“Data mining” of all that information and communication is at the heart of the furor over the recent disclosure of government snooping
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Using a simple 6-line shell script and the popular wget command line tool, I configured two computers on two different DSL connections to begin downloading all 260,000 wishlists in increments of 25,000. Each group of 25,000 wishlists took about four hours to download, for a total download time of less than one day.
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Using a pair of 5-year-old computers, two home DSL connections, 42 hours of computer time, and 5 man hours, I now had documents describing the reading preferences of 260,000 U.S. citizens.

Impressive, but I don't see how the Amazon reading habits of every geek in America would be of much use to anyone. Unless they're buying copies of 'Communism for Dummies'…

Source [AppleFritter]