How Much Would It Cost To Store All US Phone Calls Made In A Year?

An early criticism of Snowden's leak about NSA spying activity was that the $20 million annual cost for PRISM -- whatever that turns out to be -- was simply too low to be credible. One person who knows more about storage costs than practically anyone -- well, outside the NSA, at least -- is Brewster Kahle, who set up the Internet Archive, essentially a backup for the entire Web plus a wonderfully rich store of many other materials. He's carried out a fascinating back-of-the envelope calculation of how much it would cost annually to record every phone call made in the US and store it in the cloud: 

On Techdirt.

Portuguese Government Capitulates On Copyright Levies, Despite Lack Of Support From Public And Artists

Back in February last year, Techdirt wrote about the rather pathetic attempts of the Portuguese Society of Authors (SPA) to drum up some support among its members for a new copyright levy on storage devices in the face of a public outcry at the extra costs this would impose on consumer and professional products. This was a dismal failure, and so it's probably no surprise that the Portuguese government didn't move forward with the original plans. 

On Techdirt.

Closing MySQL: Marten Mickos Responds

On Open Enterprise blog.

Lifelogging

I've touched on the subject of lifelogging - recording every moment of your waking day - before, but this feature is by far the best exploration of the subject I've come across.

What's fascinating is that it draws together so many apparently disparate threads: openness, privacy, security, search technologies, storage, memories, blogging, online videos, virtual worlds, etc. etc. (Via 3pointD.com.)