Of course
they did. The FBI blithely opened a can of worms and Apple wants to
make they examine each one they try putting back in the can.
Citing FBI
Hacking Efforts, Apple Requests Judge Delay Brooklyn iPhone Data Case
Apple wants
a judge to delay government demands for data from a locked iPhone in
a Brooklyn drug case while the FBI sees if it can get contents from a
San Bernardino attacker’s phone without Apple’s help.
… Zwillinger said the Brooklyn case will be
affected by the outcome in California regardless of what the Justice
Department concludes regarding its methods of obtaining data without
Apple’s help.
He said if the same method can be used to unlock
the iPhone in the Brooklyn case, Apple’s assistance will no longer
be needed. He added that Apple
will seek to test any claims by the government that the method cannot
work on the iPhone in Brooklyn or claims that other methods cannot be
used.
The
government is scheduled to update a California magistrate judge on
April 5 about its efforts to access iPhones without the company’s
assistance.
Not earth
shaking, but amusing.
Shawn E. Tuma writes:
The Dallas Court of Appeals recently decided a civil case involving claims under Texas’ unauthorized access of computer law that provides some helpful guidance for this relatively new law that has very little case law construing it. The 3 takeaways that follow are the key legal principles that apply to this law as set forth in the case Miller v. Talley Dunn Gallery, LLC, 2016 WL 836775 (Tex. App.–Dallas, Mar. 3, 2016).
Read more on Cybersecurity
Business Law.
Not all
that horrible.
The Dangers
of Facebook Cozying Up to Beijing
Mark
Zuckerberg’s Beijing publicity stunt was as craven as it was
brilliant. There he was, the Facebook founder and his entourage
jogging
through smoggy Tiananmen Square not wearing a facemask less
promotionally-minded runners wouldn’t dream of leaving home
without.
The message from Zuckerberg’s gesture, and his
meeting with Beijing’s propaganda minister, was impossible to miss:
we at Facebook are so anxious to “friend” China that we’re
willing to depart from the normative behavior we exercise everywhere
else.
… The only way Facebook operates in Xi’s
China is as a pawn in his censorship push.
… As I’ve argued before, China
needs Zuckerberg’s blue and white pages and “like” buttons more
than his company needs the No. 2 economy. It’s
impossible for China to become an innovative powerhouse when its best
minds are excluded from the mediums entrepreneurs everywhere else use
to share notes, debate and test ideas. Social media platforms are
where these conversations rage and crowdsourcing that drives change,
sparks new industries and speaks truth to power thrives.
… It’s reasonable to expect, for example,
that Facebook would need to partner with a local tech operation.
Here, think LinkedIn entering China with the help of two joint
ventures or Japanese messaging service Line connecting via Qihoo 360.
Beijing is sure to demand client data be housed in China to allow
ready government access. Also, Facebook would probably need to help
Beijing delete posts it finds even remotely objectionable. Good
luck, for example, enjoying the usual Facebook barrage of birthday
greetings if you were born on June 4, the anniversary of the
Tiananmen crackdown. Singer Taylor
Swift walked into a political maelstrom when she named an album
“1989,” the year Tiananmen went down. China uses sophisticated
algorithms to flag words, dates and public figures it finds
threatening to the state.
Chinese messaging apps like WeChat and the
Twitter-esque Sina Weibo are policed aggressively, but they’re
largely domestic and Mandarin-based. Facebook would be quite the
wildcard as it connects mainlanders to more than 100 foreign tongues
around the globe with its group pages.
There are limits and then there are people who
ignore the limits. Hackers will always be attracted to free Internet
access.
Angola’s
Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems With Digital Colonialism
Wikimedia
and Facebook have given Angolans free access to their websites, but
not to the rest of the internet. So, naturally, Angolans have
started hiding pirated movies and music in Wikipedia articles and
linking to them on closed Facebook groups, creating a totally free
and clandestine file sharing network in a country where mobile
internet data is extremely expensive.
… In 2014, Wikimedia
partnered with Angolan telecom provider Unitel to offer Wikipedia
Zero to its customers. Wikipedia Zero is a somewhat-controversial
program that “zero rates” Wikipedia and other Wikimedia
properties (such as image and video database Wikimedia Commons) on
mobile phones in developing countries, meaning customers don’t have
to pay for any data use on the Unitel network, as long as the data
use is associated with a Wikimedia domain.
… Facebook’s program, called “Free
Basics,” has come under fire—and was banned in India—because
some see it as a user grab technique for Facebook, but Wikipedia Zero
has gotten less flak because Wikimedia’s a nonprofit organization
and its sites often skew to be purely informative.
The controversy usually ends with those two
arguments—rarely does anyone ever consider what happens if creative
people find loopholes in these zero rated services.
That brings us to what’s going on in Angola.
Enterprising Angolans have used two free services—Facebook Free
Basics and Wikipedia Zero—to share pirated movies, music,
television shows, anime, and games on Wikipedia. And no one knows
what to do about it.
Because the data is completely free, Angolans are
hiding large files in Wikipedia articles on the Portuguese Wikipedia
site (Angola is a former Portuguese colony)—sometimes concealing
movies in JPEG or PDF files. They’re then using a Facebook group
to direct people to those files, creating a robust, completely free
file sharing network.
… But people in developing countries have
always had to be more creative than those for whom access to
information has always been a given. In Cuba, for instance, movies,
music, news, and games are traded
on USB drives that are smuggled into the country every week. A
20-year-old developer
in Paraguay found a vulnerability in Facebook Messenger that
allowed people to use Free Basics to tunnel through to the “real”
internet.
The drone
refused to comment.
This Drone
Startup Just Achieved A Milestone In Doorstep Delivery
,,, Drone
startup Flirtey said on Friday that it completed the first
federally-sanctioned drone delivery in a U.S. urban area without the
help of a human to manually steer it.
The half mile-drone flight took place on March 10
in Hawthorne, Nev., Flirtey CEO Matt Sweeny said in an interview with
Fortune. Staff members programmed the drone’s flight path
using GPS and then loaded a parcel of emergency supplies—including
food, water, and a first-aid kit—into a box tethered to one of the
company’s drones.
Flirtey
then sent the flying robot to an uninhabited house where it
eventually lowered the package to the home’s front porch using a
rope while hovering above.
The
Nevada-based startup performed the delivery with the help of its
partner,
the University of Nevada at Reno.
Last year, Flirtey made the first Federal Aviation
Administration-approved drone delivery
in a rural area by dropping off emergency supplies to a health clinic
in Virginia.
Not sure we teach Swift. Should we?
The Best
Languages for Mobile App Development in 2016
Probably all my students could use this.
Google
Offers Nik Collection Of Photo Editing Suite For Free
… The Nik Collection comes with seven desktop
plug-ins that were originally targeted toward expert photographers.
From its original price tag of $149, Google is now dropping its price
to nothing.
… In case you are interested in giving the
Google Nik Collection a go, head to Nik
Collection page to download it.
Another toy
my geek friends will need.
Amazon
shows you how to make an Echo with Raspberry Pi
If you're into messing with hardware and have some
basic programming skills, you can put together an Amazon Alexa device
of your very own. Amazon has even put together an official guide to
do so on GitHub, Lifehacker
reports. You'll need to snag a Raspberry Pi 2 and a USB
microphone to make it happen, but you've probably got the other
required hardware (a micro-SD card for storage, for example) lying
around.
Every week. Ready or not.
Hack
Education Weekly News
… “The U.S. Department of Education has
rehired two of the debt
collection companies that it said last year would be fired for
misleading student loan borrowers, newly released federal
records show,” Inside
Higher Ed reports. “Department officials announced in February
2015 that they would ‘end’ the contracts of five debt collectors,
accusing the companies of making ‘materially inaccurate
representations’ to borrowers trying to get their loans out of
default.”
… Interesting verb choice in this headline:
“Sophisticated test scams from China invade U.S. college
admissions.” And the subhead: “Students hire imposter ‘gunmen’
to take the SAT, the GRE and other tests.” [Because
they all look alike? Bob]
… Via
the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “A group of parents at a Cobb
County elementary are upset over the school’s use of yoga and other
mindfulness practices for students because they believe it endorses a
non-Christian belief system.”
… Via
The Denver Post: “ The University
of Colorado nutrition expert who accepted $550,000 from
Coca-Cola Co. is stepping down as executive director of the Anschutz
Health and Wellness Center. James Hill announced Friday that he was
leaving, effective immediately, but he expects to continue
researching causes of obesity.”
… Via
Politico: “LinkedIn, labor-market analysis organization Burning
Glass and the Markle Foundation have joined forces to roll out a new
kind of job website – Skillful.com – specifically designed for
middle-skills workers, or people who have a high school diploma but
not a bachelor’s degree. The site launched in Colorado
this month with an initial emphasis on the information technology,
advanced marketing and healthcare fields, with plans to branch into
the greater Phoenix area as early as next month. The project has the
support of Colorado’s state government as well as Arizona State
University and MOOC provider edX.”
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