What I’m Reading
Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.
Build Your Own Fire Hose API with STREST – a New Protocol for Real-Time Data Streaming
STREST is a new open source protocol and server from Wiredset, the company behind the real-time social media analytics service Trendrr. STREST is HTTP-compatible and is designed for real-time data streaming. Wiredset has released the protocol spec, a server implementation and drivers in Java, Python and JavaScript.
Wiredset created the protocol to deal with the challenges it faced when building the Trendr API. The team needed a way to offer extremely high-volume API calls with low latency, deliver the results in real-time at scale, and do so through a RESTful interface.
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STREST features:
- Fully duplexed streaming connections
- Support for multiple simultaneous streams on a single connection
- Websockets support out of the box
- HTTP Compatibility
In short: you can use this to power a pretty massive API. Anyone know of anything else like this?
US Internet Ad Revenue Hit Record In 2010
The figures are in and according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, it was a banner year for advertisers on the internet. A new category was added this year with mobile advertising.
The most popular ad format was search, which represented 46 percent, or $12 billion, of the year’s total revenue
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Another Creepy Application
Yiannis Kakavas is a Greek Programmer and the creator of a new program that is just plain Creepy. No, really. The program’s name is Creepy and it certainly lives up to its name. Kakavas created the program to emphasize the vulnerability of Internet denizens in general, but now stalkers of all varieties can rejoice; they have a new tool in their bag.
Clearly, people who tell Foursquare where they are located know they are sharing this information with the world. Still, it’s jarring to see all your location declarations plotted on a big map.
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TSA Says ‘You Might Be A Terrorist If… You Complain About The TSA’
Ah, the TSA. Apparently among the “behavioral factors” that the TSA uses in determining who might be a criminal or a terrorist is… if you complain about the TSA. I guess that means I’m in line for some extra scrutiny. Honestly, though, this sounds a lot more like punitive action against people who complain, rather than a legitimate characteristic of someone who deserves extra scrutiny. Specifically, one of the factors is if someone is:
“Very arrogant and expresses contempt against airport passenger procedures.”
An ACLU person quoted in the article wonders if this violates the First Amendment, in that it’s going after someone for expressing their opinion:
“Expressing your contempt about airport procedures — that’s a First Amendment-protected right,” said Michael German, a former FBI agent who now works as legal counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “We all have the right to express our views, and particularly in a situation where the government is demanding the ability to search you.”“It’s circular reasoning where, you know, I’m going to ask someone to surrender their rights; if they refuse, that’s evidence that I need to take their rights away from them. And it’s simply inappropriate,” he said.
Honestly, you’d have to think that a real terrorist or criminal, hoping to avoid calling attention to themselves, wouldn’t be openly hostile to the search procedure, but would try to be quiet and blend in. Perhaps the TSA will defend this latest ridiculousness by saying it’s all okay because it’s standard operating procedure.
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