As casinos grew in size, thanks in part to the rise of blackjack, it became increasingly difficult to keep a vigilant eye on players. It might surprise you to hear that the most important countermeasure casinos employed against cheaters and thieves was nothing high-tech and novel like biometrics or facial recognition or RFID chips. It was simply installing cameras, being able to see. And then being able to see more. And record and playback what was seen. For all of the potential sci-fi advances they could deploy, most casinos still rely on cameras and the people watching them. "You cannot walk into any casino property in the world without being picked up on camera," says Derk Boss, President of the International Association of Certified Surveillance Professionals. "We can track your movements throughout the casino if we want to."

via The Verge.

Along those lines, the TSA issued a market research request for information last week "to obtain market research, test, and demonstration information relative to the possible expansion of expedited aviation physical screening initiatives." The American Civil Liberties Union is concerned that this is just another step toward a total-surveillance security state, and it just might be. But it also likely represents an opportunity for the TSA to bypass its own awe-inspiring history of incompetence — or to, once again, screw something up.

via Reason.com.

Yes, they seriously named their pornoscanner company "Rapiscan." Seriously.

via Boing Boing.

Dennis Romboy with Deseret News writes that police raided a man’s home as he grieved for his wife, searching for her prescription medication. According to a lawsuit he has filed, they told him that Utah’s Controlled Substances Act gives them the right to conduct warrantless searches when people die.

via Boing Boing.

Britons may remember 2012 as the year the weather spun off its rails in a chaotic concoction of drought, deluge and flooding, but the unpredictability of it all turns out to have been all too predictable: Around the world, extreme has become the new commonplace.

Especially lately. China is enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Brazil is in the grip of a dreadful heat spell. Eastern Russia is so freezing — minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and counting — that the traffic lights recently stopped working in the city of Yakutsk.

via NYTimes.com.

But then, under the cover of Christmas, the Senate inexplicably dropped the whole section of the bill devoted to ECPA reform, and just voted on the VPPA bill, weakening our video privacy, while refusing to improve our email privacy.

They were hoping no one would notice they used a disingenuous negotiation process to help weaken arguably America’s strongest privacy law at the behest of a company and leave ordinary Americans with less privacy.

via Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Bath salts started to pop up in the United States three years ago. They were considered either a starter drug for teenagers or a replacement drug for users who couldn’t get ecstasy or crystal meth. The fact that the drug was legal was its biggest selling point—and it didn’t show up on standard drug tests.

Until police union chief Aguilar blamed the Rudy Eugene incident on bath salts, few members of the Miami Police Department had heard of the drug.

via Playboy.

via Gelatobaby.

Esquire’s Charles Pierce strikes again, calling taxpayers a “dumb rampaging beast.” Does he call them that because they willingly pay into a system that spends more and more on policies they often disagree with? Nope. It’s because they have the audacity, in what’s often called a democracy, to demand a lower tax burden.

via Reason.com.

Here’s how it works: In June of last year, Rep. Peter Roksam (R-IL) introduced legislation authorizing a commemorative coin honoring the Lions Club, a service organization based in Oak Brook, IL – part of Roksam’s district.

The legislation dictates that proceeds from the coin sales be used to pay for the cost of producing the coins, but adds: “all surcharges received by the Secretary from the sale of coins issued under this Act shall be promptly paid by the Secretary to the Lions Clubs International Foundation for the purposes.”

via Heritage.org.

the fiscal cliff deal may have spared most Americans from an income tax hike, but the majority of us are taking a big hit in terms of increased Social Security payroll taxes. That’s because temporary relief from some of the burden of that tax expired at the end of 2012, and the feds are quietly anticipating increased revenue as the bulk of American workers glance at their pay stubs and notice an extra bite missing. That can be a big deal because, as the Tax Policy Center tells us, as of 2007, two-thirds of taxpayers paid more in payroll taxes than in income taxes.

via Reason.com.

Rapid DNA Analyzers—machines with the ability to process DNA in 90 minutes or less—are an operational reality and are being marketed to the federal government and state and local law enforcement agencies around the country. These machines, each about the size of a laser printer, are designed to be used in the field by non-scientists, and—if you believe the hype from manufacturers like IntegenX and NetBio—will soon “revolutionize the use of DNA by making it a routine identification and investigational tool.”

via Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Apart from the semi-fictionalized jingoistic narrative, and the way the whole thing feels like pro-torture propaganda, I just don’t see the cinematic greatness.

Yes, it was beautifully shot; yes, there were some solid performances by talented actors.

But as Glenn Greenwald wrote over email, as we were debating the film’s merits, "it felt banal, trite, thin, predictable – yeah, some parts were filmed nicely, but overall, just as a film, it was totally mediocre at best."

via Boing Boing.

Montana SWAT team drops a flash grenade through a window into a bedroom where two children are sleeping. No arrests. No alleged meth lab.

via The Agitator.

via The Agitator.

Unfortunately, Facebook has made it extremely difficult for users to truly protect their inboxes from unwanted communications. Facebook has banned pseudonyms and adopted a strict real names policy. (Unless, perhaps, you’re in Germany…) The social network has also removed a privacy setting that would allow users to suppress their profiles from appearing in the internal Facebook search. Combined with these prior changes, the newest adjustment to Facebook’s privacy settings has backed privacy-seeking users into a corner. If you have a Facebook account, you can’t efficiently hide it without breaking the terms of service. And now, Facebook is letting people pay for access to your inbox.

via Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Flemington, New Jersey has all of 4,500 people. It hasn’t seen a murder in well over a decade.

But it does have its own SWAT team. And now the town wants to buy assault rifles for its regular patrol cops, too.

via The Agitator.

Incredibly, the Senate rejected all the proposed amendments that would have brought a modicum of transparency and oversight to the government’s activities, despite previous refusals by the Executive branch to even estimate how many Americans are surveilled by this program or reveal critical secret court rulings interpreting it.

via Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Janey, a small, older pit bull, dragged a trail of blood around the house until she finally collapsed.

“They shot her four times as she was trying to get away,” Woods said, his pale blue eyes welling up. “She didn’t have a chance. It just isn’t right.”

via Motor City Muckraker |.

When members of Baltimore County’s tactical unit burst into a Reisterstown home this summer, they were looking for potentially armed suspects in the attempted murder of a 15-year-old boy. But in the chaos of the raid, Officer Carlos Artson shot and killed the home’s owner — who was not a suspect — after he thrust a large sword at the officer, police said.

via Baltimoresun.com.

This is just another example of how big government will always offend your values. Hate baseball, or the Yankees in particular? Too bad, you’re paying for ‘em. Can’t stand junk food? You’re subsidizing the stuff, from producer to consumer. The more government takes, redistributes, regulates, and insures, the more you are footing the bill for behaviors, industries, and practices you abhor. A first step toward protecting your bruised values is to stop supporting the use of tax dollars to "save jobs."

via Reason.com.

On its blog, Instagram has attempted to waylay criticisms of the reduced privacy policy, noting that “If you set your photos to private, Instagram only shares your photos with the people you’ve approved to follow you” and then clarifying that “The distribution of your content and photos is governed by our privacy policy, and always has been.” This falls far short of actually having language in the privacy policy that says “If you mark content as private, Instagram will not make it publicly available or distribute it to people you have not approved to follow you” — the type of strong, legally-binding language Instagram used to have.

via Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The heavy-handedness is Anaheim is particularly poignant when you consider that the protests themselves are in response to a rash of shootings by Anaheim cops, most notably Manuel Diaz last week, who was unarmed and shot twice. According to an attorney for the family, the second shot was to the back of the head as Diaz lay on the ground.

via The Agitator.

There have been more than 116 drone strikes in Yemen since May of last year. The president only acknowledged military operations in Yemen in June.

via Reason.com.

The UK Pirate Party abandoned its fight against the BPI — Britain’s answer to the RIAA — over its proxy for reaching The Pirate Bay, which is blocked by court order in the UK. The Party’s executive had been personally threatened with legal action by the BPI and couldn’t afford to risk home and family fighting this fight. But other Pirate Parties took up the slack: new, unblocked Pirate Bay proxies have been established by Pirate Party Luxembourg and Pirate Party Argentina

via Boing Boing.

However, it is unclear who created these super computers that may hypothetically power our existence.

via The Times of India.

The labor union that forms the backbone of opposition to Republican plans to privatize Pennsylvania’s liquor store system gave more than $140,000 to state-level candidates in 2012, including plenty of campaign cash to some high-ranking Republicans.

via Reason.com.

One child "was kicked in the side, handcuffed and searched at gunpoint," the family says.

Another child, a girl, "a diabetic, was handcuffed at gunpoint and prevented by officer from obtaining and taking her medication, thus induced a diabetic episode as a result of low-blood sugar levels."

via Reason.com.

Lest you think it is inherently suspicious a young man would have chemicals or electronic parts, note that his school is, according to a Press of Atlantic City account, "a magnet school with programs focusing on engineering and environmental sciences and specializing in hands-on learning." And his mom told MyFoxPhilly.com that her son had a "passion for collecting old stuff, taking it apart and rebuilding things."

via Reason.com.

Potential Prostitutes is only the latest sleazy site to wed personal photos to public humiliation. Its offer to publicize anonymous claims of sex crimes, however, is a novelty: any woman may be be anonymously tagged as a prostitute.

The site accepts anonymous submissions through an online form and promises to post uploads in a browsable "offender" database seeded with mugshots of convicted prostitutes. Entries may be removed by those listed—so long as they pay a hefty removal fee.

via Boing Boing.

Whereas, just about everybody’s on Facebook. Facebook’s privacy systems affect them directly every day, and they see it. So Americans are furious that Instagram might sell their photos, while shrugging at what the federal government might do with the exact same data.

via Reason.com.

In what nefarious ways are the Free Staters changing New Hampshire? Getting marijuana growers out of jail by using the rare tactic of jury nullification, among other things.

via Reason.com.

They voted down every single privacy amendment to FISA, the act that lets the NSA spy on you without a warrant. They voted down the amendment that would let you hear rough estimates of how much the NSA was spying on you. Obama spoke out against amendments that offered less privacy protection than the ones that he voted for in 2008.

via Boing Boing.

This time it’s TSA at DFW, who detained a weeping 12-year-old girl with a genetic bone disorder in a wheelchair, separated from her family, on public display, for an hour. Her hands had tested positive for explosive residue, but it was a false alarm. No apologies from the TSA. Oh, and if she was the world’s sneakiest suicide bomber, congrats, TSA, you kept her right there among all the other travelers for an hour, while you believed that she was about to blow herself to kingdom come. The Shitshow Agency, indeed.

via Boing Boing.

The Philadelphia Daily News provides similar comic relief with a piece that blows the lid off the absurdly inflated "street values" that cops claim when they seize drugs. "In the hands of a narcotics cop with a calculator," the paper notes, "$2 million of heroin can become $9 million, $500,000 worth of meth can become $2.5 million, [and] coke worth less than $1 million can become several million." The main trick is to value wholesale quantities based on the price they might command when sold to users in tiny amounts:

via Reason.com.

The record industry has finally struck back. Rather than seeking an injunction against the proxy, or suing the party, it has individually sued the party’s executives, seeking to personally bankrupt them and their families. It’s an underhanded, unethical, and unprecedented threat to democracy — essentially a bid to use their financial and legal might to destroy a political party itself.

via Boing Boing.

Brown would have liked police to pay for the $3,000 leaded-and-stained-glass door, lock and frame they broke, to clean up the mess they made, and to apologize. Police say that won’t happen.

via Chicago Tribune.

My mother-in-law said, "As far as I know I don’t have any anomalies in the crotch area."

The TSA agent told her she would have to go through the scanner again. She demurred, saying she didn’t like the machine very much. The agent told her she could opt for a pat-down. My mother-in-law refused to be frisked, figuring, correctly, that "they were going to pat-down my crotch area. I mean, there wasn’t an anomaly in the chest area."

via The Atlantic.

As policymakers evaluate how effective copyright laws are, they need to consider the collateral impact copyright regulation has on the flow of information online. When we launched the copyright removals feature, we received more than 250,000 requests per week. That number has increased tenfold in just six months to more than 2.5 million requests per week today. While we’re now receiving and processing more requests more quickly than ever (on average, within approximately six hours), we still do our best to catch errors or abuse so we don’t mistakenly disable access to non-infringing material.

via Policy by the Numbers.

In April, Zynga conducted a "secondary stock offering" in which insiders dumped 43 million shares of stock at $12 a share, raking in about $516 million.

Yesterday, four months later, Zynga reported a horrible quarter, and the stock plunged to $3.

In other words, Zynga insiders cashed out at exactly the right time.

via Yahoo! Finance.

Say you have a gallery of photos of human rights abuses that you uploaded to Facebook – and that you want the world to see, and newspapers to print. Well, there’s no option for that on Facebook.

Try to license an Instagram photo via Creative Commons. It’s not that CC isn’t the default mode — there’s not even an option for it. You get your copyright for a hundred plus years, and Instagram gets a license for that duration too.

Facebook is about Facebook. Sharing to them means sharing … on Facebook. Connecting with other people means connecting with other people … on Facebook. Like the old joke about fortune cookies, you have to append “on Facebook” to get the real meaning.

via Wired.com.

The officers did not find any drugs inside the establishment — as was outlined in the search warrant — but took about $1,500 in cash and another $8,000 worth of club “tokens,” the lawsuit states. Such tokens generally serve as product-specific gift certificates.

via Reason.com.

Narcotics detectives in Salt Lake City on Wednesday used a battering ram to knock down a door and execute a search warrant on the wrong house, frightening the home’s 76-year-old resident.

"This was a mistake," Police Chief Chris Burbank said Friday. "It should not have happened."

via The Salt Lake Tribune.

Burglars, Johnston probably thought, or worse — an elderly neighbor had recently been raped. No doubt she was terrified. That is why, as the cops got closer and closer, she found her gun. And why, as the door was opening, she fired one shot. It didn’t hit anyone. But it provoked a hail of return fire — 39 shots, 5 or 6 of which hit her and some of which struck other policemen. By the time the officers burst inside, Kathryn Johnston lay in a pool of blood.

via NYTimes.com.

The city has ordered her to pay the $710 cost of repairing the police car that killed her boy.

via NY Daily News.

Upon arriving at the station, Schoen tried to pull Tracy out of the backseat of his cruiser by her shirt. When Tracy refused to move, Schoen went around to the other side of the car, climbed into the backseat, and began punching Tracy in the face. Schoen then dragged her out of the backseat of his cruiser by her hair. All of this was captured by Schoen’s dash cam.

via Reason.com.

I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.

A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7- and 9-year-old siblings knew the safety plan — they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me. Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me.

That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room.

via Buzzfeed.

The across-the-board cut, or "sequestration," was designed to be so distasteful that Congress would be moved to cut more deliberately. If it doesn’t act, $110 billion in projected spending will be automatically cut—half from domestic spending, half from the Pentagon.

"They assume that they made it so bad that they wouldn’t accept it, but I don’t think they did," said Paul. "They’re not even…talking about real cuts. They’re talking about cuts in baseline budgeting."

via Reason.com.

When Ward 5 of Manchester, New Hampshire, elected a delegate to the state legislature this month, its voters rejected a Republican from the Free State Project who favors a minimal government. Instead they picked Tim O’Flaherty, a Democrat from the Free State Project who favors the abolition of government altogether. In the words of the Manchester Union-Leader: "O’Flaherty ran against a fellow Free Stater, housemate Dan Garthwaite, whom O’Flaherty called a statist."

via Reason.com.

Meet the administrative subpoena (.pdf): With a federal official’s signature, banks, hospitals, bookstores, telecommunications companies and even utilities and internet service providers — virtually all businesses — are required to hand over sensitive data on individuals or corporations, as long as a government agent declares the information is relevant to an investigation. Via a wide range of laws, Congress has authorized the government to bypass the Fourth Amendment — the constitutional guard against unreasonable searches and seizures that requires a probable-cause warrant signed by a judge.

via Wired.com.

via Buzzfeed

But that turned out to be the best strategy in Belarus, which remains a largely socialist state with the infrastructure to match, including a state-run communications monopoly, Beltelcom. "One of the main reasons why Opera has a large market share in Belarus is because of the Internet infrastructure in the country; it was pretty bad a few years ago," Espen André Øverdahl, one of Opera’s community managers wrote in an email, pointing to features that allow users to strip out images and other bandwidth-gobbling web extras.

via The Atlantic.

He was the conscience that sparked these international controversies. He was the human being who felt he had to speak out. And he was a very confused young man in an incredible amount of psychological pain. I want to flesh him out, to unghost him a little for you. If we, as a country, are going to imprison Manning for what he’s done, we owe it to him to understand him. If we, as a country, are going to hold him in conditions that the United Nations wants to investigate, we owe it to him to try to figure out why he did what he did.

via The Atlantic.

Proposals leaked earlier from Russia, China, Iran, and others would authorize member nations, with UN blessing, to inspect and censor incoming and outgoing Internet traffic on the premise of monitoring criminal behavior, filtering spam, or protecting national security.

via Reason.com.

via Buzzfeed.

When work crews pulled open a broken BART escalator at San Francisco’s Civic Center Station last month, they found so much human excrement in its works they had to call a hazardous-materials team.

via SFGate.

In case you didn’t have enough too worry about in terms of death raining down from the sky from remotely guided drones, now comes word that completely autonomous killer robots aren’t just minions of Skynet, they’re a likely presence in our near future. A new report released by Human Rights Watch cautions that "killer robots" (their words, not mine) could reach battlefields within the next few decades, and it strongly suggests that humans try to legislatively head-off that long-feared development.

via Reason.com.

via Buzzfeed.

The notoriously filthy waterway topped its banks when the storm barreled through the borough, filling residences with several feet of water and leaving behind a noxious grime that coated floors, walls, and belongings throughout the neighborhood — and some residents worry the water damage is just beginning.

via The Brooklyn Paper.

How can law enforcement get away with snooping into our emails and other documents stored online? After all, the Fourth Amendment guarantees the right of citizens “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,” against unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents without a warrant based on probable cause. It is long settled law that the police must get a warrant approved by a judge based on probable cause to look at a citizen’s personal mail or documents. But not if those documents are located on third party servers in the “cloud,” argue the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

via Reason.com.

The government responded angrily Wednesday to a YouTube video allegedly showing a 27-year-old Florida man sneaking a metallic object through two different body scanner devices at American airports.

The Transportation Security Administration, though, refused to directly address whether Jonathan Corbett, of Miami Beach, has discovered a method to beat the machines, which number 600 and are in about 140 U.S. airports. The brief video allegedly shows Corbett, who has sewn a pocket to his side, get through two body scanners with a metallic object in that pocket.

via Wired.com.

So, just how do you exchange messages with someone, without leaving discoverable records with your webmail provider? This is an important practical skill, whether you need to use it to keep your love life private, to talk confidentially with a journalist, or because you’re engaged in politics in a country where the authorities use law enforcement and surveillance methods against you.

via Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Because of a regulatory Catch-22, the airport X-ray scanners have escaped the oversight required for X-ray machines used in doctors’ offices and hospitals. The reason is that the scanners do not have a medical purpose, so the FDA cannot subject them to the rigorous evaluation it applies to medical devices.

Still, the FDA has limited authority to oversee some non-medical products and can set mandatory safety regulations. But the agency let the scanners fall under voluntary standards set by a nonprofit group heavily influenced by industry.

As for the TSA, it skipped a public comment period required before deploying the scanners. Then, in defending them, it relied on a small body of unpublished research to insist the machines were safe, and ignored contrary opinions from U.S. and European authorities that recommended precautions, especially for pregnant women. Finally, the manufacturer, Rapiscan Systems, unleashed an intense and sophisticated lobbying campaign, ultimately winning large contracts.

via ProPublica.

Can law enforcement enter your house and use a secret video camera to record the intimate details inside? On Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unfortunately answered that question with "yes."

via Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Northside Independent School District in San Antonio began issuing the RFID-chip-laden student-body cards when the semester began in the fall. The ID badge has a bar code associated with a student’s Social Security number, and the RFID chip monitors pupils’ movements on campus, from when they arrive until when they leave.

via Wired.com.

Read their answers.

It adds spending for physical CDs, paid downloads, and subscription fees for music buyers of both P2P users and non-P2P users aged 18-35: P2P users spend $62 per year, while non-P2P users spend $54. The chart lists the subtotal and then shows merchandise and concert ticket revenues, where P2P users spend far more ($52 to $20 for merchandise, $91 to $63 for concert tickets). The grand total is listed as $267 for P2P users and $191 for non-P2P users, a difference of 35.6 percent. 

via Michael Geist.

Of course, before being bailed out by governments, banks had never made any return in their history, assuming that their assets are properly marked to market. Nor should they produce any return in the long run, as their business model remains identical to what it was before, with only cosmetic modifications concerning trading risks.

So the facts are clear. But, as individual taxpayers, we are helpless, because we do not control outcomes, owing to the concerted efforts of lobbyists, or, worse, economic policymakers. Our subsidizing of bank managers and executives is completely involuntary.

via CNN.com Blogs.

The discovery this week of a proposed posthumous baptism for Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel — who is alive — has revived a longstanding controversy surrounding the Mormon Church’s practice of performing "saving ordinances" on behalf of its members’ non-Mormons ancestors.

via Buzzfeed.

This was where Pong — a rudimentary Ping-Pong game featuring two dashes for paddles and a white dot as a ball — became a phenomenon. But its creation was practically an accident, a stroke of luck borne out of failure. The video game industry didn’t really exist, and what its pioneers did “was very seat-of-the-pants stuff,” says Darran Jones, editor of Retro Gamer magazine. “People were making things up as they went along.”

via Buzzfeed.

Yesterday, California Watch reported that DHS signed a contract that could be worth as much as $443 million with General Atomics for the purchase up to fourteen additional Predator drones to fly near the border of Mexico and Canada. Congress would still need to appropriate the funds, but if they did, DHS’ drone fleet woud increase to twenty-four.

via Electronic Frontier Foundation.

What was different in many ways during the thick of the Bush years was that spending continued to increase during the good times, too. In 2001, Bush took the reins of a government that was spending 18.2 percent of the economy. By 2008, government spending equaled 20.8 percent of the economy. It then spiked to 25.2 percent of GDP in 2009 (a budget year for which some expenses were Obama’s but most were Bush’s). That sort of massive divergence is explainable in light of the fiscal crisis and the Bush and Obama administrations’ responses to it. In my my view, those responses were both hysterical, counterproductive, and at least in regard to the auto bailout, illegal. Whether you agree with me on any of that, you should be worried about whether the boost in spending as a percentage of GDP is a temporary blip or the new normal.

via Reason.com.

On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee is marking up a bill that would amend the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) in ways we think are unnecessary and potentially bad for users, giving companies new rights to share your video rental history after they get your “consent” just once.

via Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Kardashian is a unit I proposed a few classes back as a measure of attention. Conceptually, the Kardashian is the amount of global attention Kim Kardashian commands across all media over the space of a day.

via …My heart’s in Accra.

Mint Valley Elementary School in Longview, Washington, is receiving complaints over its "isolation box" — a ventilated padded booth apparently used to calm disabled students with behavioral problems — after parent Ana Bate posted a photo of it on Facebook.

via Buzzfeed.

Will the scandal surrounding David Petraeus, General John Allen, Paula Broadwell, Jill Kelley, and a shirtless F.B.I. agent turn into the same sort of eureka moment that Congress experienced when Bork was, as the saying now goes, "borked"? Although the lustful portion of the Petraeus scandal is hardly disappearing — who else will be drawn into it, and when will we read the emails? — attention is turning toward the apparent ease with which the F.B.I. accessed the electronic communication of Petraeus, Broadwell, Kelley, and Allen. The exact circumstances of how the F.B.I. got its hands on all this material remains to be revealed — for instance, whether search warrants were obtained for everything — but the bottom line appears to be that the F.B.I. accessed a vast array of private information and seriously harmed the careers of at least Petraeus and Broadwell without, as of yet, filing a criminal complaint against anybody. As the law professor and privacy expert James Grimmelmann tweeted the other day, "The scandal isn’t what’s illegal; the scandal is what’s legal (or what the FBI thinks is legal)."

via ProPublica.

Jenn Frank of Infinite Lives reports that Enfour, the company that publishes the $55 Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) mobile phone app, accused her of pirating the app and that the app hijacked her Twitter account and started autoposting tweets that Jenn is a software thief.

via Boing Boing.