If someone hasn’t already sold the movie rights to the story of Eddie Raymond Tipton, expect it to happen soon. Tipton, an Iowa-based former “security director” for the Multi-State Lottery Association (MUSL), is accused of trying to pull off the perfect plot to allow himself to win the lottery. It didn’t work, but not for the lack of effort. MUSL runs a bunch of the big name lotteries in the US, including Mega Millions and Powerball. It also runs the somewhat smaller Hot Lotto offering, which was what Tipton apparently targeted. When he was arrested back in January, the claims were that it had to do with him just playing and winning the lottery and then trying to hide the winnings. Lottery employees are (for obvious reasons) not allowed to play. However, late last week, prosecutors in Iowa revealed that it was now accusing Tipton of not just that, but also tampering with the lottery equipment right before supposedly winning $14.3 million. Because of these new revelations, Tipton’s trial has been pushed back until July. However, the details of the plot and how it unraveled feel like they come straight out of a Hollywood plot.
First, there’s the story of how Tipton was discovered winning the lottery in the first place. The ticket was purchased in late December 2010 in a QuickTrip off of Highway 80 in Iowa. The winning $14.3 million went unclaimed for nearly a year, but right before it was set to expire, a New York lawyer named Crawford Shaw showed up with paperwork to claim it. However, Shaw refused to reveal the necessary details about who actually won the money, as Shaw was merely representing Hexham Investments Trust, which was a shell company set up in Belize. Belize, as you already know, is a popular place to setup offshore companies if you want the true ownership to be anonymous. The problem, however, is that Iowa doesn’t allow for anonymous lottery winners. That resulted in Iowa officials investigating who was really behind the winning ticket.
The resulting investigation took them from the NY lawyer Shaw to some (unnamed) guy in Quebec City, Canada, who was listed as Hexham Investments Trust’s trustor and president. That guy eventually pointed investigators to two other guys in the Houston area: Robert Rhodes and an unnamed Houston attorney — who had also known the NY attorney, Shaw, for many years. The attorney in Houston insisted that he represented the winner of the ticket who wished to remain anonymous. Somewhat stumped, investigators released a video and screenshots of the guy at the QuickTrip who bought the ticket:
Category: Human stupidity
‘Free-range’ parents plan to file lawsuit after police pick up children
Why do americans call “making sure their kids grow up as functioning members of society” “free-range kids”?
A D.C-based law firm will file suit and pursue “all legal remedies” to protect the rights of the Maryland parents whose two young children were taken into custody for more than five hours Sunday after someone reported them as they made their way home unsupervised from a Silver Spring park, the firm said Tuesday.
Danielle and Alexander Meitiv were “rightfully outraged by the irresponsible actions” of Maryland Child Protective Services and Montgomery County police, said attorney Matthew Dowd, of the firm Wiley Rein, in a written statement.
“We must ask ourselves how we reached the point where a parent’s biggest fear is that government officials will literally seize our children off the streets as they walk in our neighborhoods,” he said.
Meet the e-voting machine so easy to hack, it will take your breath away
Virginia election officials have decertified an electronic voting system after determining that it was possible for even unskilled people to surreptitiously hack into it and tamper with vote counts.
The AVS WINVote, made by Advanced Voting Solutions, passed necessary voting systems standards and has been used in Virginia and, until recently, in Pennsylvania and Mississippi. It used the easy-to-crack passwords of “admin,” “abcde,” and “shoup” to lock down its Windows administrator account, Wi-Fi network, and voting results database respectively, according to a scathing security review published Tuesday by the Virginia Information Technologies Agency. The agency conducted the audit after one Virginia precinct reported that some of the devices displayed errors that interfered with vote counting during last November’s elections.
The weak passwords—which are hard-coded and can’t be changed—were only one item on a long list of critical defects uncovered by the review. The Wi-Fi network the machines use is encrypted with wired equivalent privacy, an algorithm so weak that it takes as little as 10 minutes for attackers to break a network’s encryption key. The shortcomings of WEP have been so well-known that it was banished in 2004 by the IEEE, the world’s largest association of technical professionals. What’s more, the WINVote runs a version of Windows XP Embedded that hasn’t received a security patch since 2004, making it vulnerable to scores of known exploits that completely hijack the underlying machine. Making matters worse, the machine uses no firewall and exposes several important Internet ports.
Government May Now Tell You Why You’re On “No Fly” List, But Not Always
Since the “no fly” list was formalized in 2001, the only way to know if the U.S. government would allow you to get on a plane was to show up at the airport and try to board a flight. The government would generally neither confirm nor deny that you were on the list, let alone tell you why.
On April 14, the government announced a new procedure for blacklisted travelers to try to clear themselves. Passengers who are denied boarding can lodge a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security, which will provide confirmation of their “No Fly List status,” and an unclassified summary of the reason why — unless providing that information would go against “national security and law enforcement interests.” The passengers can then appeal their status.
The notice of the new procedures came in court filings in several cases where plaintiffs have challenged their inclusion on the list.
Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, called the new procedures “grossly inadequate” and said her organization is already challenging them in court. The ACLU is representing 13 U.S. citizens who sued over the no fly list in 2010.
Last year a federal judge found that the government’s old redress process — which never confirmed or denied anyone’s status — was unconstitutional. The government’s response was the new procedures, which Shamsi says still doesn’t go far enough.
“One of our clients was provided a single cryptic sentence saying he had traveled to a particular country in a particular year. There are incomplete reasons, no evidence provided, and no hearing at which our clients can present their own evidence and cross-examine the government’s witnesses,” she said.
“The inadequate process the government provided to our clients is what it’s now formalizing for everyone else,” she added.
Gadeir Abbas, an attorney for Gulet Mohamed, a U.S. citizen who in 2011 was barred from flying home to Virginia from Kuwait, called the new redress process “entirely one-sided.”
Former Prenda Lawyer Hit With A $50,000 Counterclaim In ADA Shakedown Lawsuit
Late in 2013, Paul Hansmeier, formerly of Prenda Law’s Legal Buffoonery on Wheels Copyright Death Suicide Squad, realized that participating in a multi-jurisdictional legal train wreck had left him oddly unfulfilled. If the promise contained in his law degree was ever to be fulfilled, he would need to reassess his shakedown-focused lawyering.
After an indeterminable amount of thought, Hansmeier apparently arrived at the conclusion that — unfulfilled promise or no — he was really only good at one thing: shaking people down. And, sadly, he wasn’t even all that great at that. But “sue what you know,” as they say, and Hansmeier went about rebranding himself as a Champion of the Weak and Underprivileged.
No longer would he be throwing shaky demand letters and even shakier lawsuits at Household Members Voted Most Likely To Download Porn by the loose confederation of shakedown artists d/b/a An Actual Law Firm (“Come see our letterhead!”). That was the old Paul Hansmeier.
The new Paul Hansmeier would instead be throwing shaky lawsuits and demand letters at any company whose towel racks were located more than 32″ above the ground or whose entry threshold was a ¼” above the legally-mandated height. The smaller the company the better, as they rarely even bothered to show up in court and would instead settle for a small fee.
The new Paul Hansmeier’s operations were so efficient he could barely keep himself stocked in A4. Filings were submitted so fast not even the plaintiffs were aware they were listed as plaintiffs. And it was working, to a limited extent. Hansmeier was able to knock over a few mom-and-pop businesses for a few grand each. But now he’s run into Kahler Hotels, which not only isn’t interested in his ADA shakedown claims, but is countersuing him for $50,000+. (h/t to Dan Browning of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune)
How St. Louis Police Robbed My Family of $1000 (and How I’m Trying To Get It Back)
On a late spring evening eight years ago, police pulled over my mother’s 1997 Oldsmobile Aurora, in the suburb of St. Ann, Missouri, as she raced to pick up a relative from St. Louis’s Lambert International Airport. “Do you know why I stopped you?” the officer asked. “No I don’t,” my mother answered. The police charged her with speeding, but she did not receive a mere ticket. Instead, an officer ran my mother’s name and told her that since she had failed to appear in court for driving without a license, there was a six-year-old warrant out for her arrest. “I just started crying. I couldn’t believe it,” my mother said. The police arrested her and hauled her off to St. Louis County Jail, where authorities eventually allowed her one phone call, which she placed to my stepfather. He said, shaking his head, “I was surprised because I knew she didn’t have no warrants.”
St. Ann is one of the more notorious cities in the county when it comes to traffic violations, and in my mother’s case, the city’s finest, quite simply, fucked up. As it was, my mother had no warrant; the police confused her with another woman who shared her name — sans the middle initial.
She would go on to spend two nights in jail, pay $1,000 in fines that she did not owe, and plead guilty to the crimes of the other woman. She paid a devastating price, financially and emotionally, for the racist and classist policing described in last month’s Justice Department report on the tumult in Missouri. The 102-page document details the physical and economic terror inflicted upon the poor and black residents of Ferguson, Missouri. The report echoed the torrent of criticism that residents have long lodged at the city’s overseers. But, as my mother’s experience helps illustrate, the injustices cataloged by the investigation are not confined to one tiny Midwestern suburb. Ferguson is emblematic of how municipalities in the St. Louis region, and across the country, operate as carceral, mob-like states that view and treat poor black people as cash cows.
In Ferguson, at least 16,000 individuals had arrest warrants last year compared with the town’s total population of just 21,000 residents. Those warrants fed what the DOJ called a “code-enforcement system … honed to produce more revenue.” In nearby City of St. Louis, the 75,000 outstanding arrest warrants are equivalent to about one-quarter of the population, part of a county-wide problem of cash-strapped cities incentivized to “squeeze their residents with fines,” as The Washington Post put it. One city, Pine Lawn, Missouri, recently had 23,000 open arrest warrants compared with the city’s population of just 3,275 residents; court fees and traffic tickets make up nearly 30 percent of its municipal revenue. “Getting tickets — and getting them fixed — are two actions that define living in the St. Louis area,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported earlier this month.
Fighting Toddler ‘Porn Addiction,’ UK Lawmakers Demand Porn Sites Include Age Checks Or Face Closure
The UK’s attempts to filter the Internet of all of its naughty bits are nothing if not amusing, whether it’s the nation’s porn filter architect getting arrested for child porn, or the complete and total obliviousness when it comes to the slippery slope of expanding those filters to include a growing roster of ambiguously objectionable material. The idea of forcing some kind of overarching structure upon porn consumption in the UK is another idea that never seems to go away, whether it’s requiring a “porn license” (requiring users to clearly opt in if they want to view porn) or the latest push — mandatory age checks.
Seemingly unaware of the way the internet (or law, or the world itself) works, some UK lawmakers are now demanding that porn websites around the world include age verification systems, or face fines or closure. How exactly the UK government plans to enforce these restrictions upon a global pornography industry isn’t explained. The only thing the UK is sure of is that these restrictions are absolutely necessary for the welfare of the country’s tots:
“Providers who did not co-operate could also be fined. Mr Javid said: “If you want to buy a hardcore pornography DVD in a store you need to prove your age to the retailers. “With the shift to online, children can access adult content on websites without restriction, intentionally or otherwise. “That is why we need effective controls online that apply to UK and overseas. This is about giving children the best start in life.”
Well intentioned, perhaps, but it’s yet another example of people not realizing how the internet genie has left the bottle, and no amount of thrashing or cajoling is going to re-imprison the agitated djinn. The UK’s latest push is being propped up by a flood of recent scary headlines across the UK proclaiming that the country has a porn addiction problem among around a tenth of the nation’s 12- and 13-year-olds. In fairly typical media fashion, the storiesproclaiming this fact don’t really bother to dissect the claims or hunt down the survey’s origins.
If they had, they might discover that the survey in question was probably about as far from science as you can get without involving clowns and sacrificial altars:
“It turns out the study was conducted by a “creative market research” group called OnePoll. “Generate content and news angles with a OnePoll PR survey, and secure exposure for your brand,” reads the company’s blurb. “Our PR survey team can help draft questions, find news angles, design infographics, write and distribute your story.” The company is super popular on MoneySavingExpert.com, where users are encouraged to sign up and make a few quid. Here’s what that website says: “Mega-popular for its speedy surveys, OnePoll runs polls for the press, meaning fun questions about celebs and your love life.” So the company behind these stats about porn addiction are known for their quick and easy surveys and promise to generate headline-grabbing stats. An unusual choice, perhaps, for such a sensitive subject.”
While the group behind the effort (Childline) appears well intentioned, there are surely better ways to protect children than by scaring politicians into a global charade of internet booby whac-a-mole. Like, with actual parenting perhaps. Paying attention to what your kids do online, and intelligently explaining sexuality to them before they run into age-inappropriate content would be worlds more effective than demanding the globe’s pornography industry capitulate to the whims of the UK’s ludditical legislators.
Light the torches! NSA’s BFF Senator Feinstein calls for e-book burning
Senator Dianne Feinstein is calling for a pair of controversial instructionals to be banned from the internet.
Feinstein (D-CA) did not say exactly how she plans to scrub The Anarchist Cookbook and Inspire magazine from every server, desktop and notebook on the planet, but none the less she wants both titles pulled from circulation.
The comments come after two women were arrested in New York City on charges of plotting terrorist attacks.
The duo reportedly had ties to the late former editor of the Al-Qaeda backed English-language Inspire, and were accused of seeking out other bomb-making guides in preparation for an attack.
Now Feinstein, a big fan of America’s surveillance apparatus, wants to make both Inspire and the 1969 Anarchist Cookbook illegal to make available online.
“We must remain vigilant against these types of attacks and place a high priority on tracking and interdicting such plots,” the fifth-term Senator said.
“I am particularly struck that the alleged bombers made use of online bomb-making guides like the Anarchist Cookbook and Inspire magazine. These documents are not, in my view, protected by the First Amendment and should be removed from the internet.”
Difficult as it may be to have a book permanently “removed” from the internet, Feinstein shares the opinion of at least one prominent figure: the author of the Anarchist Cookbook. William Powell now says that the book should be taken out of circulation, calling its underlying premise “profoundly flawed.”
John Deere Thinks People Will Pirate Music With In-Car Computers
Did you know that it’s illegal to tinker with the code in your in-car computer? Thanks to the nuances of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), you’re not even supposed to inspect the inner workings of your vehicle’s circuitry. This is absurd, which is why the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is fighting for a better policy.
The EFF is currently entrenched in a legal battle to challenge DMCA overreach. In a new blog post—colorfully titled “Automakers Say You Don’t Really Own Your Car”—the digital rights advocates share some of the absurdity that many vehicle manufacturers are slinging to justify the DMCA’s applications to in-car computers. This is the best:
John Deere even argued that letting people modify car computer systems will result in them pirating music through the on-board entertainment system, which would be one of the more convoluted ways to copy media (and the exemption process doesn’t authorize copyright infringement, anyway).
Yes, that John Deere. How about this: If you manage to pirate music in a tractor, you deserve a much better prize than a DMCA letter. You deserve to own the tractor you paid for. Repair it when it breaks down, even! And yes, you should be able to do whatever you want with your car’s computer—within reason.
Stupid Patent of the Month: GPS Tracking, or Something
GPS technology has been around for a while. Wikipedia puts the start of development at 1973. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that it became available for consumer use. And even then, it took some time before the government removed restrictions on accuracy that it had on its use by civilians. (The government had added an intentional error to the signal that made GPS variably inaccurate up to 50 meters.)
With the loosening of restrictions on GPS came furious development in consumer applications—and a flurry of patents.
Which brings us to this month’s Stupid Patent of the Month. The dubious honor goes to U.S. Patent No. 6,442,485, “Method and apparatus for an automatic vehicle location, collision notification, and synthetic voice,” filed in 1999. The “Background of the Invention” talks about a need for an automatic voice systems that could speak for a driver involved in a collision and transmit location details to 911. For example, the patent says that “[i]t would be desirable to have an automatic vehicle location and collision notification system that would ascertain if a vehicular collision had occurred and communicate directly with an emergency facility.”
But after this background, the patent devolves into a wilderness of made-up words and technobabble. The patent includes fabricated phrases such as “Location Comparator-Indicator Module” and “Automatic Speed Controlled Location Detection Module.” (Google searches of these phrases turns up nothing other than results related to the patent.) Reading the patent to try to figure out what it means becomes an exercise in cross-referencing and guesswork. Even worse, key terms in the claims (this is the part of the patent that is supposed to clearly explain what that patent covers) don’t even appear in the description of the purported invention. This means that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to understand what the claims mean and to guess how a court might interpret them.
This sort of made-up gobbledygook is likely what has allowed NovelPoint Tracking LLP, the owner of this month’s Stupid Patent, to sue over 90 companies for infringement. The latest round of lawsuits, filed on March 27, 2015, includes companies such as Subway (the sandwich artists, not a company related to transportation), McDonald’s, and Burger King.
And what do these fast food franchises have to do with vehicle location, collisions, and synthetic voices? With respect to Subway, NovelPoint claims that Subway’s Windows phone mobile application infringes NovelPoint’s patent.
Here’s the description of Subway’s app from Microsoft’s website:
Don’t know where to find a local Subway? We’re here to help. This app will display a list of local Subway locations along with the ability to get directions and let your friends know where to meet you.
We don’t know what, exactly, NovelPoint thinks it owns, but it looks like it is accusing Subway of infringing because it has an app that shows a map with directions. And given the incomprehensibility of its patent, it can get away with this, at least enough to secure a quick settlement and get out before a court rules that no, in fact, it doesn’t own a map with directions.
And indeed that is what appears to have happened. Of the almost 100 cases NovelPoint has filed, exactly none of the cases has had a decision on the merits of NovelPoint’s claims. From what we can see, all of the cases have settled very quickly, most likely for small nuisance sums.
Patent owners shouldn’t be able to get away with this. Patents should be clear and understandable. If new words are used, they should be defined. And if words already exist in the relevant art, they should be used. NovelPoint’s patent is a great example of how using fake terms can be used to obfuscate what the patent actually claims, and then used to claim infringement by something no one would have considered the patent owner to have invented. We have laws that should prevent this sort of gaming. The Patent Office and courts need to start actually enforcing them.