthly rates. To wiretap a customer’s phone, T-Mobile charges law enforcement a flat fee of $500 per target. Sprint’s wireless carrier Sprint Nextel requires police pay $400 per “market area” and per “technology” as well as a $10 per day fee, capped at $2,000. AT&T charges a $325 activation fee, plus $5 per day for data and $10 for audio. Verizon charges a $50 administrative fee plus $700 per month, per target.
  • Data requests for voicemail or text messages cost extra.AT&T demands $150 for access to a target’s voicemail, while Verizon charges $50 for access to text messages. Sprint offers the most detailed breakdown of fees for various kinds of data on a phone, asking $120 for pictures or video, $60 for email, $60 for voice mail and $30 for text messages.

And then they try and pass that off as COGS recovery? 

“Fees are charged to law enforcement in other circumstances such as court ordered requests and it’s important to note that any fee charged is for recovery of cost required to support these law enforcement requests 24/7,” she writes.

I’m not buying that. That’s way to low of a price, and way to cleanly packaged. If these companies cared about their consumer and their privacy, they would be making it painful  and confusing to get access. They wouldn’t have a clean price structure. These companies want the government business. 

(via soupsoup)

Source: forbes.com

infoneer-pulse:

Confirmed: The Internet Does Not Solve Global Inequality

If you live in a rich country, the Internet has probably changed the way you consume (and produce) information. But when you look at global-scale knowledge production, things are as they ever were: the Anglophone world dominates with the United States doing the lion’s share of academic and user-generated publishing.

Those are the messages of the Oxford Internet Institute’s new e-book, Geographies of the World’s Knowledge, from which the above graphics were drawn. The book’s authors, Corinne Flick of the Convoco Foundation and the Institute’s Mark Graham and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, reluctantly conclude that the Internet has not delivered on the hopes that it would make knowledge “more accessible.”

“Many commentators speculated that [the Internet] would allow people outside of industrialised nations to gain access to all networked and codified knowledge, thus mitigating the traditionally concentrated nature of information production and consumption,” they write. “These early expectations remain largely unrealised.” 

We’re not only talking about publishing in academic journals or Wikipedia. The researchers also sampled user-generated content on Google and found that rich countries, especially the United States, dominate the production of user content.

The fact of the matter is that people without money can’t afford to get the education necessary to publish in academic journals, Internet-enabled or not. The other fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people in very poor countries don’t spend their time producing content for free. Hope as we might, the Internet isn’t a magic wand that makes the world more equal. 

Read more. [Image: Oxford Internet Institute]

via theatlantic

Source: The Atlantic

emergentfutures: Does social media affect how you spend money? You betcha. “The question isn’t whether social services on the Web influence how we spend money, but rather how they affect your habits. At the end of the day businesses can’t survive without making money, and that’s why we’re seeing a flood of social services that might push you over the ledge to buy that new shiny thing that you probably can’t afford. That’s how they’re going to make money, after all.” Full Story: TheNextWeb
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emergentfutures:

Does social media affect how you spend money? You betcha.

“The question isn’t whether social services on the Web influence how we spend money, but rather how they affect your habits. At the end of the day businesses can’t survive without making money, and that’s why we’re seeing a flood of social services that might push you over the ledge to buy that new shiny thing that you probably can’t afford. That’s how they’re going to make money, after all.”


Full Story: TheNextWeb

The mystery code at the heart of a potent cyberweapon

infoneer-pulse:

The mystery behind the Duqu trojan, a supposed follow-up to Stuxnet, has deepened after analysts lifted the lid on a module in its computer code - and found that part of it is written in a strange programming language that they do not recognise. The finding has sparked a fascinating hunt amongst coders and security engineers, who are chipping in ideas as to what the language might be in the comments under this blog post by security analysts Kaspersky.

» via New Scientist