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User: tech-law-ny

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  1. isn't "compelled speech about motivation" wrong? on Social Media Stars Agree To Declare When They Post Ads For Products (bbc.com) · · Score: 0

    Suppose I prominently use Apple products when I visit a public library or park. Should I be required to carry a sign disclosing that I actually hate Apple products, and do this only because I own a large amount of Apple stock?

  2. why is it ethical to analyze this server's data? on Online Casino Group Leaks Information on 108 Million Bets, Including User Details (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    The article says "included a lot of sensitive information, such as real names, home addresses ... it is unclear ... if anyone outside the security researcher accessed the leaky server." Suppose my information had been stored on that server. Should I feel less violated if the person accessing it self-identifies as a "security researcher" rather than a "PII tourist"? Might a reasonable process start with: as soon as you notice the initial bits of non-public data, contact the hosting provider or applicable CSIRT, wait, and IMMEDIATELY STOP READING THE DATA?

  3. v2.0 will assess the organic molecules' traits on New Deep-Learning Software Knows How To Make Desired Organic Molecules (nature.com) · · Score: 1

    to determine whether to sing "It's life, Jim, but not as we know it, not as we know it, not as we know it."

  4. MovieFone had this tracking data 20 years ago on MoviePass Wants To Gather a Whole Lot of Data About Its Users (fortune.com) · · Score: 1

    "Using your touch-tone keypad, please enter your latitude in degrees, minutes, and seconds now."

  5. Yes, Virginia, he publishes his toy research on Fewer Toys Gives Kids a Better Quality of Playtime, Study Claims (nypost.com) · · Score: 1

    Oops, never mind.
    Misread the headline as "Fewer Toys Gives Kids a Better Quality of Playtime, Santa Claims."

  6. agents Mulder and Scully will investigate this on Bacteria Found On ISS May Be Alien In Origin, Says Cosmonaut (independent.co.uk) · · Score: 2

    They will also learn that the Cigarette Smoking Man does, in fact, smoke on the ISS.

  7. apps: same rules as for Open Source release notes on The Strange Art of Writing Release Notes (ieee.org) · · Score: 1

    https://github.com/coreinfrast... covers this, e.g., "human-readable summary of major changes in that release to help users determine if they should upgrade and what the upgrade impact will be" and "MUST identify every publicly known vulnerability." The main difference is that, for apps, the interests of the developer are less often aligned with the interests of the user. The essence of a new release can be "more features but also more ads."

  8. device with no UI for post-install timezone change on Many US States Consider Abandoning Daylight Savings Time (newsweek.com) · · Score: 1

    http://www.eileendonoghue.org/... has no mention of IT costs - it apparently assumes there's always a simple supported process like "Control Panel > Date and Time > Change time zone" that the government could announce to all citizens. The reality may be bleak. For example, I own several IoT devices that required me to choose a timezone at initial setup, and I suspect a huge fraction of device owners would never successfully reconfigure them for a different timezone. Two apparently have no UI at all for that (the easiest way is to root it and make a manual /etc/localtime change). In other cases, the device owner needs to remember the admin password and/or find the documentation to learn where that UI feature is hidden. People will simply give up, either discarding the device or living with a wrong time display for months. Also, it can be much worse than just a wrong display, such as devices configured to open up physical security controls between 9 AM and 5 PM local time.

    It's no longer 2007 (the last time the government mucked with DST). IoT is here. Changing DST now will litter the northeast U.S. with literally millions of insecure or otherwise broken devices.

  9. will be Open Source with Red Hat Patent Promise? on Red Hat Acquires Data-Cleaning Company Permabit (fortune.com) · · Score: 1

    https://www.redhat.com/en/abou... says "Red Hat plans to open source Permabit's technology." This may mean that Red Hat's https://www.redhat.com/en/abou... Patent Promise will apply. Possibly Red Hat will announce whether they will hold all of the patents on the Permabit technology, or whether any third-party patents remain relevant.

  10. actually billboards DO have eyeball counters on Amazon and eBay Images Broken By Photobucket's 'Ransom Demand' (bbc.com) · · Score: 2

    ... or a close equivalent. Nowadays, billboard operators identify the mobile phones that pass each billboard, and do correlations with mobile phones that are detected soon afterward in the advertiser's brick-and-mortar store: http://clearchanneloutdoor.com...

  11. It was the best font for plausible deniability on Why Typography Matters -- Especially At The Oscars (freecodecamp.com) · · Score: 1

    The message from the Academy was that La La Land would have the votes in a vacuum, but Moonlight had the votes because we live in a society. Stunts and fonts are just a distraction.

  12. SHOCKING photos of how Kim Possible looks today on Facebook's New Anti-Clickbait Algorithm Buries Bogus Headlines (techcrunch.com) · · Score: 1

    Some clickbait writers have shorter careers than others.

  13. MGNT might know on-prem site is closing, can't say on Who Makes the Decision To Go Cloud and Who Should? · · Score: 1

    It's senior management's call unless they request otherwise. Maybe the obvious on-prem location is closing abruptly, and senior management isn't allowed to announce that yet. Or maybe the cloud decision has already been made by a competent IT team of an unannounced acquiring company. Unsolicited technical objections might be, at best, a waste of time.

  14. statuses/filter in Twitter Streaming API works on Ask Slashdot: Are There Any Search Engines Left That Don't Try To Think For Me? · · Score: 1

    My filter.json API requests to stream.twitter.com still seem to do a plain search (except punctuation). Up until last month, http://twitter.com/search was extremely useful for plain search, but I think they changed it (either to give far fewer results, or to make its own guess of what I actually want).

  15. new recruits studying oceanography will use a MOOC on US Navy Abandons Cloud and Data Center Plans In Favor of New Strategy · · Score: 2

    Because of limited bandwidth to the cloud from undersea, MOOC students will still face the traditional question of "What am I gonna do in a submarine?"

  16. million fake tweets with blurry question pictures? on Education Company Monitors Social Media For Test References · · Score: 1

    Although nobody should send fake tweets, I wonder what plans Pearson has for a scenario with a huge amount of chaff to investigate. For example: suppose many accounts sent tweets in a 1 hour period after school on your local area's testing day, all of the tweets had relevant text keywords and a picture reminiscent of a PARCC sample test question, and all of the pictures had various problems (blurriness, poor contrast, aimed at the corner of a page, etc.) that would make analysis expensive.

  17. anti-spam sites force centralization, help SIGINT on Email Is Not Going Anywhere · · Score: 2

    Originally email was decentralized in a practical way. Now, unless you arrange for your outbound email to arrive from a server operated by a large email provider, your deliverability is probably low. All of the email reputation systems, blocklists, DKIM, SPF, etc. are advertised as anti-spam measures. The reality is that they force email centralization in a way that helps the monitoring of email by the major SIGINT players.

  18. South Padre Is. = no launches during Spring Break? on SpaceX Chooses Texas Site For Private Spaceport · · Score: 1

    Wikipedia says "With only a few thousand residents, South Padre Island has consistently drawn between 80,000 and 120,000 spring breakers." Is it likely that a Range Safety Officer will recommend against launches during all of the common Spring Break weeks?

  19. SQLite sells optional licenses for $1000 on Ask Slashdot: How To Get Open Source Projects To Take Our Money? · · Score: 1
  20. long-term storage of phone location records? on Cell Phones, Missing Persons, and Privacy · · Score: 1

    The critical question is not why the cell phone records are released, but what records exist and why they exist. News reports often state that, at the very beginning of an investigation, law enforcement had information such as "the last time this person's phone pinged a tower was in Bridgehampton three days ago at noon." Wireless carriers can't predict who might be investigated, so this may imply long-term storage of every person's location. Questions include: A. Can I compel my carrier to tell me what information it currently retains about my own previous locations? B. How about other people's locations, with a civil subpoena? C. Is my carrier using my historical location data for its own internal purposes (marketing, etc.)?

  21. pannus.sf.net had kernel hot updates in 2006 on Patch the Linux Kernel Without Reboots · · Score: 1

    Why doesn't the Related Work section discuss kpannus from sourceforge.net/projects/pannus? 'Another command of the PANNUS is the "kpannus" for kernel live patching. ... the PANNUS controls kernel by using "stop_machine_run()" for safety ensuring, which creates threads for each CPU to execute a function without any interruption. ... The PANNUS for kernel patch("kpannus") is tested for some functions in the kernel such as sched_clock, do_gettimeofday, filesystems_read_proc, cmdline_read_proc, or init_timers.'

  22. Verified by Visa requires much trust of merchant on VeriSign To Offer Passwords On Bank Card · · Score: 1

    VbV has these two issues: Activate During Shopping asks for SSN digits I'm at the checkout stage with a random (legitimate) merchant, and suddenly I get a VbV activation page with a URL on the merchant's web site asking for the last 4 digits of my social security number. Whoa! The page tells me that these digits will be sent directly to my bank, not to the merchant. How do I know if this is true? The merchant's web site uses JavaScript and can do essentially whatever it wants with form data. If I'm an expert and dissect the page, maybe I can feel safe. But, can an average consumer be expected to distinguish this from a phish? Web browser sessions cross trust boundaries A VbV password is a password checked by my bank that helps to prove I own the CC. Within a single session with a web browser, I don't want to be communicating with a merchant and also communicating with my bank. There are too many browser vulnerabilities that could allow a merchant to hijack me. Sure, I'll give the merchant my CC #, but certainly not any reusable banking password! I've always used separate browser sessions for my bank, and currently use sessions on separate virtual machines.

  23. the tractor story finally made it to Randy Mott on HP To Cut Back On Telecommuting · · Score: 1

    >a few employees abused the flexible work arrangements ... admitted to
    >driving a tractor during conference calls about project updates.

    This all might've been avoided if certain persons STFU about the tractor story.

  24. Challenge shifts cost to an innocent third party on Are Spam Blockers Too Strict? · · Score: 1

    It's not pretty reasonable.

    You could choose to read each moderate-probability message yourself to
    decide whether it's spam. Instead, you choose to shift the cost to
    other persons by auto-replying to the sender address (which we all
    know is probably forged).

    1 of 30 replies reaches a human. This is unsolicited junk mail from
    you, and essentially never has any benefit to the recipient. The other
    29 consume some server resources at the domain of the forged sender,
    which adds up to a substantial problem when the domain is forged
    thousands or millions of times.

    There are three reasonable choices for your moderate-probability
    messages: read them, ignore them, or automatically delete them.

  25. law should and does allow unprotected networks on N.Y. County Mandates Wireless Security · · Score: 2, Insightful
    The law in question has two distinct parts. First, if you're a business that stores personal information on a networked machine, and you have a wireless access point on this network, you must implement a security measure. The county's choices of security measures probably aren't the best, but the concept of requiring a security measure in this situation is reasonable.

    Second, if you offer Internet access to the public, you must post a sign suggesting that customers' personal machines implement a security measure. It's not necessarily the best way to protect customers, but a sign is a low-cost requirement and probably rarely burdensome.

    The law doesn't forbid offering unrestricted Internet access to anyone within range. This is a good choice. A person or business should be allowed to share use of an Internet connection, provided they are willing to take the risk that someone might use this connection to do very bad things. For example, you might want to offer your Internet connection to the (semi-)anonymous public by running both an unprotected wireless hotspot and a Tor exit node.