Retiring founder wants $1M for his SCOTUS audio archive
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. But Mr. Goldman also wants to be paid for the sweat he’s put into his baby–or at least the intellectual property it represents—something he estimates is worth well over $1 million.
Here comes an entitled opinion right here: A decision to somehow “close down” Oyez if no one is willing to put up six or seven figures for it would be morally bankrupt and stain Professor Goldman’s otherwise admirable legacy.
No Rey, No Way
LucasFilm to toy vendors: No Rey
Michael Boehm at Sweatpants and Coffee:
The insider, who was at those meetings, described how initial versions of many of the products presented to Lucasfilm featured Rey prominently. At first, discussions were positive, but as the meetings wore on, one or more individuals raised concerns about the presence of female characters in the Star Wars products. Eventually, the product vendors were specifically directed to exclude the Rey character from all Star Wars-related merchandise, said the insider.
I want to be infuriated and surprised by this revelation, but I’m just infuriated.
U.S. DOT paving way for self-driving cars (and a Klingons aside)
U.S. DOT paving way for self-driving cars
Chris Ziegler reports at The Verge:
DOT and NHTSA will develop the new tools necessary for this new era of vehicle safety and mobility, and will seek new authorities when they are necessary to ensure that fully autonomous vehicles, including those designed without a human driver in mind, are deployable in large numbers when demonstrated to provide an equivalent or higher level of safety than is now available.
This is far more progressive than I expected the federal government to be on the autonomous transportation vehicle front, primarily for safety reasons. It’s good news.
More than 13,000 untested rape kits in Florida
More than 13,000 untested rape kits in Florida
This bit sent shivers down my spine:
After Detroit processed a backlog of 11,000 rape kits, police identified more than 100 serial rape suspects.
Why shivers? Because it instantly prompts me to wonder how many women were raped who wouldn’t have been raped if these kits were more efficiently processed.
Cosby charged with sexual assault
Bill Cosby charged with sexual assault in Pennsylvania
The TV legend is accused of drugging and sexually assaulting former Temple University employee Andrea Constand when she visited his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004. A probable cause affidavit filed by investigators this week alleges that Cosby “sought to incapacitate” Constand by giving her a mix of pills and wine that sent her slipping in and out of consciousness and left her unable to consent to sexual activity. Priligy brand and generic Priligy effectiveness reviews read on http://howmed.net/priligy-dapoxetine/.
Ms. Constand settled her civil case against Mr. Cosby but the latter’s statements in a deposition taken for that case and released to the public by request of the press triggered the Montgomery County District Attorney’s obligation to prosecute Cosby.
Is sending porn illegal in Pennsylvania?
Is sending porn illegal in Pennsylvania?
Dave Davies writes on his WHYY blog, Off Mic:
It's right there in the state crimes code; it's a third-class misdemeanor to "sell, lend, distribute, transmit, exhibit, or give away or show any obscene materials to any person 18 years of age or older..." (There's a separate statute prohibiting distribution of pornography to anyone younger than 18.)
He’s right, you can find it at 18 Pa . C.S. 5903. Davies goes on to explain the difficulty of defining “obscenity,” a function of the concept’s basis in community standards which can vary from community to community.
Katie Floyd's 3 Tips For Family Tech Support
Katie Floyd’s 3 Tips For Family Tech Support
Great advice for every geek dreading the holiday “Can you help me with my computer?” conversations.
Laser-armed fighter jets by 2020
Laser-armed fighter jets by 2020
Thom Patterson writes for CNN:
Here's how Air Force special ops might use them: The commander of USAF special ops, Lt. Gen. Bradley Heithold, said last September that by 2020 he wants them on C-130J Ghostrider gunships for landing zone protection.The laser weapons would take out possible threats like enemy vehicles, or disable infrastructure such as cell towers.
I saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens last night (more on that coming in an article later) so laser weapons seem an appropriate story to share today.
Sorry HR, your job descriptions suck
Machine Intelligence In The Real World
[...] Textio is a text editor that recommends improvements to job descriptions as you type. With it, I can go from a 40th percentile job description to a 90th percentile one in just a few minutes, all thanks to a beautifully presented machine learning algorithm.
I respect Human Resources professionals. Their job can be shitty. But so can their job descriptions. The prospects who know what you mean by “incumbent” are probably too pedantic and detail-oriented to apply to the likely underpaid and/or intellectually vapid position you’re hiring for. The ones who don’t know what you mean don’t actually know what they’re applying to, which makes them terrible prospects.
If machine learning can remedy that, I hope it gains wider use. But I don’t think machine learning is necessary to stop writing the kind of drivel that passes for a job description these days. It’s a classic failure of capitalism: when demand dramatically outstrips supply, quality decreases without consequences to the supplier. This goes for jobs, treatment by employers, and even job descriptions. They were never exactly the pinnacle of eloquence, but I’ve seen a serious decline in the past year or so.
Many legal filings written by attorneys are also full of reader-hostile jargon and nonsense clearly included because the lawyer’s writing professor said it should be included, or because the named partner at their first firm always used it. It’s one of the most infuriating and offensive aspects of modern U.S. professional culture as far I’m concerned:
“We do it this way because we do it this way, because the people before us did it this way, that’s why we do it this way.”
Never, ever say that to me. It triggers an almost instinctual, lizard-brain contempt in me and an assumption that whoever said it is incapable of critical thinking or analytical reasoning, and I can be a real asshole when I think that about someone.
"A slower-track school where they do well"
“A slower-track school where they do well”
I’m just going to leave this Justice Scalia quote right here:
There are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well.
Further reading:
- The Supreme Court might destroy affirmative action because this white woman’s grades weren’t good enough - Slate
- A Colorblind Constitution: What Abigail Fisher’s Affirmative Action Case Is Really About - ProPublica
- Fisher v. University of Texas - Wikipedia
- SCOTUSBlog case file on Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin
Israeli Supreme Court Rejects Family Petition To Bury Trans Woman As Their “Son"
Israeli Supreme Court Rejects Family Petition To Bury Trans Woman As Their “Son"
Peleg, who was 31, had long been concerned about a battle with her ultra-orthodox family after her death. Their beliefs forbid cremation, and she worried they would attempt to have a religious burial under her male name. Peleg paid for her own cremation in March 2014 at the one funeral home in Jerusalem that performs the service, and filed a will with an attorney a day before her suicide and asked that he fight for her wishes if her family attempted to interfere.
This is heartening. No one should be driven to suicide by discrimination against who they are, but the ultimate insult is ignorance of one’s post-death wishes, because when are we more vulnerable than in death?
Adele's '25' on Pandora
Pandora confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that every track from Adele'e new album is available through its radio service. That's not going to be a particularly great way of listening to 25 — because Pandora is a radio service, it means you can't choose what to listen to and will have to wait for a station to play the new songs — but it does mean that Adele's album is streaming in some form. You just have to be really, really patient to hear it all.
Pandora’s strange licensing niche usually works against it but here, despite the inability to listen through the songs in order, Pandora has something like an exclusive.
I wonder if Adele’s lawyers told her that keeping it off the on-demand streaming services means the track order she chose will not be the one many people hear the first time they hear the songs.
I don’t know how much that matters to modern musicians, or to someone like Adele, who doesn’t really have a customer acquisition problem.
For the, er, record, I prefer to listen to an album in order if possible.
Restraining orders in the age of drones
Today Joshua Goldman of CNET reports that the FAA recommends requiring drone pilots to register instead of registering every single drone:
On November 21, the FAA task force made its registration recommendations, and instead of keeping track of each and every drone out there, it suggested registering the names and street addresses of the pilots (mailing address, email address, phone number and serial number of the aircraft are optional). The registration requirement will apply to any UAS less than 55 pounds (25kg) and heavier than half a pound (250 grams) and owners must be at least 13 years old. A parent or guardian can register for anyone younger than 13 years old.
That makes perfect sense to me. I am concerned, however, about the implications for drone use when it comes to what are widely known as restraining orders, although in Pennsylvania they are called protection from abuse orders. The function of such orders is simple: make the defendant’s physical proximity to or remote contact via telephone or third parties with the plaintiff an indirect criminal contempt. This triggers the ability to sanction and if necessary imprison a violating defendant.
As you can imagine, these are especially useful in domestic violence situations, custody disputes and stalking circumstances. Pennsylvania orders can last up to three years based on the judge’s discretion, while New Jersey orders can theoretically last forever. Importantly, in both states a protection order prohibits the defendant from owning or receiving firearms. The goal is obvious: you don’t want a nutcase kept 100 yards from his ex-wife by a protective order to have a gun with three times that range with which to attack her.
This is where my concern about drones comes into play. I think FAA registration of drone pilots is a great idea. However, the surveillance and yes, even remote attack capabilities of drones require the prohibition of their use by defendants in protection order matters. The FAA maintains a public-facing database of registered aircraft pilots in three categories, Airline Transport Pilot, Commercial Pilot and Private Pilot. It could add a fourth category, Drone Pilot. Then it could add registration information to its Web Services, for which it provides an API with which developers can interface with the data and present it to end users.
This would allow authorities to cross-reference their own protection order registries, like Pennsylvania’s Protection From Abuse Database, with the FAA registration information and remove drones when the state police remove firearms from the defendant’s possession. Drones are an awesome technology but their value to filmmakers, scientists and geeks generally shouldn’t blind to the fact that they can be put to nefarious uses as well.
Vizio TVs spy on you, here's how to disable it
Vizio TVs spy on you, here’s how to disable it
Vizio’s technology works by analyzing snippets of the shows you’re watching, whether on traditional television or streaming Internet services such as Netflix. Vizio determines the date, time, channel of programs — as well as whether you watched them live or recorded. The viewing patterns are then connected your IP address - the Internet address that can be used to identify every device in a home, from your TV to a phone.
This is a damn good reason not to buy a Vizio TV. I won’t rant about opt-out/opt-in again. But I found Vizio generally had a good price-to-quality ratio: not top shelf hardware, but not top shelf prices, either. So this shadiness is a shame.
A shamey-ness?
Anyway, props to Samsung and LG, who, according to Julia Angwin at ProPublica, require user consent before enabling the sort of tracking Vizio turns on by default.
Disable Vizio "Smart Interactivity"
Vizio obviously knows how shady its default spying is because they have a page named after the feature which begins with information on how to turn it off:
VIA TV Interface
- Press the MENU button on your TV's remote.
- Select Settings.
- Highlight Smart Interactivity.
- Press RIGHT arrow to change setting to Off.
VIA Plus TV Interface
- Press the MENU button on your TV's remote or open HDTV Settings app.
- Select System.
- Select Reset & Admin.
- Highlight Smart Interactivity.
- Press RIGHT arrow to change setting to Off.
The how and why of sneaky ultrasonic ad tracking
Dan Goodin reports over at Ars Technica on the development of technology which can use inaudible frequencies to tie together multiple unconnected devices. He explains:
The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. While the sound can't be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it. When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.
Goodin cites a letter from the Center for Democracy and Technology to the Federal Trade Commission [PDF] describing the technical aspects of the practice and the privacy implications. I won’t repeat what Goodin or CDT have already explained with clarity. Instead, I wanted to talk about the inability of users like us to opt out of cross-device tracking.
Why don’t the companies developing and using these tracking technologies just tell us what they’re doing and give us the option to opt out? Obviously, requiring us to opt in would be the most honorable and least user-hostile approach. But I’ll concede that as being firmly in the “never gonna happen” column.
I am open to the possibility that I set up a straw man in the next section of this article, so feel free to point it out to me if that’s what you think. Just be constructive.
Concerns about using a straw man aside, the only logic I can see undergirding the failure to offer an opt-out mechanism is a concern that a large number of users would in fact opt out. That would obviously reduce or, in a worst-case scenario for tracking companies, eliminate the population of tracked individuals.
The only problem with that is that it’s bullshit.
We opt in to terms of service and privacy policy all over the web every day without reading a word of them. Projects like ToS;DR and TOSback aim to make us better informed about what we’re agreeing to and how those agreements change over time. They are fascinating and important projects but primarily the domain of geeks like me (and, since you’re reading this, possibly you, as well).
The truth is the overwhelming majority of people click “Yes” or “Agree” or “Continue” or whatever other button or link gets them to the web content or software they want to use. Here’s a quote from an AdWeek article published in May 2015, citing a survey done by photography website ScoopShot:
More than 30 percent of the 1,270 survey respondents said they never read the ToS when signing up to a social network. 49.53 percent only read the ToS ‘sometimes,’ and only 17.56 percent of people ‘always’ read the ToS.
Yes, that’s only one study, and yes, it was conducted on SurveyMonkey, but it’s a decent sample size. And can you honestly tell me that you or anyone else you know read the terms and policies of the sites and software you use? Probably not.
Is there any other reason, then, that creepy advertising tracking technology doesn’t offer an opt-out, just like the ones we never actually make use of throughout the rest of the web? Yes, I think there is.
Most websites have terms of service and privacy policies, although they are usually relegated to miniscule links at the very bottom of the website’s footer section. The European Union requires cookie notifications. But when is the last time you decided not to use a website like Facebook or the BBC website because you read their policies and didn’t consent to them? I’ll answer for the overwhelming majority of us: never, ever.
It’s their ubiquity coupled with the dominant user response of wildly clicking “Yes” until you get what you came for that makes website policies such a compelling topic of discussion. The companies building the technology that uses inaudible sound to tell advertisers that your phone, computer, television and tablet all belong to the same person can minimize conversation about their products by refusing to present you with an opt-out mechanism.
It’s that desire to remain invisible and as uncontroversial as possible for as long as possible that motivates them to be so sneaky. One commenter on Goodin’s Ars article puts it very well:
that advertisers keep basing their technological "progress" off of malware research and techniques is very telling.
It sure is. The reality is that I am one of those weirdos who doesn’t care if I’m tracked, but I do care when I’m not asked to consent to it. I propose that some privacy-minded geeks more intelligent than I develop some sort of ultrasonic ad-cancelling noise generation software for us to use in our homes and offices to thwart secret ultrasonic cross-device ad tracking. You have to take that one and run with it, I’m just an ideas man.
Is the Russian kamikaze sub misinformation or an inadvertent warning to the West?
Is the Russian kamikaze sub misinformation or an inadvertent warning to the West?
Apparently,
The screen capture depicts a project called "Ocean Multipurpose System 'Status-6.'" The weapon would apparently be delivered by a nuclear-powered underwater drone, carried externally by a nuclear submarine. The drone would be capable of depths of up to 3,280 feet and capable of speeds of up to 65 miles an hour. It would also have a range of 6,213 miles.
A weapon like this could take out the transatlantic data cables as mere collateral damage…
Russian Ships Too Close to Data Cables for U.S. Comfort
Russian Ships Too Close to Data Cables for U.S. Comfort
The first of two this-is-really-concerning posts you’ll find here today:
The role of the cables is more important than ever before. They carry global business worth more than $10 trillion a day, including from financial institutions that settle transactions on them every second. Any significant disruption would cut the flow of capital. The cables also carry more than 95 percent of daily communications.
I hope there are ways for at least economic, government and military organizations to route around those cables via satellite if necessary…
Apple has learned nothing from Microsoft's Surface
Apple has learned nothing from Microsoft’s Surface - The Verge
iPad sales are indeed down, but it does not follow from that fact that iPad use is down. This Time article did the yeoman’s work of aggregating some data about iPad sales. The bottom line is that in the five years since the iPad’s 2010 launch, Apple has sold more than 258 million of the tablets. That’s more iPads in the wild than people living in Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Japan, Mexico, Philippines, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Egypt, Germany, Iran, Turkey, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Thailand, France, United Kingdom, or Italy (thanks Wolfram|Alpha).
My dad has an Android tablet and a Windows PC. Since he got the tablet (which, interestingly from a marketing perspective, he insists on calling an iPad) he does nothing on the PC except pay bills, and that’s primarily because most of the apps you use to pay bills on mobile devices are, to put it mildly, user-hostile antichrists of design and experience.
He is a sample of one, but my dad isn’t even your typical cutting edge older gentleman. For example, he was on Aol dial-up until sometime around 2013, and refuses to use a non-clamshell mobile phone. So his taking so quickly to using a tablet implies to me that the replacement of PCs by iPads and other tablets may be closer than Tom Warren of The Verge thinks, although still far off.
I don’t see my dad using an iPad Pro though because most of his use is on the couch as a second screen. I suspect that the second screen use case coupled with the price point will dampen iPad Pro sales outside of the geek and artist demographics.
When is time to take antitrust action against Comcast?
When is time to take antitrust action against Comcast?
It’s hard to read about U.S. comeptition law without wondering when Comcast is going to face consequences for its clear abuse of its market power.