One of our favorite
topics.
Why
America Wants Drones That Can Kill Without Humans
… Though they do
not yet exist, and are not possible with current technology, LARs are
the subject of fierce debate in academia, the military and policy
circles. Still, many treat their development as inevitability. But
how practical would LARs be on the battlefield?
Heather Roff, a visiting professor at the
University of Denver, said
many conflicts, such as the civil war in Syria, are too complex for
LARs. “It’s one thing to use them in a conventional conflict,”
where large militaries fight away from cities, “but we tend to
fight asymmetric battles.
How public are public
servants?
They lost
in court last month, and now the union representing Los Angeles
County sheriff’s deputies has lost again in its bid to block the
Los Angeles Times from publishing sheriff’s deputies’ background
screening files. Jill Cowan reports:
“You’d
have to be blind not to recognize there’s tension between privacy,
public safety and the 1st Amendment,” Los Angeles County Superior
Court Judge Michelle R. Rosenblatt said during a hearing on the
matter. “There always has been, and there perhaps always will be.”
Rosenblatt
sided with The Times in striking down a complaint filed by a union
representing Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies.
Read more on the Los
Angeles Times.
[From
the article:
Attorneys representing
the Assn. for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs had alleged that 500 files
containing personal information were unlawfully obtained. They
contended that a Times reporter was illegally in possession of stolen
property.
"There's no case
law at all that says the receipt of stolen property does not apply to
the press," said Elizabeth Gibbons, an attorney for the union.
She added that the
injunction's intent was not to stop The Times from writing about the
department's hiring practices, but rather to prevent it from
disclosing information that violates employees' privacy.
… For the last year, The Times has reported on the
department's hiring of employees who had personal ties to top
officials, including Sheriff Lee
Baca, despite histories of violence or past legal scrapes.
I imagine the
government lawyers are still getting paid?
Wow. I didn’t expect
this.
Josh Gerstein reports
that the government’s request for a stay due to the government
shutdown in EFF’s litigation in First Unitarian Church of Los
Angeles v. National Security Agency was denied.
Read more on Politico.
It is useful to have
this information when investigating an incident. Absent an incident,
it just builds a database. Would that be purged if nothing happens?
Talk about chilling
free speech!
Rebecca Glenberg
writes:
From
2010 until last spring, the Virginia State Police (VSP) maintained a
massive database of license plates that allowed them to pinpoint the
locations of millions of cars on particular dates and times. Even
more disturbing, the agency used automatic license plate readers
(ALPRs) to collect information about political activities of
law-abiding people. The VSP recorded the license plates of vehicles
attending President Obama’s 2009 inauguration, as well as campaign
rallies for Obama and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
(Documentation of this program, disclosed in response to an ACLU of
Virginia public records request, can be found here.)
These practices starkly illustrate the need for tight controls on
government use of technology for surveillance purposes.
Read more on ACLU.
e-Singatures. They've
been around for years!
Hello
Sign Puts an End To "Print, Sign, Scan"
Hello Sign is a tool
that I've featured in the past, but I've used it so much lately that
I feel like I need to share it with everyone again. For a variety of
reasons over the last couple of weeks I have received a ton of email
attachments that I've needed to sign and return to their senders.
Every time that I've received one of an attachment needing my
signature I haven't printed or scanned one piece of paper. Instead,
I've used the Hello
Sign Chrome app.
On your computer you
can use Hello Sign to record your signature by using your mouse or by
importing a picture of your signature. Then whenever you need to
sign a document just upload it to Hello Sign and apply your stored
signature. You can email your newly signed document directly from
Hello Sign.
For my Ethical
Hackers... Some people never change the default password.
Resetting
Your Device? Find the Default Username and Password
Someone performed a
factory reset on their wireless router and now they’re calling you
for help.
… If your friend is
resorting to resetting their devices because they can’t remember
their own passwords, you might want to suggest
a password manager app.
Covering
391 vendors with 1600 passwords, you should be able to find what
you’re looking for — for most household computing purposes, as
well as many work-related situations. The site also breaks things
down by version number of the hardware as well.
The
list covers not only devices, but different applications and software
packages as well.
…
If you’re just trying to help your friend get back into an
application or website they forgot their password for, you might try
one of these 6
Free Password Recovery Tools for Windows.
It can't hurt!
– emails you with a
photo and GPS location whenever someone tries to unlock your phone
with the wrong password. Find out if someone is trying to unlock
your phone or locate the thief that has stolen it. It’s a
completely silent and invisible operation. No warnings are shown to
the thief. There is little to no impact on the battery.
For my students.
Definitely. Especially for those 9:00AM classes. (Attention Ethical
Hackers! I saw that sly smile. Don't you dare!)
– enables you to
schedule a wakeup call to your mobile phone. Unlike many other
similar services, this one accepts international numbers. And to
combat abuse, it tells you in advance that a call has been scheduled,
with the option to cancel the wakeup call and even block your number
from the system permanently. The call consists of a short automated
message, and premium features can be unlocked for a short fee
The perfect article for
some smart people I know?
… It’s a common
question: why bother to blog (or use other forms of social media)
when it’s so hard to build a following, and you may toil in
obscurity for years before finding an audience?
The
first strategy is to write about the people you’d like to
connect with (or the companies you’d like to work for).
Next,
consider proactively sharing articles you create.
Finally,
pursue a “ladder strategy” for your content,
As Chris Brogan’s
experience shows, it can take years for your readership to grow
organically. It’s unlikely that you’ll be “discovered” right
away by a top CEO or VC trawling the Internet. But even from Day One,
you can begin to reach key players if you’re strategic about the
individuals and ideas you cover, proactively share your content
(instead of waiting for others to stumble across it), and seek new
and bigger outlets to feature your work. Before long, you won’t
need to be discovered; the right people will already know who you
are.
Something my Statistics
students won''t get in their English classes... (And something my
Data Analysis students can profit from)
How
to Bet Money on the Nobel Prize in Literature
Ladbrokes is
right 50 percent of the time without even knowing the names of the
authors the Swedish Academy is considering. How do you do it?
That’s
not us; that’s the power of the betting market. The way people are
betting changes the odds for any given author such that the one who’s
winning turns out usually to be the one they’ve selected. We find
that the betting market is a great measure of public opinion
because people are actually putting money behind their beliefs.
All we do is put the initial list together and then manage the
markets as we do a sporting event. It’s the same as football or
horse racing, really.
OK, so how do
you put the list together?
We
read literary blogs, book reviews, Twitter—
How to make a losing
team truly dangerous.
NFL
Bettors Don't Know What to Do With the Biggest Spread of All Time
Las Vegas bookmakers
are calling this Sunday’s game between the undefeated,
record-breaking,
naked-bootlegging
Denver Broncos and the defeated, drown-your-sorrows,
sorry-you-have-to-see-this
Jacksonville Jaguars the most
lopsided NFL game ever, with the Broncos favored by as many as 28
points. The matchup stretches
the margins of NFL disparity and, so far, is baffling bettors.
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