Bad Blogger

Oh goody. Give this guy a digital camera & some copper, and look what happens…

 

Oil change reignites debate over GPS trackers

 By PAUL ELIAS, Associated Press Writer Paul Elias, Associated Press Writer – Sat Oct 16, 2:30 pm ET

SAN FRANCISCO – Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old computer salesman and community college student, took his car in for an oil change earlier this month and his mechanic spotted an odd wire hanging from the undercarriage.

The wire was attached to a strange magnetic device that puzzled Afifi and the mechanic. They freed it from the car and posted images of it online, asking for help in identifying it.

Two days later, FBI agents arrived at Afifi’s Santa Clara apartment and demanded the return of their property — a global positioning system tracking device now at the center of a raging legal debate over privacy rights.

One federal judge wrote that the widespread use of the device was straight out of George Orwell’s novel, “1984”.

“By holding that this kind of surveillance doesn’t impair an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy, the panel hands the government the power to track the movements of every one of us, every day of our lives,” wrote Alex Kozinski, the chief judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a blistering dissent in which a three-judge panel from his court ruled that search warrants weren’t necessary for GPS tracking.

But other federal and state courts have come to the opposite conclusion.

Law enforcement advocates for the devices say GPS can eliminate time-consuming stakeouts and old-fashioned “tails” with unmarked police cars. The technology had a starring role in the HBO cops-and-robbers series “The Wire” and police use it to track every type of suspect — from terrorist to thieves stealing copper from air conditioners.

That investigators don’t need a warrant to use GPS tracking devices in California troubles privacy advocates, technophiles, criminal defense attorneys and others.

The federal appeals court based in Washington D.C. said in August that investigators must obtain a warrant for GPS in tossing out the conviction and life sentence of Antoine Jones, a nightclub owner convicted of operating a cocaine distribution ring. That court concluded that the accumulation of four-weeks worth of data collected from a GPS on Jones’ Jeep amounted to a government “search” that required a search warrant.

Judge Douglas Ginsburg said watching Jones’ Jeep for an entire month rather than trailing him on one trip made all the difference between surveilling a suspect on public property and a search needing court approval.

“First, unlike one’s movements during a single journey, the whole of one’s movements over the course of a month is not actually exposed to the public because the likelihood anyone will observe all those movements is effectively nil,” Ginsburg wrote. The state high courts of New York, Washington and Oregon have ruled similarly.

Obama as Bush-lite

The Obama administration last month asked the D.C. federal appeals court to change its ruling, calling the decision “vague and unworkable” and arguing that investigators will lose access to a tool they now use “with great frequency.”

After the D.C. appeals court decision, the 9th Circuit refused to revisit its opposite ruling.

Full report at Associated Press

Also, read the Bill of Rights while we’re at it…

 

FLASHBACK: Year 2000

“No WAY anyone would elect that guy!”

The Koch family, America’s biggest financial backers of the Tea Party, would not be the billionaires they are today were it not for the godless empire of the USSR.

 

The Tea Party movement’s dirty little secret is that its chief financial backers owe their family fortune to the granddaddy of all their hatred: Stalin’s godless empire of the USSR. The secretive oil billionaires of the Koch family, the main supporters of the right-wing groups that orchestrated the Tea Party movement, would not have the means to bankroll their favorite causes had it not been for the pile of money the family made working for the Bolsheviks in the late 1920s and early 1930s, building refineries, training Communist engineers and laying down the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure.

Also, don’t miss Exposing The Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC’s Rick Santelli Sucking Koch? halfway down the page.

Had an assignment to do three moodboards for my “Interactive” Web Design class using Photoshop. Basically using a collage technique utilizing images & elements ripped off from the web. Due to a seemingly unending series of obstacles, I only had a few days to complete what was supposed to be a three week assignment. I’m a few days late, so my grade is already docked, and I did a bit of a rush job on a lot of this, so I’m not expecting much in the grade department. The assignments were 1.) fun & youthful (my idea of what youth actually like varies considerably from what my instructor thinks, so I convened an impromptu “focus group” for this one); 2.) corporate & traditional: I was bored to tears after viewing about a couple dozen of various corporate sites. There’s usually a header with the corporate logo, followed by a row of links, followed by a rectangular panel of banal “on the job” photos (probably lifted from some “no-royalty” stock image site) done using flash (and which could have been done just as easily using jQuery, and consequently using much less in the way of system resources), then about four or five bolded bullet points containing links– then yet another row of links and (as I see it) an unneccessary copyright notice which pretty much constituted the footer of the page. Gimme a break!

Lastly, there was the obligatory “cutting edge” site– not a lot of which is to be found on the web anymore. Most artists there days (it seems) are using WordPress for their sites, so they can easily update their sites to advertise showings and events. I decided to jump on the next (de)generation of teen romance: namely, the Great American Zombie Romance Trilogy. But, natch, being entirely too bored with the subject of the turbulant emotional life of teenagers, I jumped right to the chase, creating a parody of a Twilight movie advertising site:

 

Latest attempt to create “art” using Photoshop filters. This one mimicking Georges Seurat’s Pointillism technique.

We’ve seen electronic cigarettes before, but not one that charges via USB.

 

It’s no surprise that this handy device shows up on Thanko’s website, since they’re guys who usually satisfy our cravings for wonky USB gadgets. The USB version of the electronic cigarette provides inhaled doses of vaporized nicotine, so smokers can puff away without all the harmful effects to second hand smokers. The kit comes with 11 filter butts and an atomizer. You can pick yours up for about $33. But beware, you might still look pretty goofy standing in public sucking on a plastic cigarette. [Thanko via Newslaunches]

Can’t make this shizzle up…