Alibaba's Data Centers - Hangzhou, Qingdao Beijing, and Hong Kong

WSJ reports on Alibaba’s IPO and its data centers.

The launch of the Hong Kong data center also comes as Alibaba’s two main shopping sites–Taobao and Tmall– have been trying to expand outside mainland China, beginning with Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. According to Alibaba’s website, the company has data centers in three mainland Chinese cities: Hangzhou, Qingdao and Beijing.

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Alibaba said it built the new data center in Hong Kong in cooperation with a unit of Towngas, a Hong Kong gas company. Alibaba didn’t say how much it spent on the facility.

Hiding Your Moves on the Internet by acting like a Criminal is not Effective

The Guardian has a post on Janet Vertisi’s efforts to hide her pregnancy on the internet. 

Attempts to stay anonymous on the web will only put the NSA on your trail

The sobering story of Janet Vertesi's attempts to conceal her pregnancy from the forces of online marketers shows just how Kafkaesque the internet has become

The bit of irony is The Guardian hid the origin of the presentation Janet made which is here on Mashable.

How One Woman Hid Her Pregnancy From Big Data

For the past nine months, Janet Vertesi, assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University, tried to hide from the Internet the fact that she's pregnant — and it wasn't easy.

Pregnant women are incredibly valuable to marketers. For example, if a woman decides between Huggies and Pampers diapers, that's a valuable, long-term decision that establishes a consumption pattern. According to Vertesi, the average person's marketing data is worth 10 cents; a pregnant woman's data skyrockets to $1.50. And once targeted advertising finds a pregnant woman, it won't let up.

The part that had me laughing is when she figured out her process of being invisible made her more visible as a potential criminal.

Genius, right? But not exactly foolproof. Vertesi said that by dodging advertising and traditional forms of consumerism, her activity raised a lot of red flags. When her husband tried to buy $500 worth of Amazon gift cards with cash in order to get a stroller, a notice at the Rite Aid counter said the company had a legal obligation to report excessive transactions to the authorities.

"Those kinds of activities, when you take them in the aggregate ... are exactly the kinds of things that tag you as likely engaging in criminal activity, as opposed to just having a baby," she said.

What Janet was doing in her efforts to hide her pregnancy and her purchasing behavior, is she was doing the same things a criminal does to hide their activity.  If you want to hide, then blend into a crowd like camouflage.

Background matching is perhaps the most common camouflage tactic. In background matching, a speciesconceals itself by resembling its surroundings in coloration, form, or movement. In its simplest form, animals such as deer and squirrels resemble the “earth tones” of their surroundings. Fish such as flounder almost exactly match their speckled seafloor habitats.

Insight into who you want on Your Team

The Monuments Men book has a quote by General Dwight Eisenhower that are words of wisdom.

This is a long road we have to travel. The men that can do

things are going to be sought out just as surely as the sun rises

in the morning. Fake reputations, habits of glib and clever

speech, and glittering surface performance are going to be

discovered and kicked overboard. Solid, sound leadership . . . and

ironclad determination to face discouragement, risk, and

increasing work without flinching, will always characterize

the man who has a sure-enough, bang-up fighting unit. Added

to this he must have a darn strong tinge of imagination—I

am continuously astounded by the utter lack of imaginative

thinking. . . . Finally, the man has to be able to forget himself and

personal fortunes. I’ve relieved two seniors here because they got

to worrying about “injustice,” “unfairness,” “prestige,” and—oh, what the hell!

— Supreme Commander General Dwight

David Eisenhower in a letter to

General Vernon Prichard, August 27, 1942

Containerized Wind Power - Buoyant Airborne Turbine

Wind is a favorite of some for renewable energy.  Google has its airborne wind system Makani.

Altaeros Energies is a Helium buoyant system that deploys in containers.

Low Cost

The Altaeros BAT reduces the second largest cost of wind energy – the installation and transport cost – by up to 90 percent, through a containerized deployment that does not require a tower, crane, or cement foundation. Combined with significant increases in energy output, and flexible deployment options, the BAT is designed to significantly reduce the levelized cost of energy for remote power customers.

Mobility and Rapid Deployment

The Altaeros BAT is shipped in two standard containers and can be installed and producing power in under twenty-four hours. Easy transport, setup, and redeployment offers new mobility that is not feasible with tower-mounted wind turbines.

One of the nice things about the BAT is you can put other things up at that altitude.

Additional Revenue from Airborne Services

Much like other tethered aerostats, the Altaeros BAT can lift additional communication, surveillance, and sensory equipment alongside the turbine to provide additional services for remote sites. The BAT provides a line of sight over 60 miles in any direction, offering a powerful platform that fixed towers cannot reach. The addition of payload equipment does not affect the stability or power output of the system.

Army says they are shutting more Data Centers than other Federal Agencies

Saw this post on Federal Times on the US Army moving data center capacity.  This paragraph makes an interesting claim.

“We’re aggressively shutting down data centers. I don’t think there’s anyone in the federal government that is shutting down as many data centers as the Army is,” Krieger said May 6 at the C4ISR & Networks conference in Arlington, Va. “But this is not a data center drill; this is about applications. This is about modernizing, virtualizing and moving.”