Skyway Recommended October 7th to 20th
This week: Snowden Not Carrying Secret Files; Data Centers Essential to World Economy; Brazil Just a Glimpse of Canadian Spying; Web Firms Urge Transparency over Requests for User Data; New Solar Farm uses Molten Salt for Storage
Each Monday we’ll pass on links to articles we thought were well worth reading from the previous week, for those who live where we do (British Columbia, Canada), work like we do (high speed business internet), and think about things we do (internet trends, internet privacy, internet censorship, cutting-edge technology, etc.). If you don’t want to wait ’til Monday, we usually tweet and link to these as we come across them…
NY Times | Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia
Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, said in an extensive interview this month that he did not take any secret N.S.A. documents with him to Russia when he fled there in June, assuring that Russian intelligence officials could not get access to them. Read More…
GigaOm | Putting data centers on turbines to save billions of dollars
How important is the industrial internet to the world’s economy? According to GE’s Bill Ruh, even small improvements in some areas could save billions of dollars per year and significantly reduce problems like flight delays. Read More…
The Guardian | Top web firms urge more transparency over UK requests for user data
Britain needs to have a full public debate about the scale of internet surveillance to give confidence that state powers are not being abused, the world’s five biggest internet companies have told MPs. In a joint memo, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and Twitter have called for the UK government to allow greater transparency about requests for them to hand over data on their users. Read More…
The Globe and Mail | Brazil is tip of the iceberg on Canadian spying, U.S. journalist says
More disclosures about Canada’s aggressive foreign spying activities are coming, suggests Glenn Greenwald, the American journalist revealing the top-secret documents acquired by Edward Snowden, the former U.S. National Security Agency employee and security contractor. “There is a huge amount of stuff about Canada in these archives because Canada works so closely with the NSA,” Mr. Greenwald, who lives in Brazil, told The Globe and Mail in an interview on Monday. Read More…
GigaOm | A huge solar farm with molten salt storage is ready to go live in Arizona
After almost three years of construction, $2 billion in funding, a controversial Department of Energy loan guarantee, and 2,000 jobs created, a large and unique solar farm about 70 miles southwest of Phoenix, Arizona, is now ready to produce power. This is Solana, developed by Spanish engineering powerhouse Abengoa, and it uses hundreds of parabolic-shaped mirrors that concentrate the suns rays to produce electricity as well as an industry first deployment of molten salt-based thermal energy storage technology. Read More…