Thursday, March 23, 2017
Heinz running Don Draper’s ‘Pass the Heinz’ ads Tim Nudd at Adweek: In a meta union of advertising’s real and fictional worlds, Heinz just greenlighted the ads—and will run them almost exactly as Draper intended, beginning today, in print and out-of-home executions in New York City. This is awesome, not just because it’s a marriage of television and the real world, but because the ads themselves are actually brilliant.
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
Trans characters in the first big video games of 2017 Laura Dale, writing at Polygon: The past month of AAA video game releases might be the most interesting I have ever experienced as a trans woman, meaning someone who was designated male at birth but is now living as female. While far from perfect in execution, I can point out three trans characters in three separate AAA video games released in the past four weeks.
Monday, February 27, 2017
Subscribe to my newsletter Modern Law at getrevue.co/profile/modernlaw Can anyone sustain a newsletter about the law without talking politics? Tune into the resurrection of Modern Law to find out. I don’t plan on talking about Trump, at least not directly. I don’t want this thing to be an outlet for my political positions. It’s a way to express what I find interesting as the law evolves. So while you may see references to politics or Trump in the links I share, don’t expect political commentary one way or the other. One more thing: most issues will be limited to 5 links, but this one has a few extra because it’s been a while and I’m celebrating a new commitment to getting it out to you once (or even twice) every week. If for some crazy reason you want politics and daily newsletters from me, consider subscribing to my other newsletter at Nuzzel.com.
Friday, January 13, 2017
Justice Dept. internal watchdog to investigate FBI’s Clinton inquiry The inquiry by the Justice Department's inspector general, likely to keep open the wounds of the bitter 2016 presidential race, will focus on whether "policies or procedures were not followed" by the FBI and Justice Department. Of particular focus will be the letter sent by Comey to Congress just 11 days before the Nov. 8 election that disclosed that his agents were reviewing newly discovered emails possibly pertinent to the then-closed investigation on Clinton’s handling of classified material while serving as secretary of State.
Monday, December 19, 2016
Prenda Law “copyright trolls” Steele and Hansmeier arrested Justice.
Saturday, December 17, 2016
I’m in a bookstore, Joseph Fox in Philadelphia, and there are people here in the cramped sometimes hallway-narrow store with me. Many of them. People I mean. Some smell like rain. That’s how close they are. It’s raining outside and they’re coming into the store and I can smell the rain on them. You have to look behind you and on both sides before kneeling or unkneeling or turning one way or another.
Friday, December 16, 2016
NBC stupidly shutting down Breaking News app, service The decision, as it often does in the media business, came down to revenue. "Unfortunately, despite its consumer appeal, Breaking News has not been able to generate enough revenue to sustain itself," Ascheim said in the letter supplied by NBC News. "We have therefore made the hard decision to close its operations so that we can re-invest that funding into NBC News’ core digital products to help us achieve our ambitious goals for those businesses.
Wednesday, December 7, 2016
Wells Fargo Killing Sham Account Suits by Using Arbitration [Jennifer] Zeleny, a lawyer who lives outside Salt Lake City and opened a Wells Fargo account when she started a new law practice, said it would be impossible for her to agree to arbitrate her dispute over an account that she had never signed up for in the first place. The bank’s counterargument: The arbitration clauses included in the legitimate contracts customers signed to open bank accounts also cover disputes related to the false ones set up in their names.
Monday, November 28, 2016
‘Dark Meat’ by Gabriel Thompson Failing to record injuries is one strategy to create the illusion of a safe workplace. Another is to fail to refer workers to doctors for proper tests and diagnoses. Each time an injury causes an employee to miss a day of work or to receive medical treatment beyond first aid, the company is required to record it in an OSHA log book. This data is reported each year to the Department of Labor and is used to identify industries with high injury rates—whose facilities will then face increased inspections.
Thursday, November 17, 2016
FCC abides by GOP request, deletes everything from meeting agenda Wheeler's attempt to impose new set-top box rules that help consumers avoid paying cable box rental fees may also be doomed. Consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge sent a letter to Trump today urging him to side with consumers instead of "cable and Hollywood lobbyists" on the issue. Jesus.
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
Dropbox employee’s password reuse led to theft of 60M+ user credentials Kate Conger, reporting at TechCrunch: Dropbox disclosed in 2012 that an employee’s password was acquired and used to access a document with email addresses, but did not disclose that passwords were also acquired in the theft. Because Dropbox stores its user passwords hashed and salted, that’s technically accurate — it seems that hackers were only able to obtain hashed files of Dropbox user passwords and were unable to crack them.
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
Secret Cameras Record Baltimore’s Every Move From Above Pritchett had no idea that as he spoke, a small Cessna airplane equipped with a sophisticated array of cameras was circling Baltimore at roughly the same altitude as the massing clouds. The plane’s wide-angle cameras captured an area of roughly 30 square miles and continuously transmitted real-time images to analysts on the ground. The footage from the plane was instantly archived and stored on massive hard drives, allowing analysts to review it weeks later if necessary.
Tuesday, July 12, 2016
A beloved relative recently included me on an email forward that I simply could not ignore. I’m not the first person to write a rebuttal to this email. It has been making the rounds since at least 2009, as the screenshot below illustrates.
[caption id=“attachment_2525” align=“aligncenter” width=“700”]<img class=“size-large wp-image-2525” src=“https://joeross1.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/27aed-scr.png?w=1024&h=768" alt=‘Earliest Google result for “An Eye Opener” email: archive.is/jO20n’ width=“700” height=“525”> Earliest Google result for “An Eye Opener” email: archive.is/jO20n[/caption]
My response took about an hour to research and draft but there is so much factual evidence available to refute the absurd claims made in the “An Eye Opener” email that you could do a thesis on it. In other words, the little bit of work I did here is just the tip of the iceberg.
Here’s the full text of the email, followed by my reply.
Thursday, July 7, 2016
NJ law would require pet stores sell only rescue animals John C. Ensslin reports for The Record: New pet stores in New Jersey would be allowed to sell only cats and dogs obtained from shelters, pounds and animal rescue organization under a bill the state Senate passed Thursday. The bill still has to go to the Assembly and will face industry opposition there, but it’s a great step forward.
Thursday, May 12, 2016
A Slack bot to alert about missing children [caption id=“attachment_2481” align=“aligncenter” width=“700”]Slack screenshot of MissingKidsBot[/caption] From the product page of MissingKidsBot, built by David Markovich and Daniel Doubrovkine: According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, roughly 800,000 children are reported missing each year in the United States -- that's roughly 2,000 per day. This is a really great idea, and something everyone with a Slack group should consider adding.
Monday, March 7, 2016
Apple users targeted in first known Mac ransomware campaign Jim Finkle reports for Reuters: Hackers infected Macs through a tainted copy of a popular program known as Transmission, which is used to transfer data through the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing network, Palo Alto said on a blog posted on Sunday afternoon. The cynical part of me wonders whether this is a clever move by one or more media companies to discourage the use of BitTorrent clients.
Thursday, March 3, 2016
The perils of marriage equality Professor Kimberly Mutcherson of Rutgers Law School writes at Concurring Opinions about Professor Katherine Franke’s recent book ‘Wedlocked: the Perils of Marriage Equality’: We do not want to reinforce familial hierarchies by forcing people into specific family arrangements in order to warrant recognition (2 parents only), nor do we want to fetishize outsider families such that those who do not fit that model are denigrated for their choices (i.
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
Enough with the conspiracy theories about Justice Scalia’s death I read this earlier today: "As a former homicide commander, I am stunned that no autopsy was ordered for Justice Scalia," William O. Ritchie wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday, according to reports. After seeking to cast doubt on the conclusion of the deputy U.S. marshals who responded to a call from the ranch, he added, "My gut tells me there is something fishy going on in Texas.
Wednesday, February 3, 2016
Google begins rolling out free internet to public housing in Fiber cities This is a big deal. I worked at the Philadelphia Housing Authority for years and talked to a lot of kids and adults about their desire to get online. Philly isn’t yet on Google’s Fiber expansion roadmap, but this is a great development.
Tuesday, February 2, 2016
Retiring founder wants $1M for his SCOTUS audio archive Oyez is a robust archive of audio recordings and other information spanning much of the history of the Supreme Court of the United States. Its founder Chicago-Kent College of Law Professor Jerry Goldman is looking for a buyer as he nears retirement. Jess Bravin reports at the Wall Street Journal: The sticking point, however, isn’t the annual budget; Harvard Law School, for one, has offered to pick up the operating cost.
