More than 90% of Americans believe that the US government is unduly influenced by money, and the Mayday.US super PAC is raising $5M to fund the election campaigns of politicians who’ll pledge to dismantle super PACs and enact other campaign finance reforms. They raised more than $1M in 30 days last month, and this month, the goal is $5M. It’s the brainchild of Lawrence Lessig, who’s going to run prototype the project by running five electoral campaigns in 2014, and use the lessons of those projects to win enough anti-corruption seats in 2016 to effect real change.
Again, I’m not able to contribute to Mayday.US, because I’m a Canadian and Briton. But I ask my American friends to put in $10, and promise that I’ll put CAD1000 into any comparable Canadian effort and/or £1000 into a comparable UK effort. We all win when countries embrace evidence-based policy guided by doing what’s best for its citizens, rather than lining the pockets of corrupting multinationals.
Please reblog!
"A routine request in Florida for records detailing the use of a surveillance tool known as stingray turned extraordinary Tuesday when the U.S. Marshals Service seized the documents before local police could release them."
Also what about the part where the PD reveals that its been using the stingray a bunch without telling any court and blames that on the manufacturer’s NDA.
Guardian - Secrets, lies and Snowden’s email: why I was forced to shut down Lavabit
"For the first time, the founder of an encrypted email startup that was supposed to insure privacy for all reveals how the FBI and the US legal system made sure we don’t have the right to much privacy in the first place"
A former State Department lawyer has his doubts, and a famous cartoonist predicts jury nullification.
Number 1 and Benford’s Law - Numberphile (by numberphile)
I’d heard of Benford’s Law before but it sounded totally counter intuitive to me. This video does a good job explaining why one shows up as the leading digit in sets of random numbers that span large ranges.
Redmond finally joins Google, Mozilla, by offering cash rewards for security flaws.
Good news everyone! Of course Microsoft employees are not eligible but that’s probably for the best.
Moral: laws should cover behavior not specific technologies. The implementation can change, laws shouldn’t take such dependencies.
Eric gets the most entertaining mail.
You have failed to comply with them after all the warning and instructions given to you, but since you are also among the terrorist we are facing in the country, I will personal make sure that I wipe away the crime in the state and I promise you that you will definitely pay with your life because I am here to protect the interest of my people and not to put them in shame, you suppose to support this government and not to spoil it.
Megabox is an ad-replacer - replacing ads on the web as you browse with its own. Ignoring security concerns, I hope this doesn’t result in over prescriptive laws that endanger things like Greasemonkey.
To listen to songs through Megabox, users will have two options—purchasing the music through the service, or installing “Megakey” software onto their computer to listen for free. The Megakey software, as Dotcom explained to Torrentfreak, acts like ad-blocking software—except that it isn’t. Megakey allows most advertisements to appear, but replaces about 15 percent of the ads served up by websites with ads hosted by Megabox.
Welcome news. Glad to hear they’re looking for improvements.
… the USPTO has also worked with Stack Exchange, … to create a new site called Ask Patents. … Examiners or others looking for prior art can post questions about a specific application, and members of the general public can respond with evidence that an applicant was not the first to invent the subject matter of the application.
Seized shirt!
For the feds, it’s not enough to simply seize domain names without warning or due process—they want to make sure everyone knows the website operators were breaking the law, even if that has yet to be proven in court. That’s why every domain that gets seized ends up redirecting to one of these dramatic warning pages, replete with the eagle-emblazoned badges of the federal agencies involved.
Former FireFox developer on the switch to their continuous update cycle.
Oh no, Chrome is doing such-and-such; we’d better do something equivalent or we’ll fall behind! We thought we needed a rapid update process like Chrome. We were jealous of their rapid update capability, which let them deploy improvements to users continuously. We had to “catch up” with Chrome’s updating capability.
Dealing with servicing on IE for years had led me to some of the same thoughts when I heard FireFox was switching to continuous updates.
Lookup any software license shortly summarized in plain English.
PPACA (aka Obamacare) broken down into its main subsections with brief explinations and citations linking into the actual PPACA document (why is it always PDF?).
Its interesting to see the very small number of parts folks are complaining about versus the rest which mostly strikes me as “how could this not already be the case?”
I’m no expert, and everything I posted here I attribute mostly to Wikipedia or the actual bill itself, with an occasional Google search to clarify stuff. I am absolutely not a difinitive source or expert. I was just trying to simplify things as best I can without dumbing them down. I’m glad that many of you found this helpful.”
THE Fiddler Book straight from the source, EricLaw - the developer of Fiddler!
Fiddler is a wonderful tool with never ending extensibility. With this book I shall master it!
451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons: The 451 status code is optional; clients cannot rely upon its use. It is imaginable that certain legal authorities may wish to avoid transparency, and not only forbid access to certain resources, but also disclosure that the restriction exists.
That was fast.
We never recovered the bicycle, of course. The lock itself wasn’t attacked at all, as you can see.
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