Do I really want Big Brother talking to me via an
‘always on’ device?
Alison DeNisco Rayome reports:
Lancashire police officers are researching an integration with the digital assistant that would allow the force to send out crime bulletins to residents, such as missing persons reports, wanted suspects in the area, and the number of officers currently on duty, according to a TechSpot report. The integration could also be used for internal communications, such as to update officers on daily crime logs or breaking incidents.
However, the most interesting potential usage would directly involve residents, allowing victims and witnesses to report crimes directly to the police via their Amazon Echo—another example of how artificial intelligence (AI) tools can potentially free up human workers like police to do more complex work.
Read more on TechRepublic.
So, it’s like fingerprints? But it can be used
in ways fingerprints can not. (e.g. You are related to someone who
left DNA at a crime scene.)
Did you know that police can compel you to provide
a DNA sample if they are booking you for (just) a misdemeanor?
I didn’t know, and was not happy to read about
it on FourthAmendment.com.
John Wesley Hall posts part of the opinion in U.S. v. Buller:
This court tends to agree with Justice Scalia that the primary purpose of the DNA collection statute is criminal investigation. As such, this court also agrees that the Fourth Amendment should require a warrant or some level of suspicion before the search of one’s DNA is allowed. However, until the King decision is modified or repudiated, it remains the law of the land and this court is bound to apply it. Because the analysis under King and the rationale for the conclusion in King cannot be meaningfully distinguished in the case of a misdemeanor arrestee, and because there is no federal law decided in the five years since the King decision was issued making such a distinction, the court concludes that the collection of DNA from Mr. Buller is constitutional under the Fourth Amendment.
Add that to the list of things that need to be
fixed.
Are they now saying “Free is Bad?”
Technology companies with unprecedented power to
sway consumers and move markets have done the unthinkable: They’ve
made trust-busting sound like a good idea again. [Yoicks!
Bob]
The concentration of wealth and influence among
tech giants has been building for years—90 percent of new online-ad
dollars went to either Google or Facebook in 2016; Amazon is by far
the largest online retailer, the third-largest streaming media
company, and largest cloud-computing provider. Silicon Valley titans
coasted to the top of the economy with little government oversight on
the backs of incredibly convenient products, a killer backstory,
shrewd lobbying, and our personal data. They were allowed to grow
unfettered in part because of a nearly-40-year-old interpretation of
US antitrust law that views anticompetitive behavior primarily
through the prism of the effect on consumers. In that light, the tech
industry’s cheap products and free services fell somewhere between
benign and benevolent.
Perspective. How would you find that
terrorist-related needle in this haystack?
WhatsApp
sets new messaging record: 75 billion on New Year’s Eve
WhatsApp, one of the world’s most-used messaging
services, hit a new milestone on New Year’s Eve: more than 75
billion messages sent by its users. The new record represents the
most messages sent in a single day in the chat app’s history, a
spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. The previous record was
set in 2016, also on New Year’s Eve: 63
billion messages sent.
The 75 billion number included 13 billion images
and 5 billion videos, the Facebook-owned WhatsApp revealed.
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