Favorite Note: These instructions originally appeared on c/net on 12/2009. Most macs no longer have a disc drive, so that part of the instructions may not work all mac users today, e.g., you’ll have to get yourself an external disc player. The original article is attributed to Joe Aimonetti — but his profile link now leads…
All posts by Friends of Mayor Densmore
Tell Congress: It’s Time to Move FASTR
Favorite Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available When you pay for federally funded research, you should be allowed to read it. That’s the simple premise of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (S.779, H.R.1477), which was just passed out of a major Senate committee. Under FASTR, every federal agency that spends…
EFF Urges Federal Appeals Court to Protect Speech, Guard Against Censorship By Upholding Net Neutrality Order
Favorite Net Neutrality Rules Under Attack by U.S. Telecommunications Providers Washington—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is asking a federal appeals court to approve Federal Communications Commission (FCC) net neutrality rules that prevent Internet service providers from interfering with and censoring content on the Web. U.S. telecommunication providers sued the FCC in Washington D.C. federal circuit…
Symantec Issues Rogue EV Certificate for Google.com
Favorite On Friday, Google reported on its online security blog the faulty issuance of a certificate for google.com and www.google.com by Symantec, a prominent Certificate Authority. This misissuance is significant not only because it represents a breach in the core Internet trust mechanism; it was also the first of its kind with regards to the…
New Open Letter Calls on TPP Negotiators to Stand up for User Safeguards
Favorite Copyright restricts all kinds of important, everyday uses of creative works—even worse, these strict rules last nearly two lifetimes for any given work. We are fighting to reform and push back against these restrictions in the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), especially those that undermine the public’s ability to use, research, remix, or otherwise modify…
New Surveillance Self-Defense Playlist for Academic Researchers
Favorite Academic researchers by necessity spend a lot of their time thinking about how to minimize harm in the conduct of their research. Prompted by the dark history of abuses in human subjects research, research ethics have become a deeply ingrained part of methods training and institutional review. But what it means to minimize harm…
The SEC’s Power Grab: Civil Agencies Try to Weaken ECPA Reform Legislation
Favorite As we anticipated in Monday’s post, Wednesday’s hearing on reforming the Electronic Communications Privacy Act focused on creating a loophole for civil law enforcement agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to access personal content stored by third-party service providers without a warrant, rather than on the need to raise the standard for…
With Little Fanfare, FBI Ramps Up Biometrics Programs (Yet Again)—Part 2
Favorite As we noted in Part 1 of this story, in the last few years, the FBI has been dramatically expanding its biometrics programs, whether by adding face recognition to its vast Next Generation Identification (NGI) database or pushing out mobile biometrics capabilities for “time-critical situations” through its Repository for Individuals of Special Concern (RISC).…
With Little Fanfare, FBI Ramps Up Biometrics Programs (Yet Again)—Part 1
Favorite In the last few years, FBI has been dramatically expanding its biometrics programs, whether by adding face recognition to its vast Next Generation Identification (NGI) database or pushing out mobile biometrics capabilities for “time-critical situations” through its Repository for Individuals of Special Concern (RISC). But two new developments—both introduced with next to no media…
Update on First Unitarian Church v. NSA: EFF’s First Amendment Challenge to NSA Spying
Favorite EFF has long believed that the First Amendment is as important to thinking about the NSA’s Spying as the Fourth Amendment. When the government can track to whom you talk, when and for how long, like it did with the telephone records collection under section 215 of the Patriot Act, it knows with whom…