Here's another link to an overview of a successful and big-data outfit: LinkedIn Architecture. It's from Cookies are for Closers: Oren Hurvitz’s Blog, which has more good stuff in it that you might like.

Here's more reports about data/base security follies:

• Bank of NY Loses Tapes With 4.5 Million Clients' Data


• From the UK: Intelligence official suspended over al-Qaeda file left on train


• Data Breach Study Spanning 500 Break-Ins Released. Some interesting results, such as "Nearly nine in 10 corporate data breaches could have been prevented had reasonable security measures been in place"


• Here's another UK story about surveillance cameras, This surveillance onslaught is draconian and creepy. The CCTV craze seems to have really gotten out of hand over there, but I suspect we'll be catching up here in the US soon enough. What are they used for in the UK? From the article: "the civilian in charge of a Worcester [UK] police station's surveillance team was suspended after detectives found, among one day's footage, a 20-minute sequence of close-ups of a woman's cleavage and backside as she walked oblivious through the streets." That's just the tip of a sickening iceberg of misuse of the technology, so read the article if you dare.

As we get access to more and more data, we need more, and more interesting, ways of looking at it--and I keep tripping over some of these interesting visualizations. Sometimes they're even worth using!

• One of the nice things about online bookstores like Amazon is that you can find just exactly what you want, instantly. Of course, that eliminates part of the charm of going into a bricks-and-mortar shop and discovering something you weren't expecting. So, consider Zoomii, which is a more real-world like bookstore experience. Working like the love-child of Amazon and Google Maps, you browse books visually, zooming in on "shelves" and looking at book covers. As a front-end, you can buy the books you find on Amazon; Zoomii makes their money through the Amazon Associates program.


• Want to explore the Linux kernel? Try the Interactive Linux Kernel Map. It's a lot like the Zoomii (or Google Maps, for that matter): scroll-wheel to zoom in and out, click and drag to move around, and click to open up source code. Not as slick, perhaps, as other visualizations, but certainly useful if you're interested in understanding how the Linux kernel works.


• It's one thing to remap huge databases into user-friendly interfaces; it's another to demonstrate relationships among different entities. That's what these Maps of science show: how different scientific fields are related to each other.


• Not exactly data visualization, but it's a neat application, Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access), from Microsoft Research, is a friendlier and possibly easier alternative to CAPTCHA for sorting out bots from humans. The idea is to require completion of a task that's pretty easy for humans, but almost impossible for computers: differentiate between photos of cats and dogs. I played with it for a while, and it seems as if you don't have to get all the cats perfectly, but as long as you only miss one (I think) and don't misidentify any dogs as cats, you can pass for human.

Wondering whether Amazon Web Services could be used to build a profitable business? Flickr-killer wannabe SmugMug has built a scalable--and profitable--web service using AWS products EC2 and S3.

SmugMug founder and CEO Don MacAskill tells you all about how they do it on his blog, here: SkyNet Lives! (aka EC2 @ SmugMug).

I'm not sure if this article at Gizmodo is entirely sincere, but it's certainly worth reading if you've got any opinions at all about Vista: Ten Reasons Why Vista Isn't That Bad.

Some of the reasons sound pretty pathetic:

"3. Games work just about as well as under XP." (only a 10% degradation in performance!)
"8. Drivers support isn't as bad as it's made out to be."
"9. It's not any buggier than Windows XP. "

But read the article for the rest of the reasons, the succinct and pungent comments, as well as the link (the first one in the article) to the Youtube video of "lightning bolt, lightning bolt" nerds. Swallow your coffee before you open that one, unless your monitor needs cleaning anyway.