Something for the e-Lawyers? Interesting questions of probable cause as well as new areas covered by a protective order.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/10/12/2237246/Facebook-User-Arrested-For-a-Poke?from=rss
Facebook User Arrested For a Poke
Posted by kdawson on Monday October 12, @07:11PM from the criminalizing-the-annoying dept.
nk497 writes
"A woman in Tennessee has been arrested for poking someone over Facebook. Sharon Jackson had been banned by courts from 'telephoning, contacting or otherwise communicating' with the apparent poke recipient, but just couldn't hold back from clicking the 'poke' button. She now faces a sentence of up to a year in prison."
[From the article:
When you poke someone, an alert pops up in the corner of that person's Facebook page notifying them of your poke. [I didn't know that... Bob]
Although Jackson declined to comment, her lawyer, Lawren Lassiter, told ABCNews.com that his client was "extremely shocked" when the police arrested her.
"The only evidence that I'm aware of is a printout of a screen," said Lassiter, adding that the printed screen grab of the victim's Facebook page is what led police to determine that the protective order had been breached. "I'm trying to get my hands on some Facebook documentation so we can better assess the situation."
Information from Facebook could help verify whether the poke came from Jackson's account or an imposter's, he said. It could also help determine whether or not the poke was made from Jackson's computer or if someone broke into her account.
… Although "poking" is a somewhat passive and new form of technology-enabled correspondence, Ryan Calo, a residential fellow at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet & Society, said it is still a form of communication restricted by a protective order.
"A poke is a very deliberate action," he said. "You have to select the person and say, 'this is what I want to do.'"
… In recent months, Calo said, there have been similar instances in which a person's virtual actions on social media sites have had legal ramifications.
In July, a Chicago woman was hit with a $50,000 lawsuit from a local management company after posting a comment on Twitter about her "moldy apartment."
What I find interesting here is that the article does not even hint at the “defamatory statements” Has their speech been chilled?
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=4497
University’s libel suit highlights growing online dilemma
October 13, 2009 by Dissent Filed under Court, Internet, U.S.
A libel lawsuit filed by Butler University highlights the dangers of certain types of online postings.
The university is suing an anonymous blogger for comments posted last year on a blog that the school contends includes defamatory statements about two high-level administrators.
The blog has since been removed. University officials said they strongly support freedom of speech and academic freedom, “but we cannot tolerate the harassment, intimidation and defamation in which the defendant engaged.”
Read more on TheIndyChannel.
Internet economics are confusing to governments?
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/10/12/1814241
Blogger Loses Unemployment Check Because of Ads
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday October 12, @03:56PM from the time-for-an-injection-of-common-sense dept.
Techdirt is reporting that one unfortunate, unemployed New York lawyer recently had her unemployment benefits greatly reduced because of the incredible $1/day she was earning via ads on her blog.
"The whole thing sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare, with NY State asking her to get a form from her new 'employer' who didn't exist. Then NY Department of Labor started giving her all sorts of contradicting information, and eventually an 'investigation' into her 'business' — during which time her unemployment benefits were stopped entirely. She's now pulled the Google AdSense from her blog (total earned over the life of the blog $238.75)."
It's not because of the sex. (Okay, maybe a little bit) But is the fact that the Internet was used enough to change all the rules?
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=4469
Group sex photos case heads to trial
October 12, 2009 by Dissent Filed under Breaches, Court, U.S.
Defendant took pictures of his ex-girlfriend “engaged in various sex acts with two other people.” Later he emailed some of the photos to his ex-girlfriend’s mother, ex-husband, ex-in laws, boss and co-workers.
The ex-girlfriend sued for intentional infliction of emotional distress and invasion of privacy. Defendant moved for summary judgment.
[...]
Plaintiff claimed two forms of invasion of privacy — intrusion upon seclusion and publication of private facts. The court held she had presented enough facts for the latter but not the former.
The court granted Defendant’s motion for summary judgment as to intrusion upon seclusion because no intrusion occurred. Plaintiff knew Defendant was there taking pictures of the activities. The court rejected Plaintiff’s argument that publication of the no doubt intimate photos constituted intrusion. It held that the disclosure of properly obtained information could not give rise to the claim.
But as to the argument that emailing the photos unlawfully publicized private facts, the court sided with Plaintiff. Defendant had argued that emailing the photos to only a half dozen or so people did not amount to “publication,” which is one of the elements of the tort. He pointed to Comment “a” of the Restatement (Second) of Torts §652D which says that “it is not an invasion of the right of privacy to communicate a fact . . . to a single person, or even to a small group of people.”
In rejecting this argument, the court engaged in what some might characterize as “Internet exceptionalism,” — applying the law in response to a perceived substantial difference between online and offline communication.
Read more on Internet Cases.
The case is Peterson v. Moldofsky, No. 07-2603, 2009 WL 3126229 (D.Kan. September 29, 2009)
Hat-tip, Legal Blog Watch.
[From Internet Cases:
The court observed that “the Internet enables its users to ‘quickly and inexpensively’ surmount the barriers to generating publicity that were inherent in the traditional forms of communication.” Finding this distinction to be significant, the court held that distribution of the photos even to a small group of people through the private means of electronic mail could be considered a “publication” for purposes of the tort of invasion of privacy.
Local (DU Law) Magistrate on e-Discovery
Judges Craig Shaffer and Ron Hedges Give Good Advice to All Students of e-Discovery
This week’s blog is an exclusive 15 minute, must-see video by two judges, Ronald J. Hedges and Craig B. Shaffer. Craig Shaffer (shown left) is a United States Magistrate Judge in Colorado. Ron Hedges is a former U.S. Magistrate Judge in New Jersey (1986-2007).
If we have learned anything, it's that we learn nothing.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/10/13/0037246/100-Years-of-Copyright-Hysteria?from=rss
100 Years of Copyright Hysteria
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday October 13, @08:07AM from the frothy-mouths dept.
Nate Anderson pens a fine historical retrospective for Ars Technica: a look at 100 years of Big Content's fearmongering, in their own words. There was John Philip Sousa in 1906 warning that recording technology would destroy the US pastime of gathering around the piano to sing music ("What of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?"). There was the photocopier after World War II. There was the VCR in the 1970s, which a movie lobbyist predicted would result in tidal waves, avalanches, and bleeding and hemorrhaging by the music business. He compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler — in this scenario the US public was a woman home alone. Then home taping of music, digital audio tape, MP3 players, and Napster, each of which was predicted to lay waste to entire industries; and so on up to date with DVRs, HD radio, and HDTV. Anderson concludes with a quote from copyright expert William Patry in his book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: "I cannot think of a single significant innovation in either the creation or distribution of works of authorship that owes its origins to the copyright industries."
Huge surge in 2009...
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/022548.html
October 12, 2009
ID theft is one of UK's fastest growing crimes
National Identity Theft Prevention Week - UK's Fraud Prevention Service resources:
Let this be a lesson to ya.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/magistrate-clears-blogger-riaa-of-vexatious-charges/
Judge Refuses to Punish Lawyer for Anti-RIAA Blogging
By David Kravets October 12, 2009 3:53 pm
Think of it as another type of fingerprinting?
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=4494
Does a cheek swab for DNA require a warrant?
October 13, 2009 by Dissent Filed under Court, Surveillance, U.S.
No, says the Indiana Court of Appeals in Garcia-Torres v. State:
After comparing cheek swabs with other searches requiring only reasonable suspicion, we conclude that the DNA sample collection technique at issue here, although minimally invasive, is also one of those limited searches that requires only reasonable suspicion and may therefore be conducted without a warrant. If anything, the cheek swab involves much less impact on the subject than some other searches that all agree may be conducted based on mere reasonable suspicion. As the United States Supreme Court has observed, “[e]ven a limited search of the outer clothing for weapons constitutes a severe, though brief, intrusion upon cherished personal security, and it must surely be an annoying, frightening, and perhaps humiliating experience.” Terry, 392 U.S. at 24-25. And yet, it is universally understood that such a pat-down may be conducted upon reasonable suspicion.
In contrast, a cheek swab takes even less time than a pat-down or field sobriety tests (”FSTs”) and is painless. Moreover, a swab of the inside of the cheek is very limited in scope, whereas a pat-down will generally involve manual exploration of the entirety of a suspect‘s body, including the genital areas. Finally, a swab does not carry nearly the same potential for opprobrium as pat-downs or FSTs, which will typically occur on public thoroughfares. As such, swabs are even less violative of the “[t]he interests in human dignity and privacy which the Fourth Amendment protects” than pat-downs or FSTs.
Read the rest of Orin Kerr’s post and the ensuing discussion on The Volokh Conspiracy. Criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield also offers his own commentary on Simple Justice.
Interesting, but not immediately useful. I suspect hackers will use this technique to demonstrate reading RFID tags at much greater distances.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/10/13/0059241/Visualizing-RFID?from=rss
Visualizing RFID
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday October 13, @02:08AM from the tufte-would-be-proud dept
jamie found a video on Warren Ellis's blog introducing a new way to visualize RFID fields. The film is by Timo Arnall and Jack Schulze. The subject is introduced in words on the BERG site (a design consultancy); the tech behind it is explored at Touch, a project that experiments with near-field communications.
"This image is a photographic mapping of the readable volume of a radio field from an RFID reader. The black component in the image is an RFID reader... The camera has been fixed in its position and the reader photographed. Using a tag connected to an LED we paint in the edges of the readable volume with a long exposure and animate them to show the form."
Back in the day, the IBM anti-trust case was typical of huge data volumes, with evidence being delivered in “semi-trailer” sized batches. Now we need to address “Library of Congress” sized batches.
Getting Students To Think At Internet Scale
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday October 13, @05:08AM from the peta-here-a-peta-there dept.
Hugh Pickens writes
"The NY Times reports that researchers and workers in fields as diverse as biotechnology, astronomy, and computer science will soon find themselves overwhelmed with information — so the next generation of computer scientists will have to learn think in terms of Internet scale of petabytes of data. For the most part, university students have used rather modest computing systems to support their studies, but these machines fail to churn through enough data to really challenge and train young minds to ponder the mega-scale problems of tomorrow. 'If they imprint on these small systems, that becomes their frame of reference and what they're always thinking about,' said Jim Spohrer, a director at IBM's Almaden Research Center. This year, the National Science Foundation funded 14 universities that want to teach their students how to grapple with big data questions. Students are beginning to work with data sets like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, the largest public data set in the world. The telescope takes detailed images of large chunks of the sky and produces about 30 terabytes of data each night. 'Science these days has basically turned into a data-management problem,' says Jimmy Lin, an associate professor at the University of Maryland."
[For size comparisons, see: http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/tek1/how_big.htm 10 Terabytes: Printed collection of the U. S. Library of Congress
This is interesting to us educator types...
http://theopensourceschool.blogspot.com/
The Open Source School
Following the adventure of putting together an Open Source school: Albany Senior High School in Auckland, New Zealand. Covers pedagogy, learning, software, hardware, learning management systems, libraries and anything else I feel like talking about.
For the Computer Forensics wiki
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-trace-deactivate-your-stolen-cell-phone-with-mobiwee/
How To Trace & Deactivate Stolen Cell Phone
Oct. 12th, 2009 By Grant
Ditto
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-8-online-tools-to-identify-the-owner-of-a-phone-number/
Top 8 Online Tools To Identify The Owner Of A Phone Number
Oct. 13th, 2009 By Tina
I'll through these in in case my Disaster Recovery students think the T-Mobile problem I gave them happens too infrequently to be worth considering...
http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/10/11/major-bug-in-snow-leopard-deletes-all-user-data
Updated: Major bug in Snow Leopard deletes all user data
Owen Williams on 11 October 2009 - 21:25
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10373349-36.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Facebook database outage cut off about 150,000
by Caroline McCarthy
http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/lifestyle/travel/2955289/Fyfe-chides-IBM-over-outage
Air New Zealand boss criticises IBM over outage
By RANDAL JACKSON - Computerworld
Last updated 12:10 12/10/2009
… Air NZ's short haul airlines group general manager, Bruce Parton, told Radio New Zealand the fault appeared to have been caused by a power failure, followed by a delay in a back-up generator running.
"Ten thousand-plus customers affected on the last day of holidays, and millions of dollars of revenue not going through our online site, you can be assured we'll be having some very serious discussions with IBM today."
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