Anita Sarkeesian asserts her right not to be in danger of being shotTim Vitale, spokesman for Utah State University, on Anita Sarkeesian’s cancellation of a planned lecture in the wake of emailed threats:
She was worried about Utah law preventing police from keeping people with legal, conceal-carry permits from entering the event. But our police were prepared and had in place extra security measures. It was her decision to cancel.
HBO without cable coming in 2015Peter Kafka reports at Recode:
[HBO CEO Richard] Plepler said the company will go “beyond the wall” and launch a “stand alone, over the top” version of HBO in the US next year, and would work with “current partners,” and may work with others as well. But he wouldn’t provide any other detail.
Plepler has been pondering this possibility for a while, and a couple of years ago I did some back-of-the-napkin math which suggested there is a lot of money to be had in a web-only subscription.
I’ve heard from many people who insist their iPhone or iPad “can’t handle” or “doesn’t fit” iOS 8. I read an article about a slow-down in updates to iOS 8. John Gruber of Daring Fireball first posited that some well-documented software bugs were making people reluctant to update.
But his follow-up post reminded me how many times I’ve been asked by “normals” how I managed to update my iPhone 5. Their phones, the common story goes, just don’t have enough free space available to perform the update.
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 designers ought to keep their design talents backstage where they can do the most good. “There’s an odd irony here,” he observes.
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 city’s ordinance. The proposal would add up to 90 days of jail time and a $2,000 fine if someone is convicted of hate crimes in addition to whatever other specific crime they’ve committed.
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 dashboard that prevented her car from starting. Before she could get back on the road, she had to pay more than $389, money she did not have that morning in March.
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 themselves beyond the law. David Kravets of Ars Technica reports Comey has “reached out” to the companies about the issue. Absent new or amended legislation, though, there is little he can do about it, precisely because there is such a sales incentive to marketing encryption these days.
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 children off the Internet, give them a new name, and claim them as their own. Sometimes they create entire fake families.
The sad thing is there is relatively little protection to be had from the law in situations like this.
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 under the protection of your passcode. Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data. So it’s not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8.
My iPhone 5 recently stopped charging, unless I propped the phone upside down against an inclined surface like a lamp stand or a keyboard. I’m not in a position to buy one of those fancy new iPhones, so I shopped around in the internet’s DIY isle.
I found a well-reviewed set of iPhone surgery tools and even a well-reviewed replacement part on Amazon. Armed with those and an instructional YouTube video, I planned to replace the part myself.
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 Philadelphia, about OutBeat in writing the article. I’ll publish a Q&A with him next month, also at Geekadelphia.
Whether you’re gay, bisexual, straight or heteroflexible, and even if you don’t like jazz ( or don’t know yet that you do like jazz), the four-day festival is going to be fun and informative.
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 around.
My generation were loud about the outdated software our employers used. We begged, insisted and shouted from the rooftops that efficient workload management demanded a higher level of polish, functionality and user experience.
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 wild guesses. This is a terrible sign, firstly because it never works, and secondly because they thought that it would. [ … ] Strong candidates say “I don’t know” as soon as they hit their limit, and may start asking questions.
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 to access and download email from a service provider’s servers. The logic was that if someone hadn’t downloaded their email in six months or more, they had effectively abandoned it.
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.
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 policy discussed are real and interesting but the tongue-in-cheek analysis is wonderfully entertaining.
The Economist wrote in 2011 about the end of the legal industry’s lofty heights, saying of one large but ill-fated American firm:
Howrey’s boss, Robert Ruyak, blamed two new trends for his firm’s demise. Howrey had begun acceding to clients’ demands for flat, deferred or contingent fees, causing income to become clumpy and unpredictable. And the rise of specialised e-discovery vendors hollowed out another source of revenue. Legal services continue to unbundle as traditionally firm-based work like document review is outsourced and electronic discovery becomes more complex.
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) to deliver the vaccine (funding for politicians committed to proposals which would limit big political contributions).
If you support the cause, be heartened: Lessig likes to fight, and is good at it.
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 signed up for it. Facebook obviously doesn’t charge its users money, but the mere act of creating a profile affirmatively grants the company total access and usage rights over everything you do on the site.
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 present for some poor decisions and didn’t speak my mind.
Claire’s post explains exactly why I failed to speak up, and it’s an important read whether you’re a manager or not.