syndicatedragon

This post originally appeared on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's website. The author, Dave Maass, is a media relations coordinator and investigative researcher for EFF.

For years, local law enforcement agencies around the country have told parents that installing ComputerCOP software is the “first step” in protecting their children online.

Police chiefs, sheriffs, and district attorneys have handed out hundreds of thousands of copies of the disc to parents for free at schools, libraries, and community events, usually as a part of an “Internet Safety” outreach initiative. (You can see the long list of ComputerCOP outlets here.) The packaging typically features the agency’s official seal and the chief’s portrait, with a signed message warning of the “dark and dangerous off-ramps” of the Internet.

The Android Hangouts app, seen here translating an MMS message from a Sprint account.

On Monday, Google announced that its free Google Voice service received a long-awaited service upgrade in the form of Multimedia Message Service (MMS) support across nearly every major cellular carrier in North America.

Senior software engineer Alex Wiesen took to his personal Google Plus page to post a statement on Google's behalf, declaring that the company worked with "nearly 100 different North American carriers," including AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile, to ensure that MMS texts received on Google Voice would display correctly starting this week.

Up until this week, Google Voice users didn't see MMS messages as intended; instead, they arrived as SMS messages. Depending on the carrier, they'd either come with a link to the originally attached image or no indication that an image was ever attached. Now, while outbound Google Voice MMS attachments still appear on most carriers as a link, inbound MMS messages render images natively within Google Voice.

Adobe even logs what you read in Digital Editions' instruction manual.

Adobe’s Digital Editions e-book and PDF reader—an application used by thousands of libraries to give patrons access to electronic lending libraries—actively logs and reports every document readers add to their local “library” along with what users do with those files. Even worse, the logs are transmitted over the Internet in the clear, allowing anyone who can monitor network traffic (such as the National Security Agency, Internet service providers and cable companies, or others sharing a public Wi-Fi network) to follow along over readers’ shoulders.

Ars has independently verified the logging of e-reader activity with the use of a packet capture tool. The exposure of data was first discovered by Nate Hoffelder of The Digital Reader, who reported the issue to Adobe but received no reply.

Digital Editions (DE) has been used by many public libraries as a recommended application for patrons wanting to borrow electronic books (particularly with the Overdrive e-book lending system), because it can enforce digital rights management rules on how long a book may be read for. But DE also reports back data on e-books that have been purchased or self-published. Those logs are transmitted over an unencrypted HTTP connection back to a server at Adobe—a server with the Domain Name Service hostname “adelogs.adobe.com”—as an unencrypted file (the data format of which appears to be JSON).

The front (left) and back (right) of RocketSkates, motorized chariots for your feet.

Andrew Cunningham

Some words just make other words seem cooler. Add "rocket" to just about anything—car, backpack, toast—and suddenly you've made those words way more interesting. Rocket car! Rocket backpack! Rocket toast!

That was my thinking when I decided to try out RocketSkates, an upcoming product from Acton that cleared $550,000 in Kickstarter funding over the summer. While they aren't actually propelled by rockets, the motorized and battery-powered skates will scoot you along at speeds of about 12 miles per hour, and creator Peter Treadway has high hopes that they'll compete with skateboards, bikes, regular skates, and plain old feet as a form of urban transit. We met with Treadway earlier this week to talk about the skates and to take them for a test run.

RocketSkates began as a school project that Treadway began working on while he was getting his master's degree in industrial design. For him, "wearable transportation" was a natural way to combine his "love of cars and love of fashion." During the prototyping phase, he even delayed his own graduation so he could retain his access to the school's facilities.

Okay, it's not "breaking," but it does seem worth commenting on two recent cases in which officers did not open fire on a suspect.

Of course most police-citizen interactions do not end in death, but lately it has at least started to seem a little like that's the exception rather than the rule.

The first of these surprisingly non-fatal incidents is the one in which a 42-year-old man jumped the fence, ran across the lawn and got into the White House [update: two rooms into it] before he was apprehended. Some, perhaps understandably, saw this as a failure. "Under no circumstances," said Politico, "should anyone be able to vault over the fence and run unimpeded into the residence." Really? What if the place is on fire and the person is a firefighter? What if the vaulter is a 14-year-old kid who doesn't know there are supposed to be snipers on the roof to protect the lawn?

Okay, maybe they should not actually be able to "run unimpeded into the residence"—and the White House has announced that from now on, darn it, it is going to keep that door locked—but in cases like that I think most would prefer that the intruder not end up dead, even if a shooting might be seen as understandable.

And that, surprisingly, is what happened here. As Josh Voorhees wrote at Slate, "it's worth pausing for a second to acknowledge something the Secret Service got right amidst all they did wrong: not a single shot was fired. [Omar] Gonzalez, an Iraq War veteran who is likely mentally ill, is still alive."

The second and possibly even more astounding incident happened over the weekend in Ann Arbor, Michigan, when this happened:

[T]hree men were in the street, one of whom had a sword raised over his head and was moving toward another man. The officers shined their spotlight on the man and told him to drop the sword, while taking out their guns and pointing them at the man.

The man ... did not comply and instead ran at the police officers. He stopped about 15 feet away from the officers and was placed under arrest....

(Emphasis added.) Wait, what? I would call that last sentence a "twist ending," because it is most unlikely that anybody doing what this guy did would ever get the chance to stop voluntarily. In fact, I just paced off 15 feet here in my office and I'm now upgrading that to "almost impossible." My office is frankly not that big, but if I were armed, once inside that door waving a sword your lifespan might be limited. But this guy, too, is still alive.

Compare that case to this one, in which two St. Louis officers killed a 25-year-old man who walked toward them with a knife. The incident was caught on video (which, needless to say, is graphic). As soon as they arrive, the officers leap out with guns drawn, though at that point they have no reason to think he's dangerous. (He had been wandering around outside a convenience store, yelling.) And while a shot or at least a tasing is probably understandable once he approaches, they shoot to kill.

There's also video of the fatal shooting in the John Crawford case, which shows officers immediately opening fire on a man wandering around Wal-Mart with an air rifle that he had picked up off the shelf, talking on the phone and making no threatening moves. In that case a 911 caller had claimed (falsely) that the man was threatening others, but still the police made no attempt to assess the situation before opening fire. (Last week a grand jury declined to indict the shooter.)

Finally there's this one, which was not fatal but the speed with which the officer opens fire is incredible. He has stopped this driver for a seatbelt violation, and the driver's standing outside the open door of his truck. The officer asks him for his license, and he calmly leans in to get it. Apparently assuming the driver is reaching for a gun, the officer almost immediately fires four shots at him, hitting him once in the hip. All this was captured by the officer's dash cam, which also then recorded quite a few iterations of the question, "Why did you shoot me?" and some not-very-convincing answers. Possibly more surprising is that in this case, the officer has actually been fired and is being prosecuted.

Anyway, while officers who shoot too fast should be criticized (at a minimum), as Voorhees was suggesting we should take a second to praise the ones who don't shoot when they probably could have. Two cops in Michigan stood their ground and kept their heads when some guy charged them with a sword. Now that's bravery.

Do they give out decorations for not shooting people? If they do, those two should get one.

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A worker honey bee covered in pollen. Honey bees add about 20 billion dollars a year to the US economy, mostly through their pollination services. Urbana, Illinois, USA.

Alex Wild

Here is a true story about how copyright infringement costs my small photography business thousands of dollars every year.

Or, maybe it isn’t. It could also be a true story of how copyright infringement earns me thousands of dollars every year. I can’t be sure. Either way, this is definitely the story of how copyright infringement takes up more of my time than I wish to devote to it. Copyright infringement drains my productivity to the point where I create hundreds fewer images each year. And it's why, in part, I am leaving professional photography for an academic position less prone to the frustrations of a floundering copyright system.

I have an unusual, and an unusually fun, job: I photograph insects for a living. I love what I do in no small part because the difference between my profession and getting paid to be an overgrown kid, is… not that much, really. I collect ants and beetles, I play with camera gadgets, I run around in the woods. Meanwhile, publishers, museums, and the pest control industry send me enough in licensing fees that I haven’t starved to death. By nature photographer standards, business is booming. I cover a modest mortgage in a working class neighborhood. I even afford a new lens or two every year.

MIT researchers have released a video of a robot they're calling "cheetah" making its way across campus. An earlier robot that was also called cheetah was part of a DARPA/Boston Dynamics (now owned by Google) collaboration that was notable for its speed. The MIT version is notable for ditching the tethers that supplied power to it—it goes for runs using on-board battery power and control logic.

Cheetah is only able to move at up to 10 mph, but its developers expect that they'll be able to get it to eventually travel at up to 30 miles an hour. For now, cheetah's biggest accomplishment is being able to move without any wires, which are normally used to supply power, and in some cases command-and-control, to more sophisticated robots.

The MIT group has also been working on the mechanics of the robot's stride, trying to have it exert more force each time it strikes the ground. The result is that it's been able to move across less rigid surfaces, like grass, which is why it's able to be taken out onto the MIT campus. Additionally, they've developed a routine that allows the robot to take a hop, which will let it bound over obstacles.

The new Android version of Hangouts is very green.

Ron Amadeo

Google Hangouts, Google's IM client and the replacement for Google Talk, has gotten a massive set of updates, which are slowly trickling out to users. The biggest news of the bunch is Google Voice integration, which lets Google Voice users send and receive text and phone calls through the Hangouts app. There's also a new Android app with a very green redesign and the ability to make VoIP calls from the app.

The Android app is significantly easier to understand than the old one. Contacts are in one tab, conversations are in another, and the last tab hosts the VoIP dialer. There's a normal navigation drawer that lets you jump to the settings and other lesser-used parts of the app. There's also a new Hangouts Dialer app in the Play Store, which gives users an easy way to add a direct link to the VoIP dialer to their home screen. The bad news is that there are now two dialers apps for Android.

The updated app is very green, but it doesn't yet follow Google's Material Design guidelines. This means that while it just got a redesign, it will have to be redesigned again sometime this year to match Android L.

Amazon has at long last released a version of its video player for Android devices, according to a report Tuesday from The Next Web. The app release negates some of the video advantage that used to be reserved for Amazon-branded Android products like the Kindle Fire, but it rounds out the list of platforms where Amazon can appear.

Amazon has always been a persnickety service about where and how its videos will play. Users can stream to a PC desktop but not always in HD, and they can pin videos for offline viewing but only on Kindle products. Amazon video apps have been available for iOS devices for some time, but Android was always left out.

At first, Android users had to use a workaround to get the app from Amazon's Appstore that involved enabling the right permissions. But as of a couple hours later, the app was available directly through the Google play store for users in the US, UK, and Germany. This brings video purchases and rentals as well as Amazon Prime Instant Video streaming to devices including the Nexus 7, one of the Kindle Fire's competitor devices.

Wait—that's got to be an exaggeration. It's not like the reporter is actually quoting the charge sheet—

"On and/or about the 20th day of Sept. 20, 2009 at or near 222 S. Florissant within the corporate limits of Ferguson, Missouri, the above named defendant did then and there unlawfully commit the offense of 'property damage,' to wit, did transfer blood to the uniform," reads the charge sheet.

Okay then.

No Yelp reviews yet, but only getting 1.2 stars on Google+

As Michael Daly reports at The Daily Beast, the address where the defendant was said to have so wantonly damaged these officers' uniforms is in fact the address of the Ferguson Police Department, which recently took over from the colon-searchers in Deming, New Mexico, as America's favorite. Did the above-named defendant go down there voluntarily and throw blood upon their uniforms? No he did not.

The above-named defendant was 52-year-old Henry Davis, who was a Henry Davis but not the Henry Davis they were looking for. This Henry Davis had the bad luck to be caught in a driving rainstorm on the highway, reportedly missing the exit for St. Charles and ending up in Ferguson. Having pulled over to wait out the rain, he became the prey of an officer who ran his plate and found an outstanding warrant for "Henry Davis."

The two Henry Davises had different middle names and Social Security numbers, but these details, and the corresponding likelihood that the person in custody was an entirely different human being not suspected of anything, do not seem to have been important. Though the booking officer realized the problem, he did not let Davis go. When Davis objected to being locked up and forced to sleep on a cement floor, the officer summoned others. Words were exchanged, probably—you know how people smart off in Ferguson when being hassled for no reason—and Davis was beaten and kicked in the head.

In this emergency-room photo, you can see where Davis got the blood that he allegedly "transferred" to the uniforms of the officers who beat and kicked him. Possibly while they were beating and kicking him, but the report is not totally clear as to when said transfer occurred.

To be honest, there are reasons to believe that it never occurred at all. Such as the fact that the officers involved all admitted under oath that it didn't. That's one pretty good reason.

According to the report, which quotes from the depositions, one officer basically admitted under oath that he had lied under oath when he signed the criminal complaint against Davis. At that point it had presumably become more important to lie about beating Davis in the first place—he had sued by then—than to go after him for blood-related uniform damage. All the officers, in fact, claimed none of them struck Davis and that they did not see him bleeding. A little awkward, considering they had charged him with bleeding on them.

Somehow, a federal magistrate ruled that the perjury and Davis's injuries were too minor to sustain his due-process and excessive-force claims. Kind of astonishing. The case is on appeal, though, and Davis's lawyer suggested that recent events in Ferguson might lead that court to take the claim a little more seriously.

The Daily Beast also notes that the officer who has since been identified as the one who shot Michael Brown had been on the job for about two years at the time of the Davis incident. Did he learn from it? We don't know yet. Not for sure, anyway.

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Maybe the CIA should consider blaming rogue monkeys for all that missing evidence. That'd be harder to pull off in Virginia than New Delhi, but it's at least as good as the current explanations.

A member of India's parliament suggested last week that monkeys were partly to blame for thousands of files missing from the Home Ministry, although he was plainly ridiculing officials who, he claimed, themselves blame monkeys whenever a file goes missing. 

"Files in the Home Ministry are in such a bad condition that old files are strewn all over the corridors," Rajeev Shukla said during a debate in the parliament's upper house. "Whenever a file is lost it is said that monkeys have taken it away. There is a big monkey menace there," Shukla declared, "and in this government there is a minister who is against any action against monkeys."

Everyone was amused, but the joke only works because the monkey menace itself is all too real.

Previous monkey-menace coverage here involved the city of Varanasi, a Hindu holy city where the problem is even worse. See "Tourist Files Complaint Against Primate Thief" (July 17, 2007). This is partly because of reverence for the god Hanuman, who is usually depicted as a monkey. According to this recent report, although more than 400 people are treated for rabies every day in Varanasi, partly due to monkey bites, an official said options were limited since "many Hindus believe the monkey to be a representative of Lord Hanuman and [are] opposed to any operation against them." (Dogs are also to blame but are less exalted.)

But there is indeed a "big monkey menace" in the capital itself, as the New York Times reported in 2012, and file-stealing is not the biggest problem:

Stories abound in Delhi of monkeys entering homes, ripping out wiring, stealing clothes and biting those who surprise them. They treat the Indian Parliament building as a playground, have invaded the prime minister’s office and Defense Ministry, sometimes ride buses and subway trains, and chase diplomats from their well-tended gardens.

This article puts the number of insurgents at about 30,000.

So, what do you do when you're plagued by a horde of little monkeys and it's not politically acceptable to kill them?

Well, you get bigger monkeys.

Langur-wranglers
in Delhi

The main problem is the common rhesus monkey, which is relatively small (males average about 17 pounds). To scare them away, people turned to the langur, which is about twice that size. They aren't natural enemies—langurs are herbivores—but presumably smaller monkeys tend to avoid bigger ones anyway. According to the Times, the langur doesn't actually have to be present, because the smell of its urine is enough to scare the rhesus(es) away. So while the langurs would often go out on patrol, people were also paying their owners to have the langurs pee on things. "Mr. Singh said that he had 65 langurs urinating on prominent homes and buildings throughout Delhi," the Times said of one proud entrepreneur.

But wouldn't you know, there are langur advocates too. The langur is a protected species, and although officials looked the other way for quite a while, they have cracked down recently. It is a crime to own, sell, or rent langurs now, which was very bad news for the langur-men.

It is great news, though, for the 40 humans who have now been hired to act like langurs.

The country's urban development minister told MPs yesterday that 40 people had been hired to "disguise themselves as langurs" in hopes of scaring the rhesus monkeys away from Parliament. This was only one of several measures being taken "to tackle the monkey and dog menace inside and around Parliament House," he said—rubber bullets are another option—but it is not surprisingly the one that has attracted attention.

There might be a translation issue here as to the meaning of "disguise." While this report actually describes the uniform these people supposedly wear ("a smattering of grey, black and white, with a tail to boot"), other reports say the minister meant only that the men had been trained to sound like langurs. "These men are not dressed like langurs," an official said, "but only mimic their voices to terrorise the monkeys." A Wall Street Journal source apparently spoke to one of these "monkey impersonators"—who was guarding a Supreme Court justice's home from monkeys at the time—and he said he growls or waves a stick, but doesn't use a costume.

Officials said that the langur impersonators were only a "stop-gap" measure until better solutions can be deployed. That's good, because there is evidence that the langurs weren't really getting the job done anyway. "People said to get a langur," said one business executive, after a rhesus bit his maid's daughter. He did, "but the monkeys mobbed the langur and beat it up." He didn't blame the langur, really, it's just that the langur was seriously outnumbered. Given that there are only 40 langur impersonators, I hope those guys are getting combat pay, because it won't take too long for the monkeys to figure this out.

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