Month: November 2014
UK’s Home Secretary Says Terrorists Will Be The Real Winners If Country’s Cell Coverage Dead Zones Are Fixed
So it’s the tired old “because terrorists” excuse again…
The UK’s culture secretary wants to eradicate the nation’s patchy cell phone coverage. UK cell phone users aren’t able to switch towers on the fly — something residents of other EU countries (as well as the US) enjoy — but are forced to connect only with their provider’s towers.
But Home Secretary Theresa May would rather UK citizens suffer through a plethora of dead zones (or “not spots” — the term of choice for these no-service areas) than put her country in harm’s way. According to an internal letter written by May, providing near-seamless coverage for UK phone users will open the door for increased terrorist activity.
Catcalling royalty
How Do You Have A Town Of 300 Residents… And 100 Police Officers?
Oakley, Michigan has only 300 residents. Up until very recently, it also had 100 police officers. How does a town end up with a police force equal to one-third of its population? To answer that question, you have to go back to when it had a single police officer.
Oakley, Mi. is barely a town at 300 people, only one streetlight and, until recently, one police officer. The one cop was good at his job, reports Vocativ’s M.L. Nestel, until he was forced to step down after getting caught stalking a teenage girl.
A new chief, Robert Reznick, was installed. He immediately began hiring new officers. The one officer that had policed the town for several years without incident was replaced with twelve full-time officers. Then Reznick went further, allowing civilians to buy their way onto the police force.
Here’s how the chief’s program works: The wanna-be officers pay about about $1,200 for a uniform, bullet-proof vest and gun, and some make additional donations to the police department. In return, they get a police badge and the right to carry their gun almost anywhere in the state, including places that people with normal gun permits can’t, like casinos, bars, stadiums and daycare centers.
This proved to be very popular, even pulling in a couple of non-resident NFL players as auxiliary officers. Needless to say, running a pay-to-play police force tends to generate problems. Complaints were raised about the heightened police presence at a local event that had run peaceably (if rather rowdily) for years.
Obama Administration Reverses Bush Policy, Says U.S. Torture Ban Applies Abroad
It seems that Obama has actually affirmed that torture is not legal, even if done outside the US, and even if done during a war. It remains to be seen if this changes anything, or if it means another loophole will be used.
In contrast to positions previously taken by the U.S. government, the delegation will affirm that U.S. obligations under Article 16, which prohibits cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, do not apply exclusively inside the territorial United States. The delegation in Geneva will make clear, consistent with the text, negotiating history, and the Senate ratification process, that U.S. obligations under Article 16 (as well as under other provisions of the Convention with the same jurisdictional language) apply in places outside the United States that the U.S. government controls as a governmental authority. The delegation will also make clear our conclusion that the United States currently exercises such control at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and over all proceedings conducted there, and with respect to U.S.-registered ships and aircraft.
Hooray For Licenses! Update Strips 17 Songs From Steam Users’ Purchased Copies Of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
It seems like Rockstar has pushed a steam update removing 17 songs from GTA: San Andreas, because they don’t have a license to distribute them any more.
The problem with this is that customers have already paid for a license to those songs, and should not be affected by this at all. Yet, they are.
You might have noticed Steam downloading a sizeable update for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas over the weekend and wondered what that was about. A fancy secret tying into GTA V’s return to the west coast, perhaps? Not quite. The patch added support for XInput controllers like the Xbox 360 pad, which is nice, but also removed seventeen songs from various radio stations. No more angsting out and gunning it across Gant Bridge in the wrong lane listening to Killing in the Name, I’m afraid.
Edit:
Uriel-238 writes in the comments at Techdirt:
What the patch does
-removes 18 songs
(“Critical Beatdown”, “Running Down A Dream”, “Woman To Woman”, “You Dropped A Bomb On Me”, “Yum Yum”, “Running Away”, “I Don’t Give A f*ck”, “Express Yourself”, “Killing in the Name of”, “Hellraiser”, “Ring My Bell”, “Personal Jesus”, “Don’t Let It Go To Your Head”, “Express Yourself”. “Rock Creek Park”, “Grunt”, “Soul Power ’74” and “The Payback”)
-revokes all mods created for San Andreas on PC
-deletes all of your previous save files
-removes 1280×700 resolution
-has various textures missing and things like foilage completely removedSource: Luneth’s review on the Steam Store Page
ISPs Removing Their Customers’ Email Encryption
Recently, Verizon was caught tampering with its customer’s web requests to inject a tracking super-cookie. Another network-tampering threat to user safety has come to light from other providers: email encryption downgrade attacks. In recent months, researchers have reported ISPs in the US and Thailand intercepting their customers’ data to strip a security flag—called STARTTLS—from email traffic. The STARTTLS flag is an essential security and privacy protection used by an email server to request encryption when talking to another server or client.1
By stripping out this flag, these ISPs prevent the email servers from successfully encrypting their conversation, and by default the servers will proceed to send email unencrypted. Some firewalls, including Cisco’s PIX/ASA firewall do this in order to monitor for spam originating from within their network and prevent it from being sent. Unfortunately, this causes collateral damage: the sending server will proceed to transmit plaintext email over the public Internet, where it is subject to eavesdropping and interception.
If You’re Going To Complain About Spotify Payments, At Least Understand A Little Economics First
To sum it up, the main problem with artists not earning a lot from Spotify and other streaming services isn’t the money paid from Spotify. It’s the fact that record companies take most of the money for themselves, leaving little for the artists.
Spotify currently pays about 70% of its revenue to rightsholders. That typically goes to middlemen — publishers for the musical work copyright, who then pay a portion to the songwriters, and record labels for the sound recording copyright, who then pay a portion to the musicians.
VC David Pakman (who testified in November 2012 before the House Judiciary IP Subcommittee about why the current music licensing scheme deters VC investment in new music services) recently analyzed data from middlemen in a few industries and found that many legacy middlemen are not earning the large share they take from creators in the digital age. Record labels, for example, contributed a lot more value when they coordinated and financed studio time (which can now be done with a basic computer and Internet connection, and possibly a Kickstarter campaign), manufacturing records and CDs and got them to retailers (which is no longer the primary way of selling music), and marketing (which can be done online with free services). Now, in the digital age, many of these services are no longer needed or performed.
In remarks last week at the Web Summit Conference in Dublin, Bono explained that rather than fighting against streaming, artists should be fighting for transparency
An Innocent Man, Tortured by the U.S., Asks the U.N.: Where’s the Accountability?
U.S. officials are in for a serious grilling on Wednesday as they get hauled before the U.N. Committee against Torture and questioned about about a multitude of ways in which the U.S. appears to be failing to comply with the anti-torture treaty it ratified 20 years ago.
As Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU Human Rights Program noted on Monday:
This marks the first U.N. review of the United States’ torture record since President Obama took office in 2009, and much is at stake. The review will test the pledges President Obama made to reverse disastrous Bush-era policies that led to gross violations of human rights, like torture, secret and incommunicado detention, “extraordinary renditions,” unfair trials, and more. It is also likely to examine practices that emerged or became entrenched during Obama’s time in office, such as indefinite detention at Guantánamo, immigration detention and deportations, and the militarization of the police, as witnessed by the world during this summer’s events in Ferguson.
Three Ways Courts Screw the Innocent Into Pleading Guilty
You should go read Jed A. Rakoff’s essay in The New York Review of Books, in which the senior federal district judge tries to explain why innocent people so often plead guilty.
But even if you have better things to do this weekend than digest Rakoff’s thorough, convincing, 4,400-word essay, it’s still worth considering why at least 20,000 people have pled guilty to and gone to jail for felonies they did not commit — if you very conservatively take criminologists’ lowest estimates, and cut them in half.
Rakoff identifies three ways the criminal justice system obstructs its own “truth seeking mechanism,” a trial by jury, which Rakoff calls a “shield against tyranny” and which Thomas Jefferson famously called “the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”