http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=10493
Contest Unlocks 3.1B Personal Records to Developers
May 24, 2010 by Dissent
From a press release:
At the height of the online privacy debate, DataRockit, a leader in data services technology, is opening up its 3.1B criminal, consumer, sex offender and real estate records for an application development contest. Launching today, with TechCrunch Disrupt, the contest challenges developers to construct an application that utilizes the database records in DataRockit’s comprehensive infrastructure to help look after the communities where we live. The Disruptive contest will run through June 7, 2010, the kickoff of New York Internet Week
Does anyone else have any concerns that they could just be handing huge data sets to potential ID thieves?
Only true citizens (and those who work for them) have rights. Us second class citizens only think we do.
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=10498
MD: Debate Sparks Over Video Recording Of Arrests
May 24, 2010 by Dissent
This issue has been covered on PogoWasRight.org in the past, but nothing has yet changed. WJZ reports:
Several Marylanders face felony charges for recording their arrests on camera, and others have been intimidated to shut their cameras off. That’s touched off a legal controversy.
[...]
Video of another arrest at the Preakness quickly made its way online, despite an officer issuing this warning to the person who shot it, “Do me a favor and turn that off. It’s illegal to videotape anybody’s voice or anything else, against the law in the state of Maryland.”
But is he right? Can police stop you from recording their actions, like a beating at the University of Maryland College Park?
The American Civil Liberties Union says no.
Read more on WJZ.
[From the article:
Under Maryland law, conversations in private cannot be recorded without the consent of both people involved.
But can that be applied to incidents, such as one caught on tape three years ago where a Baltimore officer arrested a teenager at the Inner Harbor?
"When you tell me to turn it off because it's against the law, you've proven to me that I'm not secretly taping you," said law professor Byron Warnken. "He doesn't have the right to say, if you don't stop recording me, I'm going to arrest you."
The last official interpretation of Maryland's law came from the previous attorney general saying it was legal for officers to record video on dashcams.
For my Computer Security class.
“Evil” App Displays Cell Numbers Of Unwitting Facebook Users
(Related) Showing my students that there is money to be made by collecting all that “public” data and using it to fill the gaps others leave (or charge too much for)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20005690-248.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
PhoneTell taps the Web for proper mobile caller ID
by Josh Lowensohn May 24, 2010 4:00 AM PDT
… Though its one hang-up (no pun intended) is that its directory of phone numbers, which is attached to names and readily available for landline phones, has not been carried over to mobile phones. Instead, mobile-phone users get numbers only.
One company that's helping to change that is PhoneTell, which is launching at Monday's TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York. Formerly CallSpark (which debuted at last year's DemoFall) PhoneTell aims to help you figure out who's calling your phone, even if they're not in your own personal phone book.
To accomplish such a feat, PhoneTell maintains its own directory of 200 million contacts from sources including the yellow pages and white pages, Yelp, OpenTable, and Zagat. The company also has a graylist that's made up of known telemarketers. More importantly though, its system can tap into various services you're a part of, like Gmail, LinkedIn, and Salesforce, to grab contacts behind a log in.
This is the kind of app I expect my Statistics students to create. With even a small percentage of users tech-literate, this type of app is likely to become common – measuring the performance of products and services against the promises of the Marketing Dept.
Complain About Your Dropped iPhone Calls… With Science
by John Biggs on May 23, 2010
We just saw a great product at the TC Disrupt Hack Day. It’s basically a class action lawsuit generator against AT&T that uses your actual call drop data to tabulate how many times your phone crashed and how many times you’ve been generally hosed by AT&T.
The site is worstphoneever.com and it searches for baseband crashes on your desktop, uploads them, and saves them to a database. The results are tabulated and added to the total, eventually leading to a detailed class-action lawsuit.
Do you have an iPhone? Then you know it’s the best portable computer ever made, while at the same time being the worst phone. ever. because it drops calls all the time!
Here’s what you can do: upload log files of dropped calls for your phone, see how many calls you dropped, where, and when, and then see how they compare with your friends!
Then, when we have enough data, we’re going to file a class action lawsuit on behalf of all our users, run Apple and AT&T through the ringer, and you can get a slice of the action! Don’t get mad, get even!
Law 2.0 Kind of defeats the spirit of the GPL, which is intended to allow consumers to modify their software to suit their needs.
Do Build Environments Give Companies an End Run Around the GPL?
Posted by timothy on Sunday May 23, @05:34PM
"I have two devices, from two different companies (who shall remain nameless, but both are very large and well known), which run Linux-based firmware. The companies release all their source code to comply with the GPL, however neither of them include a build environment or firmware utilities with the code. This means that if you want to alter the free software on the device, you can't — there is no way to build a firmware image or install it on the devices in question, effectively rendering the source code useless. I have approached the companies directly and while one of them acknowledges that they are not fully GPL compliant, due to other license restrictions they cannot make their build environment public, and they do not have the resources to rewrite it. I have approached the FSF but their limited resources are tied up pursuing more blatant violations (where no code at all is being released.) Meanwhile I am stuck with two devices that only work with Internet Explorer, and although I have the skills to rewrite each web interface, I have no way of getting my code running on the devices themselves. Have these companies found a convenient way to use GPL code, whilst preventing their customers from doing the same?"
No comments:
Post a Comment