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schwit1 quotes a report from Vocativ: The Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles has been caught using facial recognition software -- despite a state law preventing it. Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont describe such a program, which uses software to compare the DMV's database of names and driver's license photos with information with state and federal law enforcement. Vermont state law, however, specifically states that "The Department of Motor Vehicles shall not implement any procedures or processes that involve the use of biometric identifiers." The program, the ACLU says, invites state and federal agencies to submit photographs of persons of interest to the Vermont DMV, which it compares against its database of some 2.6 million Vermonters and shares potential matches. Since 2012, the agency has run at least 126 such searches on behalf of local police, the State Department, FBI, and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

LinkedIn has apologized for a vague new update that told some iPhone users its app would begin sharing their data with nearby users without further explanation. From a report: The update prompted outrage on Twitter after cybersecurity expert Rik Ferguson received a strange alert when he opened the resume app to read a new message: "LinkedIn would like to make data available to nearby Bluetooth devices even when you're not using the app." That gave Ferguson, vice president of research at the cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, a handful of concerns, he told Vocativ. Among them: "the lack of specificity, which data, when, under what conditions, to which devices, why does it need to happen when I'm not using the app, what are the benefits to me, where is the feature announcement and explanation, why wasn't it listed in the app update details." Reached for comment, LinkedIn said it's a mistake -- that some iPhone users were accidentally subject to undeveloped test feature the company is still working on.

The Qualcomm Foundation, along with the XPRIZE Foundation, "announced the winning team of its nearly four-year-long global competition to develop a functional, easily usable tricorder," reports Vocativ. The Pennsylvania-based Final Frontier Medical Devices team was the first place winner, receiving the top prize of $2.6 million, while Boston-based Dynamical Biomarkers nabbed $1 million. From the report: Led by Dr. Basil Harris, a Philadelphia emergency room physician, the team was mostly made out of family and friends Harris coaxed into volunteering their free time on the weekend. By contrast, Dynamical Biomarkers had 50 scientists and programmers, mostly paid, and was sponsored by the Taiwanese government and Taiwan-based cellphone company HTC. The device kit developed by Final Frontier, called DxtER, uses non-invasive sensors that collect data from the user and combines that with an AI frontloaded with information in the field of clinical emergency medicine to come with a diagnosis. The device currently operates on an iPad tablet, but future versions should work equally fine on a smartphone as well. The device, ideally, would allow patients to then send their readings to their doctors so they could collaborate on their health care. According to an interview Harris held with the Washington Post, DxtER can diagnose up to 34 medical conditions in its present design. The device developed by Dynamical Biomarkers could reach up to 50, team leader and Harvard Medical School professor Chung-Kang Peng, told the Post, given it surpasses the five-pound weight limit imposed by the competition guidelines.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vocativ: In a 35-minute speech detailing a landmark $100 billion investment into state infrastructure, largely focused on New York City and Long Island, Governor Andrew Cuomo made a number of promises that would thrill New Yorkers, like the promise of a renovated Penn Station, called Penn-Farley, a direct train from there to LaGuardia Airport, and the completion of the long-awaited Second Avenue Line. Oh, and facial recognition cameras around the city, he said: "At each crossing, and at structurally sensitive points on bridges and tunnels, advanced cameras and sensors will be installed to read license plates and test emerging facial recognition software and equipment." "We're going to be using this in Penn-Farley and we also want to be testing it in bridges and crossings system," he added. On the matter of facial recognition cameras, Cuomo was shy on details. It's unclear how many cameras will be deployed, which agencies will have access to them, what defines a crossing, how citizens' photos will be stored, and what photo databases will be used to compare against the faces of the millions of people who drive into the city. In his speech, Cuomo referenced the cameras as necessary for New York to adapt to 21st century security threats. "In this age of terrorist activity and lone wolves, if you look at points of vulnerability you'll go to our tunnels and to our bridges. So really they have to be reimagined for a new reality," he said.

Apple, Google and Microsoft -- three of the largest technology companies in the U.S. -- have each said they don't scan all incoming messages for the U.S. government, which is exactly what Yahoo does. According to Reuters, Yahoo secretly built a custom software program last year to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials. The company complied with a classified U.S. government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI. Vocativ reports: In a statement, a Microsoft spokesperson told Vocativ that "We have never engaged in the secret scanning of email traffic like what has been reported today about Yahoo." While Apple declined to give a statement on the record, a representative for the company did, in response to Vocativ's question, refer to CEO Tim Cook's official letter on consumer privacy, which reads in part: "I want to be absolutely clear that we have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will." The fact that both the companies declined further statement means it's not yet known if the NSA or FBI approached them to request they build a program like Yahoo's. Meanwhile, a spokesperson from Alphabet's Google issued a statement to CNBC: "We've never received such a request, but if we did, our response would be simple: 'no way.'" [The spokesperson later clarified that the company has not received a "directive" or "order" to that effect, either, according to The Intercept.] But the question is whether or not you believe them. With Yahoo's case, only a handful of employees knew about the program. The same could be true with Apple, Google, Microsoft or any other large tech company. Edward Snowden tweeted not too long after Reuters' report surfaced: "Heads up: Any major email service not clearly, categorically denying this tomorrow -- without careful phrasing -- is as guilty as Yahoo."

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Vocativ: [Vocativ reports:] "The U.S.'s most popular third-party presidential candidate says he would 'consider' pardoning the highest profile convicts of computer-related crimes in the country, including Chelsea Manning, Ross Ulbricht, and Jeremy Hammond. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico, also reiterated his possible willingness to pardon Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency analyst who gave a cache of agency documents to journalists in 2013." "Having actually served as a governor and administered the power to grant pardons and clemency, Gary Johnson is very conscious and respectful of the need for processes for using that authority," Joe Hunter, Johnson's communications director, told Vocativ in a statement. "However, he has made it clear on numerous occasions that he would 'look seriously at' pardoning Edward Snowden, based on public information that Snowden's actions did not cause actual harm to any U.S. intelligence personnel. Likewise, he has said he would look favorably on pardoning Ross Ulbricht, consistent with his broader and long-standing commitment to pardon nonviolent drug offenders, whistleblowers, and others imprisoned under unjust and ill-advised laws," Hunter said. When Vocativ asked specifically about Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond, Barrett Brown, and Matthew Keys, Hunter responded: "The same goes for the other individuals you have mentioned -- and hundreds, if not thousands, like them. Gov. Johnson finds it to be an outrage that the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the developed world, and announced in 2012 that, as President, he would promptly commence the process of pardoning nonviolent offenders who have done no real harm to others." The Green Party candidate Jill Stein has also shared her thoughts on pardoning Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Not only would she pardon Snowden, but she said she would appoint him to her cabinet.

Since the Uber and Lyft ride-sharing apps stopped service in Austin, drunk driving has increased, riders are hunting for alternatives, and the police are conducting undercover sting operations against unauthorized ride-sharing drivers. With Chicago also considering new restrictions on ride-sharing apps, Slashdot reader MarkWhittington shares this report from Austin: With thousands of drivers and tens of thousands of riders who once depended on ride-sharing services in a lurch, a group called Arcade City has tried to fill the void with a person-to-person site to link up drivers and riders who then negotiate a fare. Of course, according to a story on KVUE, the Austin city government, and the police are on the case. The Austin Police Department has diverted detectives and resources to conduct sting operations on ride-sharing drivers who attempt to operate without official sanction. Undercover operatives will arrange for a ride with an Arcade City driver and then bust them, impounding their vehicle and imposing a fine.
"The first Friday and Saturday after Uber was gone, we were joking that it was like the zombie apocalypse of drunk people," one former ride-sharing driver told Vocative.com. Earlier this month the site compared this year's drunk driving arrests to last years -- and discovered that in the three weeks since Uber and Lyft left Austin, 7.5% more people have been arrested for drunk driving.

An anonymous reader writes: A U.S. judge has just admitted the existence of the NSA's infamous PRISM program by name, apparently the first time any federal judge has done so. PRISM has been an open secret since June 2013, when documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were first made public. An ominous NSA PowerPoint training slide claimed that PRISM allowed "collection [of user data] directly from the servers" of major American tech companies like Yahoo, Google, and Apple, though those tech companies immediately and fiercely protested that no, to their knowledge, they didn't give the NSA such access. It's since been generally accepted that the NSA wasn't physically accessing those companies' servers with PRISM, but instead creating a streamlined legal process to compel those companies, via orders processed in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to turn over users' data. Since the program's disclosure, most government reports and redacted FISA court orders have referred to PRISM by the legal authority the NSA claims authorizes it, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But that's confusing, because 702 also authorizes what's called Upstream collection, which gives the NSA access to raw internet data -- not the same thing as PRISM, which is more specifically targeted.

wjcofkc writes: A group of ISIS supporters have threatened to take down Facebook and Twitter, as well as their leaders. In a 25-minute propaganda video released by a group calling itself "the sons of the Caliphate army," photographs of both technology leaders are riddled with bullets. The video was first spotted by Vocativ. The threats are being made over the two companies' efforts to seek out and remove terrorist-related content on their respective platforms. The group is quoted as saying, "If you close one account, we will take 10 in return and soon your names will be erased after we delete your sites, Allah willing, and will know that we say is true."

Bennett Haselton writes The corruption of the #Ferguson and #Gamergate hashtags demonstrates how vulnerable the hashtag system is to being swamped by an "angry mob". An alternative algorithm could be created that would allow users to post tweets and browse the ones that had been rated "thoughtful" by other users participating in the same discussion. This would still allow anyone to contribute, even average users lacking a large follower base, while keeping the most stupid and offensive tweets out of most people's feeds. Keep reading to see what Bennett has to say.

As demonstrations and looting took place in Ferguson, some friends of mine and many public commentators expressed disgust with some of the most prejudiced comments tweeted with the #ferguson hashtag. A few high-profile cases led to incidents such as security concerns at one high school and a teacher being fired from another, but most of my friends paying attention said it was more about the steady drumbeat of subtly racist, ignorant, or epically point-missing tweets limping past, often larded with passive-aggressive sarcasm. (Typical example that I just pulled from #ferguson, courtesy of "Wayne Dupree Show": "Liberal Logic 101: Blacks don't commit crimes, Police are just racist. It's sad but that's the narrative being pushed #ferguson #ericgarner". But on the other side, hashtag names like "#BlackLivesMatter" are pretty passive-aggressive too.)

It reminded me of the corruption of the original #GamerGate tag, which today is infamously known for crude sexist trolling, but in its original incarnation (as coined by actor Alec Baldwin), the hashtag apparently referred to some somewhat reasonable questions being raised about ethics in gaming journalism and the statements of one (female) indie game developer. Regardless of what you think of the original arguments or the people making them -- even if you accept, for the sake of argument, that everything they were saying was wrong -- they didn't deserve for the hashtag to be associated with sexist piggishness that became synonymous with #GamerGate, to the exclusion of any discussion of the original points.

Whether a hashtag is corrupted by opponents (#ferguson) or by Neanderthals who nominally claim to be supporting you (#GamerGate), in either case it's possible for a sufficiently large mob to effectively ruin the discussion for many of the participants. In the case of #GamerGate, the point of the original discussion was drowned out completely; in the case of #ferguson, a high proportion of tweets are still aligned with the original point, but a reader is still going to quit reading if each victim-blaming tweet depresses them so much that the next 10 decent tweets won't make up for it.

So, what can you do? You could follow only the people you trust to say something thoughtful (or, at least, not proudly ignorant), and filter their posts for the #ferguson hashtag, but then you'd miss the overwhelming majority of other people's tweets on the subject, even the good ones. You can follow all posts with the hashtag and block the most egregious repeat "offenders", but that won't help much when the problematic messages come from so many different accounts.

What Twitter could do, on the other hand, would be to set up a system for browsing tweets under a given hashtag that would reward the tweets that are given the highest rating by other users following the same hashtag. That would not replace the current Twitter default of strict reverse chronological order for tweets, which hardcore Twitter fans consider sacrosanct. But it could be an alternative model for browsing the tweets grouped under a given hashtag.

Similar to the system I suggested for Twitter to adjudicate abuse reports, a tweet under a given hashtag could initially be shown to a random subset of, say, 100 users who are following that hashtag, and rated as to whether the tweet is funny, informative, interesting, etc. (sound familiar)? Then if the average rating is high enough, the tweet would be shown to users who are browsing the "highest rated" tweets on a given topic.

(The simpler and more obvious solution would be to display tweets as "highest rated" if they had been favorited or retweeted by lots of people. However, this is problematic because it allows a person to game the system by having all of their friends -- or sockpuppet accounts -- "like" a tweet in order to drive it to the top of the pile. By having the ratings come from a random subset of users, this resists attempts to game the system, because there's no way for a user to ensure that their friends will be among the random subset that is selected to rate the tweet.)

This is, essentially, the same algorithm that I've recommended for many other similar problems, even including, say, ways to identify the best new songs in a given genre (so that trance fans can rate the best new trance songs, country fans can rate the best new country songs, and in both cases, the new songs with the highest average rating get the widest promotion to all self-declared fans of that genre). However, there's a signficant twist in the case of rating tweets under a political hashtag. Fans of trance music can be reasonably sure that country music fans are not going to sign up to rate trance songs and given upvotes to the stupidest trance music. But on the other hand, if you create the #ferguson hashtag to discuss reforms to the justice system, there's a good chance that plenty of trolls will sign up to follow the #ferguson hashtag if it gives them the opportunity to upvote racist and victim-blaming tweets that defeat the purpose of the original discussion. Even if you assume that the racists and victim-blamers constitute a minority of users following the hashtag, it might also be the case that they will have a higher response rate whenever they happen to part of a random sample which is asked to "rate" a given tweet to determine whether that tweet is promoted to a wider audience. The trolls might end up constituting a majority of votes cast, which would defeat the purpose.

So perhaps a modified version of the algorithm could work better. As before, new tweets under a given hashtag would be rated by a random subset of users following that hashtag. However, for some random subset of those tweets, the tweets would also be rated by a random subset of all Twitter users. (How to solicit ratings from the general population of Twitter users is a good question. If you simply displayed those tweets to random Twitter users in a sidebar and asked, "Please rate this tweet, even though it's for a hashtag that you're not following," the response rate would likely be very low. But whatever the low rate was, if you display the tweet and the rating request to enough users, eventually you will get a sample of ratings that is statistically significant.) If the system determines that, in many cases, the rating of the tweet's quality from average Twitter users is significantly far apart from the rating from users following that hashtag, then that hashtag can be considered "compromised" (i.e., the majority of people following tweets on that hashtag are probably trolls, or at the least, voting far differently from how average Twitter users vote). And then, perhaps, the highest-rated tweets under that hashtag could be displayed with a disclaimer saying that the ratings have probably been manipulated and are not reliable (but here are the highest-rated tweets anyway, in case you want to read them).

This does raise a philosophical question: What if some subset of Twitter users -- whether skinheads, or communists, or Beliebers -- want to engage in a discussion where posts are rated according to their appeal to members of that in-group, without regard for those posts' appeal to the rest of the user base? Isn't that a perfectly valid form of discussion? My sympathies lie against that point of view. Apart from the fact that the group obviously has the legal right to engage in whatever in-group discussion they want to have, I don't think it's healthy to engage only with like-minded people whose mindset is radically different from almost everyone else's. (In any case, the system could still display the highest-rated tweets, just with the ever-present reminder that those ratings are wildly different from the average ratings given by users who are not following the hashtag. Unfortunately that might just embolden members of the in-group who take pride in the fact that their philosophy sets them apart from most of the rest of the world.)

Unfortunately a "deference to the majority" also means that the protocol wouldn't do much good in cases where the majority really is wrong. If Twitter had existed 60 years ago and had implemented something like what I'm describing, then Twitter discussions of homosexuality or interracial marriage might never have gotten off the ground, because the majority probably would have downvoted anything advocating or even tolerating those lifestyle options. (What year would you guess was the first year in which surveys showed that a majority of Americans supported interracial marriage? 1997.) Peer review, even in the random-sample, non-gameable fashion that I'm talking about, doesn't do much good to advance the discussion when we are the trolls, oblivious to the things we're bigoted and ignorant about that we'll look back and shake our heads at in another fifty years.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Hasani Gittens reports that as miraculous as it was that a 16-year-old California boy was able to hitch a ride from San Jose to Hawaii and survive, it isn't the first time a wheel-well stowaway has lived to tell about it. The FAA says that since 1947 there have been 105 people who have tried to surreptitiously travel in plane landing gear — with a survival rate of about 25 percent. But agency adds that the actual numbers are probably higher, as some survivors may have escaped unnoticed, and bodies could fall into the ocean undetected. Except for the occasional happy ending, hiding in the landing gear of a aircraft as it soars miles above the Earth is generally a losing proposition. According to an FAA/Wright State University study titled 'Survival at High Altitudes: Wheel-Well Passengers,' at 20,000 feet the temperature experienced by a stowaway would be -13 F, at 30,000 it would be -45 in the wheel well — and at 40,000 feet, the mercury plunges to a deadly -85 F (PDF). 'You're dealing with an incredibly harsh environment,' says aviation and security expert Anthony Roman. 'Temperatures can reach -50 F, and oxygen levels there are barely sustainable for life.' Even if a strong-bodied individual is lucky enough to stand the cold and the lack of oxygen, there's still the issue of falling out of the plane. 'It's almost impossible not to get thrown out when the gear opens,' says Roman.

So how do the lucky one-in-four survive? The answer, surprisingly, is that a few factors of human physiology are at play: As the aircraft climbs, the body enters a state of hypoxia—that is, it lacks oxygen—and the person passes out. At the same time, the frigid temperatures cause a state of hypothermia, which preserves the nervous system. 'It's similar to a young kid who falls to the bottom of an icy lake," says Roman. "and two hours later he survives, because he was so cold.'"

New submitter natarnsco writes "The Dallas, Texas police chief has used an unusual weapon in his arsenal to announce firings and other disciplinary measures in the Dallas police force: Twitter. 'Dallas Police Chief David O. Brown has fired or disciplined 27 officers and employees in the last year. And every time he brings down the hammer, he announces it on Facebook and Twitter, specifying exactly who the men and women are and what they did. On Dec. 30, it was five officers and a 911 call operator.' The article goes on to say, 'Chief Brown is, as far as we know, unique among police chiefs in his use of social media. "I'm unaware of anyone else doing this," says Lt. Max Geron, who handles media relations at the Dallas Police Department. "If we weren't the first, we were one of the first." We checked out the Twitter profiles of various departments around the country as well and couldn't find a similar situation. The social media posts aren't an official policy of the DPD, but rather a "push for transparency" initiative, in Lt. Geron's words. "[It comes from] a desire to be more transparent and to get our message out to the greater community," he says.'"