Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras just added two new privacy and security features “amid rising scrutiny on the company,” reports The Hill, including “a second layer of authentication by requiring users to enter a one-time code shared via email or SMS when they try to log in to see the feed from their cameras starting this week… “Until recently the company did…
Tag: eff
Gopher’s Rise and Fall Shows How Much We Lost When Monopolists Stole the Net
Science-fiction writer, journalist and longtime Slashdot reader, Cory Doctorow, a.k.a. mouthbeef, writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) just published the latest installment in my case histories of “adversarial interoperability” — once the main force that kept tech competitive. Today, I tell the story of Gopher, the web’s immediate predecessor, which burrowed under the mainframe systems’ guardians and created a menu-driven interface…
‘Unauthorized Bread’: A Tale of Jailbreaking Refugees Versus IoT Appliances
Science fiction writer, journalist and longtime Slashdot reader, Cory Doctorow, a.k.a. mouthbeef, writes: My novella “Unauthorized Bread” — originally published last year in Radicalized from Tor Books — has just been published on Ars Technica: it’s an epic tale of jailbreaking refugees versus the disobedient IoT appliances they’re forced to use, and it’s being turned into a TV show by The…
EFF Files Amicus Brief In Google v. Oracle, Arguing APIs Are Not Copyrightable
Areyoukiddingme writes: EFF has filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in Google v. Oracle, arguing that APIs are not copyrightable. From the press release: “The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that functional aspects of Oracle’s Java programming language are not copyrightable, and even if they were, employing them to create new…
Internet Pioneers Fight For Control of .Org Registry By Forming a Nonprofit Alternative
Reuters reports that a group of “prominent internet pioneers” now has a plan to block the $1.1 billion sale of the .org internet domain registry to Ethos Capital. The group has created their own nonprofit cooperative to offer an alternative: “There needs to be a place on the internet that represents the public interest, where educational sites, humanitarian sites, and organizations…
Hundreds sign up to storm Australia’s Area 51
Several Facebook pages have cropped up to promote Australia’s answer to the infamous ‘Storm Area 51’ event. Originally billed as a tongue-in-cheek eff… Source: https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/332436/hundreds-sign-up-to-storm-australias-area-51…
EFF Challenges Ring’s Spokesperson Shaq To A Discussion About Police Surveillance
Shaq O’Neal was one of the greatest players in basketball history. But as a spokesperson for Amazon’s Ring security cameras, the EFF also calls him the “one man at Ring who might listen to reason,” challenging him to go one-on-one with the EFF’s privacy experts: In just a year and a half, Amazon’s Ring has set up more than 500 partnerships…
Pennsylvania Supreme Court Rules Police Can’t Force You To Tell Them Your Password
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a forceful opinion today holding that the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects individuals from being forced to disclose the passcode to their devices to the police. In a 4-3 decision in Commonwealth v. Davis, the court found that disclosing a password is “testimony”…
DHS Will Soon Have Biometric Data On Nearly 260 Million People
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) expects to have face, fingerprint, and iris scans of at least 259 million people in its biometrics database by 2022, according to a recent presentation from the agency’s Office of Procurement Operations reviewed by Quartz. From the report: That’s about 40 million more than the agency’s 2017 projections, which estimated 220 million unique identities…
Are Amazon’s ‘Ring’ Cameras Exacerbating Societal Inequality?
In one of America’s top city for property crime, the Atlantic examines the “porch pirate” of San Francisco’s Potrero Hill. It’s an 8,000-word long read about how one of the neighborhood’s troubled long-time residents “entered a vortex of smart cameras, Nextdoor rants, and cellphone surveillance,” in a town where the public hospital she was born in is now named after Mark…