Thursday, October 9, 2014
A sense that it wasn’t designRobert Sullivan has such a good interview with Jony Ive over at Vogue: In other words, the secret weapon of the most sought-after personal-electronics company in the world is a very nice guy from Northeast London who has a soft spot for woodworking and the sense that …Thursday, October 9, 2014
Philly will consider adding LGBTQ protections to hate crimes ordinanceRandy Lobasso, writing at Philly Weekly‘s PhillyNow blog: Last week, Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown introduced a proposal along with Councilman Jim Kenney to add disability, sexual orientation and gender identity to the …Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Subprime auto lenders use technology to compel paymentMichael Corkery And Jessica Silver-Greenberg, reporting at the New York Times DealBook blog: Ms. Bolender was three days behind on her monthly car payment. Her lender, C.A.G. Acceptance of Mesa, Ariz., remotely activated a device in her car’s …Friday, September 26, 2014
FBI Director dislikes encryption on Apple and Google devicesEncryption of data on mobile devices is a big selling point in our post-Snowden world. But FBI Director James Comes isn’t happy about it: What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to place …Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Anonymous Instagram users role-play with stolen baby photosBlake Miller of Fast Company has this chilling article: Jenny had become a victim of a growing—and to many, alarming—new community that exists primarily on Instagram: baby role-players. Instagram users like Nikki steal images of babies and …Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Apple can’t bypass your iOS passcodeApple says in the latest revision of its page on government information requests: On devices running iOS 8, your personal data such as photos, messages (including attachments), email, contacts, call history, iTunes content, notes, and reminders is placed …Thursday, September 18, 2014
OutBeat, America’s First Queer Jazz FestivalI don’t usually write about events here, but since I wrote the article to which I link above, I thought it appropriate to share. I had several great conversations with Chris Bartlett, Executive Director of the William Way Community Center in …Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Millenials won’t use subpar enterprise softwarePaul Boag writes at Smashing Magazine: Frustration will only increase as millennials enter the workforce. These people are digital natives, and they expect a certain standard of software. They expect software to adapt to them, not the other way …Saturday, September 13, 2014
The systemic failure of modern hiring practicesLaurie Voss, in a piece about technical hiring that is easily applied to the legal field and hiring more generally, on asking applicants questions to which they almost certainly don’t know the answer: The weakest candidates will try to waffle or make …Friday, September 12, 2014
Privacy advocates, tech companies nudge Congress to protect ‘abandoned’ e-mailsThe Email Privacy Act would prevent the government from using mere administrative subpoenas to access email older than 180 days. The distinction, included in the Stored Communications Act , was based on the need for users …Friday, September 5, 2014
7th Circuit strikes down gay marriage bans in Wisconsin and Indiana The legal momentum favors universal application of the fundamental right of two consenting adults to marry, but that doesn’t make each ruling any less exciting.Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Listen: The Lawfare Podcast discusses zombies in the context of international law and national securityIf you’ve ever wondered how international law, laws of war and national security policy might be applied to a zombie apocalypse scenario, listen to episode 89 of The Lawfare Podcast. The law and …Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Larry Lessig fighting for campaign finance reform with Mayday PACLawrence Lessig’s Mayday PAC is using the very system it decries to attempt to bring that system down. In other words, Lessig et al are hijacking the virus (the influence of big donors on American politics via election contributions) …Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Facebook is not freeIf you use Facebook, this article is a must-read. It’s now common knowledge Facebook is always watching and analyzing how you use the service. But the breadth and depth of the company’s participation in the data brokering economy is staggering. The worst part? You literally …Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Why we don’t speak up at workThis piece by Claire Lew at Signal v. Noise doesn’t exactly fit into my general topics of law, technology and design, but it’s so important I that feel obligated to share it. I mention in my article about the role of metrics in editorial strategy that I’ve been …Sunday, July 6, 2014
For the NSA, we are the haystackBarton Gellman, Julie Tate and Ashkan Soltani, reporting at the Washington Post: Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended …Friday, July 4, 2014
Facebook COO Sandberg apologizes for emotional contagion experimentR. Jai Krishna, reporting on the reaction of Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg to the outcry over the company’s experiment on the emotions of nearly 700,000 unwitting users: We take privacy and security at Facebook …Thursday, July 3, 2014
Listen: This Week in LawWhen it comes to my own website, editorial calendars always give way to real life. I’m back with the latest in a series that would be more accurately called the “Podcast of the Month.” I really need to step it up with these, as I still have about 70 of them to which I listen …Sunday, June 29, 2014
Houston, We Have A Public Domain ProblemParker Higgins of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, lamenting the recent removal of a public domain NASA clip he posted on the audio sharing site SoundCloud: The real goofy bit is that before I started at EFF, I worked at SoundCloud. I actually uploaded …Saturday, June 28, 2014
Facebook experimented on its users' emotionsAviva Rutkin, reporting in New Scientist: A team of researchers, led by Adam Kramer at Facebook in Menlo Park, California, was curious to see if this phenomenon [of contagious emotion] would occur online. To find out, they manipulated which posts showed …Friday, June 20, 2014
Budgets and egosMark Headd, Philly’s first Chief Data Officer, who quit in spring of 2013, talking to Juliana Reyes of Technically Philly about why he resigned the post: “A self-certifying website is a 20th century answer to the problem of tax deadbeats,” he wrote in an email. “An open data API is …Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Avoid Facebook’s all-seeing eyeViolet Blue, reporting at ZDNet: Facebook also announced Thursday it will begin tracking its users’ browsing and activities on websites and apps outside Facebook, starting within a few weeks Her article is full of great advice for people who want to minimize …Friday, June 6, 2014
Journalism and tomatoesFrom a May 2013 editorial in the Columbia Journalism Review: Perhaps journalism can learn from the mistakes of the food industry, which bred a perfectly red, flawless-looking tomato, giving the edge to looks over taste, since that’s what consumers were buying. Redesigns …Thursday, May 29, 2014
AT&T, acquiring DirectTV, “vows” to stick to FCC’s Open Internet rules for 3 yearsNathan Mattise, reporting at Ars Technica: The two companies will demonstrate “continued commitment for three years after closing to the FCC’s Open Internet protections established in 2010, …Thursday, May 22, 2014
Mark Zuckerberg on survival of the most passionate I actually think a lot of the reason why great stuff gets built is because it’s kind of irrational at the time, so it kind of selects for the people that care most about doing it. A great point. That young man is going places.Saturday, May 17, 2014
Gino Barrica on self-hating lawyersGino Barrica, responding to yet another article1 cautioning against the pursuit of a law degree: See, I’m not a self-hating lawyer. I’m not one of those who hang my head in shame when people ask what I do and I’m not someone who tells people to run for the hills …Wednesday, May 14, 2014
The true Julian AssangeAndrew O’Hagan reads his essay Ghosting, about the failed ghostwriting project during which he got to know WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange as few do. The full text is also available at the link.Thursday, May 8, 2014
Condoleezza Rice backs out of Rutgers commencementThe Associated Press reports: The school’s board of governors had voted to pay $35,000 to the former secretary of state under President George W. Bush and national security adviser for her appearance at the May 18 ceremony. Any question involving …Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Internet Privacy and What Happens When You Try to Opt OutJanet Vertesi tried to hide her pregnancy from the internet: The myth that users will “vote with their feet” is simply wrong if opting out comes at such a high price. With social, financial and even potentially legal repercussions involved, …Friday, April 25, 2014
Philadelphia School District releases budget dataPublic entities don’t often have the budget needed to attract top talent from the private sector. But exposing data to public manipulation and scrutiny, aside from fulfilling a duty of transparency too often ignored, allows anyone interested in …