ECT News Network Broadcast

"The self-publishing revolution is really only a few years old, so what was surprising to me about this sort of material is not that it exists -- that's always existed, I guess -- but more where it was sold," said author Jeremy Duns. "This seems to me to be more the material that you would have found in a sex shop. So to find it on iTunes or Amazon or Barnes & Noble or these kinds of places -- that's what was surprising."

Visible Measures measures via a massive analytics capability an ocean of video at some impressively high scales. By creating very deep census data of everything that's happened in the video space, Visible Measures uses unique statistical processes to figure out exactly what patterns emerge within video usage at high speed and massive scale and granularity. Chief Technology Officer Chris Meisl explains in this podcast just how Visible Measures measures.

Researchers at George Mason University's Mercatus Center recently launched a website, PiracyData.org, to determine whether or not there are legal alternatives for viewing the world's most pirated movies. Drawing upon TorrentFreak's weekly list of the 10 most pirated movies, the researchers will quantify the validity -- or invalidity -- of copyright holders' claims that pirates are thieving material that is indeed available elsewhere, as well as claims that search engines like Google should quit linking to pirated content. In this TechNewsWorld podcast, we are joined by Jerry Brito, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center and a cofounder of the site.

"The most important realization that we made was that it wasn't going to be a huge technology effort that was going to make this happen," said Chris Wegrzyn, director of data architecture at the DNC. "It was going to be about analysts. It's about people who were going to understand the political challenges, understand something about the data, and go in and find answers."

A team of investigative journalists in Russia have suggested that the Russian government will be embarking on an ambitious surveillance regimen for the upcoming Winter Olympics, which will be held in Sochi, Russia, next February. In this podcast, Andrei Soldatov, one of the journalists who helped break this story, joins us from Moscow. Soldatov talks about what, exactly, Russia has planned for the Games, how the 1980 Moscow Olympics still informs the nation's surveillance philosophy, and more.

The agility goal of real-time responses is no longer good enough. What's apparent across more business ecosystems is that businesses must do even better, to become so data-driven that they extend their knowledge and ability to react well into the future. When you take a data-driven approach, you have to give up some of the older approaches around intuition, gut instinct, or some of the metrics that used to be important. That really requires you to change your thinking and not just rely on the highest-paid person's opinion when you need to make a decision. It's really now becoming more of a science.

"If you view analytics as a cost center, that's the wrong view. It should be aimed at optimizing revenue streams," explained Pete Fishman, director of analytics at Yammer. "We micro-optimize the product, we micro-optimize sales and marketing, the business. Analytics is about improving everybody at their job, making data available to allow people to be more effective."

"It transcends the standard gaming demographic," explained Jon Hicks, editor for Xbox 360 - The Official Xbox Magazine (UK). "I think that's one of the reasons why it's so successful: Everybody who buys video games buys GTA, and many other people who don't routinely buy video games will also buy it. It's got to that level of sort of cultural weight."

While so-called BYOD isn't necessarily new -- IT departments, after all, have been supporting mobile road warriors since the 1980s -- the rising tide of end users seeking the use and support of their own consumer devices is different. It's so different that IT departments are grasping for any standard or proven approaches that make BYOD access of enterprise resources both secure and reliable.

CSC and HP have entered a strategic partnership to help companies and governments better understand and adapt to the tough cybersecurity landscape. "We've got to change the paradigm here," said CSC's Dean Weber. "We've got to get better at threat intelligence. We've got to get better at event correlation. We've got to get better at the business of cybersecurity. And it has to be a public-private partnership that actually gets us there, because the public has an interest in the private infrastructure ... . That's not just U.S. -- that's global."