Baseline Magazine - September/October 2010

As if the recession wasn’t
already bad enough, with jobs
disappearing faster than you
can tweet “I’m unemployed,”
CloudCrowd, the self-
proclaimed “world’s first
Labor Operating System,” has
found a way to allow tasks
“to be completed anytime,
anyplace, anywhere, with
reliable accuracy and at a
fraction of the cost of salaried
employees.”
In a recent release,
CEO Alex Edelstein noted
that he is pleased with his
company’s “ability to execute
high-volume projects” using
the Internet, a proprietary
platform and a “global, on-demand labor force.” What’s more, CloudCrowd recently
completed its millionth task. We don’t know what the task was, but the company says
it does work for business, technology and education clients. CloudCrowd breaks large
projects into discrete tasks and distributes them to its workers via Facebook.

“Clients pay only on a cost-per-task basis,” says the release, “providing time and money savings over traditional approaches that require managers, employees, training, salaries, benefits, hardware and office expenses.” Yeah, real jobs. Nevertheless, the company says it has 25,000 workers on Facebook.

Amped Up About the Weather

“Everybody talks about the weather, but
nobody does anything about it,” goes the old
saw. Well, don’t say that about Johns Hopkins
University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL),
Boeing and Iridium. The trio has worked
together, according to a release, to imple-
ment “a new space-based system to monitor
Earth’s space environment.”
The system is called AMPERE—one
of our new favorite acronyms—for
Active Magnetosphere and Planetary
Electrodynamics Response Experiment. In
short, it provides “real-time magnetic field
measurements using commercial satellites
as part of a new observation network to
forecast weather in space.”
The idea is to develop a system that
will allow “24-hour tracking of Earth’s
response to supersonic blasts of plasma
ejected from the sun at collection rates fast
enough to one day enable forecasters to
predict space weather effects.”
That’s great, but is it going to rain
Saturday when I’m supposed to play golf?
Yeah, didn’t think you’d know.

BY THE NUMBERS

BY
TIM
MORAN

37%

Mysterious Numbers
The percentage of IT decision-
makers at large companies who
anticipate hiring additional IT staff
in the second half of 2010—up 11
percentage points from June 2009.

BASELINE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010

42

Have you ever listened to shortwave radio? I would have thought that, given today’s sophisticated technologies, shortwave would have gone the way of tube amplifiers and rotary phones. Not so.

A recent story on npr.com titled “Numbers Stations: Mystery Over The Airwaves” tells the tale of “shadowy corners of the shortwave radio spectrum [where] you can often find mysterious mechanical voices counting off endless strings of numbers—in English, Czech, Russian and German ... even Morse code.” But who’s listening? Who, indeed.

And, more to the point, who’s broadcasting?

Apparently, these are known as “numbers stations,” and they’ve been on the air for years. Many think they are the work of spies. These stations are unlicensed, and no government will admit to using them, making it virtually impossible to determine where they are broadcasting from—and why. And the encryption system they use is just about unbreakable. Spying by the numbers over an almost century-old comm technology—what will they think of next?

23.75.58.10 53.07.33.??

“Thieves are more likely to select argets based on the perceived value of the data and cost of the attack rather than victim characteristics uch as size.”