Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Is Earlybird or X-Pro II better for your wads of cash?

I was at a conference once on technology and law enforcement, and there was a gentleman presenting some sort of Twitter-monitoring technology on behalf of IBM.  Because I was at the booth next to him, I got to hear his pitch dozens of times, describing a specific scenario in which a small time drug dealer was coordinating with clients over Twitter.  As the day went on, the size of the fish he had caught got bigger and bigger, and the tone of his pitch more and more frenzied, until finally he jumped the shark and told someone that "nowadays all crime is coordinated over Twitter."  Hah, Twitter is so 2012!  In 2013, all crime is coordinated over Instagram:

Aspiring rapper's Instagram photos lead to largest gun bust in New York City history


Also in today's news: Supreme Court Justices don't use e-mail, which probably makes it difficult for them to opine on things like net neutrality, whether metadata qualifies for Fourth Amendment protections, and a host of other technologically relevant issue that are currently defining our society.  Technological innovation is occurring at an ever faster rate, and has clearly passed the rate at which Supreme Court justices die, which means that this will be a permanent state of affairs.  They may begin to understand e-mail around the time when they are asked to rule on the legality of remote-scanning your flying car's hyperdigicube transponder.

No comments:

Post a Comment