Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists(applefritter.com)
applefritter.com
Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists
http://www.applefritter.com/bannedbooks
3 comments
Kind of a freaky read. He put work into showing how someone would do it, not just claiming someone could do it. Excellent job.
It would have been a little better read if he had chosen reading material that wasn't middle-of-the-road stuff that might make the bestseller list or be assigned reading in school. How about the Turner Diaries (Timothy McVeigh's favorite) for the Right, books by actually Communists or anarchists for the left, maybe some deep ecologists? And some Loompanics-style how-to books about weapons, killing, and identity theft instead of the silly children's book he used: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0830606041/applefritt...
Is this just because hardly anybody has those books on their wishlist and he wouldn't have had anything to write about?
Is this just because hardly anybody has those books on their wishlist and he wouldn't have had anything to write about?
The actual reading material he chose is immaterial. Much more important is that the tools required to build his system were trivial and yet he had a wide array of search parameters to choose from. There is a lot of power there.