jrtom

http://www.wired.com/print/entertainment/music/magazine/15-11/ff_lala

Hmm. I'll be interested to see how that works for them. (Ditto for that company that prices tracks according to how many copies they've sold...although the fact that I can't remember their name is not a good sign.)

Open-Source Spying

The title is quite misleading, really; the article has nothing to do with open source, and actually less to do with spying than to do with managing and working with the information generated from spying.

Aside from that, though, it's a very interesting overview of some of the issues that have been identified inside the various US' three-letter agencies regarding the tensions between existing bureaucratic practice, attempts to modernize, the need for "need to know" restrictions, the need for distributed high-quality analysis, and the need for relevant information.

If I had more faith in the US government's goals and observance of its (supposed) principles, in some ways this sounds like an interesting set of problems to try to help solve. If nothing else, though, I think that Microsoft is a big enough bureaucracy for me to practice breaking my head against for now.

A provocative question: what effects on policy might result from the widespread adoption, inside the intelligence services, of such tools as wikis, blogs, and hyperlinking?