Miniwriting
Write a few sentences on the Sakai forum, or, if you really prefer, send them to me by email. I'd like them by the next class.
Videos:
Readings:
blog.aboutamazon.com/policy/we-are-implementing-a-one-year-moratorium-on-police-use-of-rekognition
Of course, Clearview has imposed no such moratorium.
Actually, if the police want to use Rekognition to identify faces, they have to first supply the library of photos; they don't come with it.
The ACLU is suing Clearview in Illinois because under Illinois law it is illegal to collect people's biometric information without their consent. Which is exactly what Clearview did. See nytimes.com/2020/05/28/technology/clearview-ai-privacy-lawsuit.html.
Clearview has responded that they are only a "search engine", and that this means their actions are covered by the first amendment, but my guess is they're going to have trouble with both parts of this strategy.
The Internet Archive (home of the Wayback Machine) is in danger. In addition to archiving websites, they also have an archive of digital books, which they would "lend out" to one person at a time. During the lockdown, they relaxed their lending rules so that multiple users could read the book at the same time; the actual content was still protected by DRM. Now they are being sued by publishers. Total damages could easily bankrupt them.
https://decrypt.co/31906/activists-rally-save-internet-archive-lawsuit-threatens
The "National Emergency Library" has now been closed, but hopes for a quick end to the lawsuit are slim as apparently publishers are upset about existing lending practices of the Internet Archive. Publishers apparently charge libraries four times as much as consumers for ebooks, in part due to DRM and in part due to the fact that ebooks are licensed rather than sold. The IA's lending library was apparently bypassing some of those rules, even before the shutdown.
Some General Electric refrigerators have a filter that has an RFID tag. If you don't replace the filter on time, the icemaker shuts down. If you replace the filter with a different brand, the icemaker shuts down. See gefiltergate.com. On the face of it, this might be a violation of the 1975 Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, which requires that users who install third-party replacement parts do not lose warranty coverage. Or it might not be, if a court were to rule that this was not a warranty situation. GE's strategy is based on the DMCA's rules making it illegal to provide a workaround for DRM.
There's a package Ninjutsu OS, which is a tool meant to take a licensed copy of Windows 10 and
Microsoft has issued a takedown notice to Github (which Microsoft now owns).
It is not clear what if any content copyrighted by Microsoft is contained in Ninjutsu OS. But Microsoft's complaint apparently does not list any; instead, it claims that Ninjutsu's modification of Windows 10 config settings is alone enough to warrant the takedown. This is because it provides a way to "work around technical restrictions of the software". It is true that workstation Windows installations contains code for Windows Server, but use is disabled due to "technical restrictions of the software". But I don't think Microsoft is referring to that. Also, apparently it is possible to run Ninjutsu OS standalone, without having a Windows 10 installation, though according to the developer in that situation it won't "run properly". Microsoft would be well within its rights to demand takedown of a pirated copy of Windows, but that's not quite what their complaint demands.
See torrentfreak.com/removing-annoying-windows-10-features-is-a-dmca-violation-microsoft-says-200611.
Free speech issues relevant to computing:
The importance of §230 to the tech industry
Could Facebook survive without §230? Could Twitter?
Batzel v Cremers: expanding §230 to you and me