Yesterday it was Facebook with its most shared links of 2011.

Today it’s Twitter with its “most important”.

Among the mix is “Welcome back Egypt #Jan25” for the Arab Spring and “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)” which foretold the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. 

So too is “my daughter her name is sarah m. rivera,” sent out by a homeless man in New York who hadn’t seen his daughter in 11 years. They were reunited the next day.

Wired talks with two professional photographers about their positive experiences using Lytro’s new light field cameras. Unlike traditional digital cameras, Lytro’s lenses capture the entire light field instead of a single plane.

The upshot, as Lytro explains it:

Since you’ll capture the color, intensity, and direction of all the light, you can experience the first major light field capability – focusing after the fact. Focus and re-focus, anywhere in the picture. You can refocus your pictures at anytime, after the fact.

And focusing after the fact, means no auto-focus motor. No auto-focus motor means no shutter delay.

And no shutter delay means, in theory, no missing your shot.

Lytro’s wording is important here: you can experience the first major light field capability. 

In his interview with Wired, photographer Stephen Boxall thinks the technology could eventually be integrated into 3D movies.

3D images could be rendered in real-time to an audience, and the audience’s eyes could be tracked using motion-sensing and facial recognition technology to determine where each person is looking at the film onscreen.

“Now you are able to look around the head of your favorite movie star to see what’s happening behind them whilst having the scene refocus wherever you look,” Boxall says. 

Lytro explains its science here. An image gallery is here. The cameras are scheduled for release in early 2012 with prices ranging from $399-$499.

Image: Jason Bradley, See Lions Soaking in the Sun via Lytro. Select the image to play with its focusing.

Wikileaks is back with The Spyfiles, a database “of hundreds of documents from as many as 160 intelligence contractors in the mass surveillance industry.”

The release is being funneled through a number of organizations: ARD in Germany, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism in the UK, The Hindu in India, L’Espresso in Italy, OWNI in France and the Washington Post in the US. 

The data was gathered in conjunction with Bugged Planet and Privacy International.

Via Wikileaks:

International surveillance companies are based in the more technologically sophisticated countries, and they sell their technology on to every country of the world. This industry is, in practice, unregulated. Intelligence agencies, military forces and police authorities are able to silently, and on mass, and secretly intercept calls and take over computers without the help or knowledge of the telecommunication providers. Users’ physical location can be tracked if they are carrying a mobile phone, even if it is only on stand by.

But the WikiLeaks Spy Files are more than just about ’good Western countries’ exporting to ’bad developing world countries’. Western companies are also selling a vast range of mass surveillance equipment to Western intelligence agencies. In traditional spy stories, intelligence agencies like MI5 bug the phone of one or two people of interest. In the last ten years systems for indiscriminate, mass surveillance have become the norm. Intelligence companies such as VASTech secretly sell equipment to permanently record the phone calls of entire nations. Others record the location of every mobile phone in a city, down to 50 meters. Systems to infect every Facebook user, or smart-phone owner of an entire population group are on the intelligence market.

Image: Screenshot of The United Nations of Surveillance, an interactive map by OWNI that lets users explore companies offering surveillance technology around the world.

MSNBC’s comics blog has a story about San Francisco-based No Starch Press and its release of a line of math and science manga comic books.

The books are translations of Japanese originals.

Via MSNBC:

The plot lines may sound sappy to grown-ups. Usually they involve a cute schoolgirl or schoolboy who’s challenged by an equally cute teacher to master a seemingly impenetrable subject. But Bill Pollock, the founder and president of No Starch Press, says the books get the job done, especially for students who are at a crucial age for math and science education…

…Japanese researchers have reported that manga books can deliver information in a shorter time and make a stronger impression than conventional textbooks. “Manga’s textual hybridity is utilized to promote the readers’ effective learning, as verbal and iconographic tests place multiple layers of information in context and project a focused content,” Satsuki Murakami and Mio Bryce wrote in the International Journal of the Humanities.

Image: The Manga Guide to Relativity via No Starch Press.

On Tuesday Facebook released a 2011 top 40 list of the its most shared articles in the United States.

Coming in at number 1: Satellite Photos of Japan, Before and After the Quake and Tsunami from the New York Times.

Rounding out the list at number 40: Steve Jobs’s Patents, also from the New York Times.

In between are articles and videos such as Laughing Baby Loves Ripping Paper! (at number 30 from Yahoo) and Parents, don’t dress your girls like tramps (at number 4 from CNN).

While the sample size is small, we thought looking at percentage shares by company would be interesting.  It’s not much of a surprise that familiar names dominate the list but we’ll dig around and see if we can get a larger sample and see what that might hold.

Via the Washington Post:

Northern Virginia technology entrepreneur Jerry Lucas hosted his first trade show for makers of surveillance gear at the McLean Hilton in May 2002. Thirty-five people attended.

Nine years later, Lucas holds five events annually across the world, drawing hundreds of vendors and thousands of potential buyers for an industry that he estimates sells $5 billion of the latest tracking, monitoring and eavesdropping technology each year. Along the way these events have earned an evocative nickname: The Wiretappers’ Ball.

The products of what Lucas calls the “lawful intercept” industry are developed mainly in Western nations such as the United States but are sold throughout the world with few restrictions. This burgeoning trade has alarmed human rights activists and privacy advocates, who call for greater regulation because the technology has ended up in the hands of repressive governments such as those of Syria, Iran and China…

…But the overwhelming U.S. government response has been to engage in the event not as a potential regulator, but as a customer.

The list of attendees for this year’s U.S. Wiretappers’ Ball, held in October at the North Bethesda Marriott Hotel and Conference Center, included more than 20 federal agencies, Lucas said. Representatives of 43 countries also were there, he said, as were many people from state and local law enforcement agencies. Journalists and members of the public were excluded.

H/T: @AnupKaphle

Is the current copyright system the right and only tool to achieve our objectives? Not really.

Citizens increasingly hear the word copyright and hate what is behind it.

Sadly, many see the current system as a tool to punish and withhold, not a tool to recognise and reward.” — Neelie Kroes, European Union Digital Agenda Commissioner, in a speech to the Forum d’Avignon in Paris.

As ZDNet UK notes:

Rights-holders have long complained about the damage done to their industry by online copyright infringement. Governments and courts in countries including the UK have responded by blocking access to websites that help people unlawfully share music, videos, games and software.

Some countries, such as New Zealand and France, also threaten repeat infringers with suspension or disconnection of their broadband services.

A reminder that in the United States there are currently legislative attempts to essentially privatize copyright enforcement by giving copyright holders the power to issue takedown notices — without judicial oversight — against Web sites they believe are infringing on their content. 

Stephen Colbert on CNN’s firing of approximately 50 journalists after the network completed a study on the quality of user generated content it was receiving via platforms such as iReport. 

Via the Register:

The country’s Information and Communications Technology minister, Anudith Nakornthap, said that if such users “share” or “like” articles on Facebook that are considered to insult the Thai royal family, they could face sentences of between three and 15 years in jail – as laid out in Thailand’s Computer Crimes Act.

According to AFP, the dominant social network was asked to remove over 10,000 pages of material that contained images or text that the Thai ministry said was “offensive” to the monarchy.

It’s not just social networks that fall under watchful eyes. A 61-year-old man was recently convicted of sending four text messages that officials believed were offensive to the royal family.

His sentence: 20 years in jail… or, five years per offending message.

In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time.  It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has. — Mark Twain

A few years ago, Mental Floss gathered a series of quotes and called it the Mark Twain School of Journalism.

Among my favorites: Get your facts first and then you can distort them as much as you wish. — Michael

Image: Detail from Time Magazine’s July 2008 cover.