Darn! I wanted to see the school board
explain this in court.
Ex-Student
Drops ‘Spycam’ Case Against Lower Merion Schools
January 11, 2012 by Dissent
Eric Campbell and Danielle Vickery
report:
Former Lower
Merion School District student Paige Robbins on Wednesday morning
withdrew her lawsuit that alleged a district laptop’s camera took
photos of her undressed without her knowledge.
Robbins and her
parents said after a hearing at U.S. District Court in Philadelphia
they plan no further legal action against the district.
Read more on Patch.com
So the technology records street
conversations? How is that useful in detecting and location gunfire?
Was anyone (other than Big Brother's minions) aware of this
“feature?” What else have the failed to mention?
Gunshot
Sensor Sparks Privacy Concerns
January 11, 2012 by Dissent
Sacha Pfeiffer and Lynn Jolicoeur
report:
A murder case in
New Bedford is raising tough questions about what happens when
technology, law enforcement and privacy rights collide.
At the center of
all this is an acoustic sensor that’s meant to detect the sound of
gunfire, but that ended up recording a street argument just before a
fatal shooting. Prosecutors are now using that recording as evidence
against two defendants, and that’s troubling to some civil
liberties advocates.
Read more on WBUR.
[From the article:
Under Massachusetts law, you cannot
secretly record someone’s oral communication — period. I think
the police have violated the wiretapping statute and shouldn’t be
allowed to use the tape recording.
Are you paranoid enough?
Are
Drones Watching You?
January 12, 2012 by Dissent
Jennifer Lynch of EFF writes:
Today, EFF
filed suit against the Federal Aviation Administration seeking
information on drone flights in the United States. The FAA
is the sole entity within the federal government capable of
authorizing domestic drone flights, and for too long now, it has
failed to release specific and detailed information on who is
authorized to fly drones within US borders.
[...]
Many drones, by
virtue of their design, their
size, and how high they can fly, can operate undetected in urban
and rural environments, allowing the government to spy on Americans
without their knowledge. And even if Americans knew they were being
spied on, it’s unclear what laws would protect against this. As
Ryan
Calo, the ACLU
(pdf) and many others have noted, Supreme Court case law has not been
friendly to privacy in the public sphere, or even to privacy
in areas like your backyard or corporate
facilities that are off-limits to the public but can be viewed
from above. The Supreme Court has also held that the Fourth
Amendment’s protections from unreasonable searches and seizures may
not apply when it’s not
a human that is doing the searching. None of these cases bodes
well for any future review of the privacy implications of drone
surveillance.
Read more on EFF.
Is it conceivable that they could win?
Would that be “proof” that the US needs even more “copyright
owner's control of congress?”
"The music industry has
initiated a lawsuit
against the Irish government for not
having blocking laws on the books; on the theory
that if blocking laws were in place then filesharing would go away.
On Tuesday the music industry issued a plenary summons against the
Irish government which is the first step towards making this
litigation possible. This all began in October 2010 (EMI
v. UPC), when an Irish judge ruled that Irish law did not permit
an order to be made against an ISP requiring blocking of websites.
Recently several ISPs across the European Union have been ordered
by
courts to
block thepiratebay.org through legal maneuvers."
Did Facebook contribute as much to the
Obama campaign as Google? (Just asking...)
Google
And The Monopoly Paradox
With the deep inclusion of Google+ into
Search, Google is tempting fate. We’ve
been over this. A lot. And
this story is going to continue for some time to come. It
sure looks like Google is almost asking for an inquiry into
potentially anti-competitive practices (and
it’s coming). Which is insane. So the next logical question
is why? Why is Google risking so much to do this?
My colleague Eric
had a very interesting theory earlier. Maybe Google’s real
motive is to get the government to also look into Facebook’s
often-unfair practices with regard to their network ahead of their
IPO. If social and not search is indeed the
future, call this pre-subversion. And if there’s any shred of
truth to this theory, more power to Google — it’s rather genius
(though still extremely risky).
What names will be taken, what names
will not. $185,000 for “.truth” but nothing for “.logical?”
Companies
Prepare for Land Grab of New ‘Generic’ Top-Level Domains
From this Thursday (midnight
UTC) companies can apply to the Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers (ICANN) for the domain name suffix of their
choosing — from dot brand (.brand) or dot product (.camera, for
example) through to generic terms like .food, .hotel or .pugs. They
have until April 12 to get their applications, along with the
$185,000 fee, to ICANN. After that date it is expected that further
applications won’t be accepted for at least two or three years.
Perhaps a “Free Movie Night” at the
U?
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Here is some more evidence of why Open
Culture is one of my favorite blogs to read. This morning they
posted two great YouTube discoveries; full-length productions of
George Orwell's 1984
and Animal
Farm. I've embedded Animal
Farm below.
Applications
for Education
If you use either 1984 or Animal
Farm in your classroom (I had to read both in high school), you
might want to show parts or all of these videos to your students
after they have read the books. If you want to use just a part of
one of the videos you might want to try using one of these
tools to clip the section that you need.
I'm thinking of translating my Master's
Thesis into “Super Bob Saves the World!”
… If you’re interested in
creating and publishing your own comic or graphic novel and
distributing it online, you will probably want to use these formats;
they’re the most common, they’re easy to create and are
recognized by most comic book readers.
[and when I'm done:
Comic Book Readers
For Windows, you
might use ComicRack
Mac OS comic
readers include Comical
On the iPhone you
might try CloudReaders
Android users have
the benefit of Droid
Comic Viewer
Windows Phone
users can run the Lindy
Comics app
Ultimately it is easier to use a comic
reader than use a standard PDF reader (although many comic readers
will support PDFs); indeed, it is possible to convert
PDFs directly to CBZ format files.
(Related) But then, maybe I'll have my
students do it for me!
Amazon:
Time to start programming your e-books
The dividing line between writing books
and writing programs just got a big step blurrier.
That's because Amazon has now released
tools for creating books using Web technologies. Those tools
include Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), used to describe Web pages,
and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), used for formatting.
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