Saturday, September 14, 2013

So is the court saying they should have been doing this all along or just “Now that the cat is out of the bag?”
Spencer Ackerman reports:
The court that oversees US surveillance has ordered the government to review for declassification a set of secret rulings about the National Security Agency’s bulk trawls of Americans’ phone records, acknowledging that disclosures by the whistleblower Edward Snowden had triggered an important public debate.
The Fisa court ordered the Justice Department to identify the court’s own rulings after May 2011 that concern a section of the Patriot Act used by the NSA to justify its mass database of American phone data. The ruling was a significant step towards their publication.
Read more on The Guardian. See also emptywheel’s coverage.


Do the crooks know this? For my Ethical hackers. What can we get for a guillotine that's still in the box?
Don't worry, your severed fingers won't unlock your iPhone 5S
… It explains that Apple's scanner doesn't work by optics. Rather, Apple's new system probes beneath the layer of you skin to see the real live action beneath.


I consider myself a clipping service (with commentary)
Much has been tweeted and written about the media shield law that made it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. The bill gave me cause for concern as I listened to the debate about it and read the coverage on Politico, because I got the sense that bloggers/citizen journalists like myself would not be covered, even though I engage in a lot of the same behaviors that paid journalists working for big outlets like the NYT do.
It turns out that at least one prominent media lawyer thinks I definitely would be covered, and I’ve asked him to write up his analysis of the language of the bill to explain under what conditions folks like me could claim the shield privilege. I’ll post a link to his analysis once it’s online.
In the meantime, you may want to read David Savage’s coverage in the Los Angeles Times (via Joe Cadillic).


Still not on this list...
Bloomberg Visual Charts of Billionaires
Today’s rankings of the world’s richest people – Index is a daily ranking of the world’s richest – Visual charts provide bios. Provides the ability to: Explore – Rank – Plot – Map specific individuals and groups. Includes key data points: citizenships, genders, ages, sources of wealth.


Very useful tools. Pick one.
Tools for Creating Creating Screen Capture Images and Videos
This evening I received a question from a reader who was wondering what I use to create the annotated screen capture images that you see in the guides that I produce. I create those images by using Jing which I have installed on my Mac and Windows computers. There are other services that I have tried from time to time. Those services along with Jing are described below.


Every week...
From the press release: the California Community Colleges Board of Governors has voted to require that any works created under contracts or grants funded by the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office carry the Creative Commons Attribution license that gives permission to the public to reproduce, distribute, perform, display or adapt the licensed materials for any purpose so long as the user gives attribution to the author." [Potential resource? Bob]
The Open University has released a report on “Innovating Pedagogy,” which offers a look at 10 education theories, tools, and practices which it says “have the potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice, particularly in post-school education.” Among the 10: gaming, MOOCs, and badges.

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