When
I talk about IP, I mention DRM. Of course you would remove DRM only
for legal reasons...
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/ways-to-remove-drm-from-ebooks/
How
to Remove DRM From Your Ebooks: 6 Methods to Try
(Ditto)
https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-remove-watermark-from-photo/
How
to Remove a Watermark From a Photo: 5 Easy Ways
Freebie.
Registration required.
https://thehackernews.com/2020/12/ciso-with-small-security-team-learn.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheHackersNews+%28The+Hackers+News+-+Cyber+Security+Blog%29
CISO
with a small security team? Learn from your peers' experience with
this free e-book
… In
the e-Book "10 CISOs With Small Security Teams Share Their Must
Dos and Don'ts" (Download
it here),
CISOs of teams up to 5 across the industries share their challenges
and what worked with them in terms of efficiency.
Eventually,
digital passports and CBP can copy that image.
CBP
proposes to require mug shots of all non-US citizen travelers
From
Papers, Please!
Last
December we called
attention to plans by
US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to require mug shots of all
travelers entering or leaving the US by air or sea, including US
citizens.
Within
days, CBP issued a press
release falsely accusing us of
incorrectly reporting the official
CBP notice of
its plans, and saying that it would withdraw its notice the next time
the regulatory agenda was published.
So what happened?
Earlier
this month, CBP withdrew
the notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM)...
and issued a
new notice of proposed rulemaking the
same day that wouldn’t apply to US citizens, but would require all
non-US citizens, including permanent US residents (green-card
holders) to be photographed whenever they enter or leave the US by
any means: air, land, or sea.
Read
more on Papers,
Please!
A
lot of my friend’s parents spoke Italian to each other. Would CBP
have detained them? Speaking Klingon though…
Speaking
Spanish is a not a lawful basis for being made to show ID
From
Papers, Please!
US
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has agreed
to pay a “monetary sum” to two native-born US citizens and
Montana residents who
were made to show ID and detained for about 40 minutes (including
continuing detention even after they showed their Montana drivers
licenses) solely because a CBP agent overhead them speaking Spanish
to each other.
The amount of the settlement has not been
made public.
The
ACLU of Montana represented
the two Latinx residents of Havre, MT,
in their lawsuit,
which initially sought a declaratory judgement “that race, accent,
and language cannot create suspicion to justify seizure and/or
detention” (which ought to go without saying) in addition to money
damages.
Read
more on Papers,
Please!
An
argument I’m watching…
https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/law-enforcement-is-using-location-tracking-on-mobile-devices-to-identify-suspects-geofence
Law
enforcement is using location tracking on mobile devices to identify
suspects, but is it unconstitutional?
… Chatrie
is now asking a federal judge in Richmond, Virginia, to suppress
evidence uncovered as a result of the warrant. His lawyers argue the
warrant is unconstitutional, characterizing it as “a general
warrant purporting to authorize a classic dragnet search of every
Google user [and
only Google users Bob] who happened to be near a bank in
suburban Richmond during rush hour on a Monday evening.”
The
government counters the warrant was “narrowly constrained based on
location, dates, and times.” It says the limited geographic and
time scopes make the warrant “particular”—lingo from the Fourth
Amendment that states warrants must “particularly” describe the
place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. At
press time, a hearing on the motion to suppress evidence was
scheduled for Nov. 17.
Privacy
advocates reject the idea that geographic and time limits render
these warrants “particular.”
“Judges
may know the size of an area being tracked and the duration, but it’s
impossible for them to know how many people were in that area,”
Cahn says.
Strategic
implications? Limit data released in answer to each request…
https://www.cpomagazine.com/data-protection/german-court-slashes-gdpr-fine-for-telecoms-giant-by-90/
German
Court Slashes GDPR Fine for Telecoms Giant by 90%
A
German court has slashed a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
fine assessed to one of the country’s largest telecommunications
service providers by over 90%, calling it “unreasonably high.”
… 1&1
Telecom GmbH was fined by the Federal Commissioner for Data
Protection and Freedom of Information (BfDI) for an issue with the
company’s customer service department. Callers to the customer
service line were being provided with personal information from user
accounts by doing nothing more than providing that user’s name and
date of birth. The issue came to light when a customer filed a
complaint against a stalker, a former partner who had made use of
this security flaw to obtain the customer’s new phone number.
Though
BfDI claimed the breach “posed a risk for the entire customer
base,” a district court in Bonn decided upon review that the
GDPR fine was too high due to the limited amount of information that
an unauthorized party could potentially obtain.
(Related)
Another GDPR loophole?
https://www.huntonprivacyblog.com/2020/12/01/dutch-court-overturns-dpa-fine-on-legitimate-interest-legal-basis/
Dutch
Court Overturns DPA Fine on Legitimate Interest Legal Basis
… According
to the Dutch DPA, purely commercial interests do not constitute a
legitimate interest that can serve as a legal basis for data
processing activities under the GDPR.
In
overturning the Dutch DPA’s decision, the court relied on guidance
issued by the European Data Protection Board (the “EDPB”), which
provides that legitimate interests can cover a range of different
interests, provided that they are real and present (not speculative),
meaning that all kinds of factual, economic and idealistic interests
can qualify as legitimate interests.
A
big market for surveillance?
https://www.bespacific.com/amazon-announces-new-employee-tracking-tech-and-customers-are-lining-up/
Mashable:
“.Amazon-powered
employee tracking is coming to a warehouse, and possibly a store,
near you. The ecommerce, logistics, and (among other things) cloud
computing giant
quietly previewed Tuesday new hardware and software development kits
(SDK) which add machine learning and computer vision capabilities to
companies’ existing surveillance camera networks. And in what
should come as no surprise as companies around
the world ramp
up employee
monitoring,
customers are already champing at the bit to sic Amazon’s tech on
their own workers. Amazon, of course, is notorious for monitoring
its fulfillment center workers’ movements in excruciating detail.
From social-distance tracking
systems to
automatic tools that keep
tabs on “the
rates of each individual associate’s productivity,” Amazon has a
well deserved reputation for invasiveness. AWS
Panorama,
shown off at the AWS
re:Invent conference,
offers some version of that future to companies willing to cough up
the cash. And while Amazon partially
advertises the
new system as allowing “you to monitor workplace safety,”
corporate customers clearly have a different purpose in mind.
(Related)
Does this move strip out all value from Productivity Score?
https://www.makeuseof.com/microsoft-productivity-score-scaled-back/
Microsoft
Scales Back the Privacy-Invading Productivity Score
Microsoft
recently released a new tool called "Productivity Score"
that allowed employers to check on how productive their workers are,
but it quickly drew the ire of privacy advocates all over the world.
In response, the software giant is making adjustments to the service
to make it less intrusive.
… Microsoft
has now made a post on Microsoft
365 tackling
the controversy. First, the company is reshaping Productivity Score
so that it removes all identifying information from workers.
Employers can only use the data to see how their company as a whole
is doing, and cannot use the tool to pry into what an individual is
up to.
Second,
Microsoft is refining the UI so that it presents the Productivity
Score as a means of measuring how a business is adopting modern
technology. It will no longer give the impression that it's meant to
stalk individual workers. [Was
that ‘impression’ deliberate? Bob]
Not
sure about the witchcraft bit, but cheating sounds like a good idea.
https://www.bespacific.com/legal-research-no-longer-limited-to-keywords/
Legal
research no longer limited to keywords
Tom
Goldstein – SCOTUS Blog –
“Longtime
readers of SCOTUSblog are by now familiar with Casetext’s
legal search tool.
It solves an ever-present need for our team: finding opinions from
all levels of the court system for our articles and case pages.
Practitioners who read this blog, on the other hand, face a different
need in their day-to-day work with the law. Rather than searching
cases by name, attorneys need a way to search case law to find
support for specific propositions. This task is challenging not just
because the common law is vast, but because judges will use different
articulations for the same proposition or principle. Casetext
addresses this formidable challenge head on with their new tool:
Parallel
Search.
As opposed to simple keyword search, the limitations of which most
of us are intimately familiar with, Parallel Search uses machine
learning technology to match full phrases and sentences with those
with similar meanings in case law, even if the results and query have
almost no words in common. It’s so powerful that users
have described the
technology as “straight up witchcraft” and “almost … like
cheating” (though it certainly isn’t)…”
A few years ago, this would have been headline
news. Now only a few of us scifi geeks even notice it.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/01/1012793/chinas-change-5-mission-has-successfully-landed-on-the-moon/
China’s
Chang’e 5 mission has successfully landed on the moon
The lander is
expected to begin drilling operations very soon for lunar material
that it will bring back to Earth
