(later edit: with all due respect for the seriousness of the topic, I loled when I read the title; seems like the submitter also noticed the alliteration and changed it to "thousands of trillions", which made me laugh again)
post-napoleon french number system is quite... peculiar.
Some places kept pre-revolution French (like Switzerland) and there they use "normal" numbers (ie: 79 is seventy nine, instead of sixty ten nine, and 84 is eighty four instead of four twenty and four)
The phrasing is that much more confusing because France is a long scale country, so "one thousand trillion" is the valid way to say 10^21. If 1 byte = 1 metadata element (unlikely), that's a zettabyte. Which is probably not what's meant.
basically 3 million 1TB hard drives in raid 5 (1M x 3). you can probably fit a 500 1TB 2.5" drives into a single rack if you really try, and 2,000 racks can fit easily into warehouse-sized facility. (grid of 100 x 20 racks)
Hi, I wrote this post. I see that everyone is as confused as I was with the "milliards de milliards" :) "Millions of trillions" is the right way to say it in English I believe (if you don't want to go over trillions). I edited the headline a couple of minutes after publishing to correct my mistake. Sorry!
One should rather interpret this as "zillions", because "milliards de milliards" is generally used to mean a mind-boggling quantity like in "des milliards de milliards d'étoiles" (billions of billions stars).
I think the surprising part about this is the following statement: "The DGSE entirely designed the program and no data protection representative is overseeing it." I differentiate between these programs more with "It's not what you collect, it's how you use it." :-)
Thousands of trillions? At what point do we start expressing numbers in terms of the number of known atoms in the universe? This is big data. Civil liberties aside, this is awesome.
I'd express this as .19, or 15/78 due to the French dataset containing 10^15 and the number of atoms in the universe, at a speculated lower bound, being 10^78.
The one good thing that could come of all this surveillance, maybe we get a better version of Sim City that actually does need cloud computing.
They thought Snowden was on the Morales' plane because of the intel they received from the bugs they planted in the Ecuadorian embassy in London that were found weeks ago. The Ecuadorians announced they discovered the bugs within 24 hours of the forced landing of Morales' plane.
I just find it a little coincidental that Snowden is working with Wikileaks, which is led by Assange, who is holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy, where news has just been uncovered that they discovered a bug a few weeks ago, and that this news was released within 24 hours of the diversion of Morales' plane.
Personally, I think the news release of the bug was intended to send a message to the US & UK intelligence services.
I recall reading on a newsgroup sometimes in 2001 (prolly long lost since then) that the french internet was being monitored by french the government. So kind of old news to me.
Or politicians are so corrupt they don't want to be found out...
Like, Brazil (for example, when our intelligence agency DID spy on suspected corrupt politicians, everyone involved with the investigation was fired, and all related investigations got closed, much to unhappiness of the population)
It is... very extensive and lots of tangled stuff (there was even Brazil-Italy government spying it seems...)
But you can find most information under the case that was forcibly closed (Operação Satiagraha) and the names of the protected criminal (Daniel Dantas) and the fired chief of investigation (Protógenes Queiroz)
The war wasn't over when the preparations for Germany's new secret service began. The material collected about the Soviets survived the end of the war because it was hidden (on microfilm) in sealed canisters buried in the German Alps, with the intent to side with the Americans and start spying on the Soviets again... The plan totally worked. To make it even better, the organization gobbled up high-profile Nazis who wanted to avoid prosecution like nobodies business. Even today, whenever someone wants to take a closer look at the people who work(ed) there, documents vanish and nobody knows a damn thing.
Then there is the entire StaSi. Of course they lost, so we get to point fingers at them and declare them the bad guys.
Germany may have strong privacy laws, but our three branches of secret services are exempt in various ways. Don't kid yourself. We are most likely right up there with France.
Le Monde is actually quite good. I try to keep a multi-angle view of politics in Europe, so I frequent a few newspapers/sites from different European countries. After shopping around a bit, I settled for Le Monde as the IMO best among the French daily newspapers.
Seeing how crappy the french daily newspapers are, that's a pretty meaningless claim. Over the past few years most of the "quotidiens" have been doing nothing more than rewriting the AFP reports. They don't do investigative journalism anymore, and even the published articles are full of spelling mistakes, something you didn't see 20-30 years ago.
The level has dropped significantly for the press in France, and that's also why no one buys them anymore. All these french newspapers are heavily State-subsidized for survival. Let's not wonder a second about their independence.
Isn't it obvious to everyone by now? We have to wake up, basically every developed country has a program like PRISM that varies but the whole premise of capturing information isn't anything new. This is something that the US and other countries have been doing since World War 2 in some shape or form.
I could easily write a script in Python through some crafty Google searches, the Facebook API, Twitter API, LinkedIn and simple scraping could compile a report of a person and or persons activity on the Internet throw in some natural language processing and I could paint a vague but nonetheless somewhat accurate representation of a person. Capturing phone meta data and tracking locations via cell phone towers would obviously only be only something those supplied with such information would be able to store and have access to.
The difference between a surveillance scraping network that infringes upon your privacy and one that walks the grey line very closely is what information it is given. The technology behind PRISM like programs is largely the same, perhaps fluctuations in how fast information can be retrieved, sorted, tagged and stored are the only difference.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] thread(later edit: with all due respect for the seriousness of the topic, I loled when I read the title; seems like the submitter also noticed the alliteration and changed it to "thousands of trillions", which made me laugh again)
Some places kept pre-revolution French (like Switzerland) and there they use "normal" numbers (ie: 79 is seventy nine, instead of sixty ten nine, and 84 is eighty four instead of four twenty and four)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septemvigesimal
And then there's Danish...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
The headline of TFA's TFA (the source article) says
"La DGSE collecte ainsi des milliards de milliards de données".
That translates to 'millions of millions' pieces of data, or on the order of 10^12 (trillions in short scale) pieces of data.
A milliard is a billion.
10^18 bytes in petabytes = 888.17 petabytes
or basically a million terabytes if you round up.
basically 3 million 1TB hard drives in raid 5 (1M x 3). you can probably fit a 500 1TB 2.5" drives into a single rack if you really try, and 2,000 racks can fit easily into warehouse-sized facility. (grid of 100 x 20 racks)
eta: From the article: "capable of managing dozens of petaoctets of data, in other words dozens of millions of gigaoctets"
I'd express this as .19, or 15/78 due to the French dataset containing 10^15 and the number of atoms in the universe, at a speculated lower bound, being 10^78.
The one good thing that could come of all this surveillance, maybe we get a better version of Sim City that actually does need cloud computing.
I love the hypocrisy of French politicians at being outraged at PRISM and wanting to offer asylum to Snowden, when they're doing the same shit.
The politicians that like this thing, are the same ones that stopped Evo Morales plane thinking Snowden would be on it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23179431
I just find it a little coincidental that Snowden is working with Wikileaks, which is led by Assange, who is holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy, where news has just been uncovered that they discovered a bug a few weeks ago, and that this news was released within 24 hours of the diversion of Morales' plane.
Personally, I think the news release of the bug was intended to send a message to the US & UK intelligence services.
• Those who make no secret of it.
• Those who don't have the technology to do it.
Like, Brazil (for example, when our intelligence agency DID spy on suspected corrupt politicians, everyone involved with the investigation was fired, and all related investigations got closed, much to unhappiness of the population)
But you can find most information under the case that was forcibly closed (Operação Satiagraha) and the names of the protected criminal (Daniel Dantas) and the fired chief of investigation (Protógenes Queiroz)
Then there is the entire StaSi. Of course they lost, so we get to point fingers at them and declare them the bad guys.
Germany may have strong privacy laws, but our three branches of secret services are exempt in various ways. Don't kid yourself. We are most likely right up there with France.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/edward-snowden-acc...
Seeing how crappy the french daily newspapers are, that's a pretty meaningless claim. Over the past few years most of the "quotidiens" have been doing nothing more than rewriting the AFP reports. They don't do investigative journalism anymore, and even the published articles are full of spelling mistakes, something you didn't see 20-30 years ago.
The level has dropped significantly for the press in France, and that's also why no one buys them anymore. All these french newspapers are heavily State-subsidized for survival. Let's not wonder a second about their independence.
I could easily write a script in Python through some crafty Google searches, the Facebook API, Twitter API, LinkedIn and simple scraping could compile a report of a person and or persons activity on the Internet throw in some natural language processing and I could paint a vague but nonetheless somewhat accurate representation of a person. Capturing phone meta data and tracking locations via cell phone towers would obviously only be only something those supplied with such information would be able to store and have access to.
The difference between a surveillance scraping network that infringes upon your privacy and one that walks the grey line very closely is what information it is given. The technology behind PRISM like programs is largely the same, perhaps fluctuations in how fast information can be retrieved, sorted, tagged and stored are the only difference.