Just in case you thought that Snapchat’s privacy settings were awesome, researchers have found that the security model is pretty piss poor.
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Author: Christopher Parsons
Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.
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6/8 dissertation chapters, completed!
There is a technical term economists like to use for behavior like this. Unbelievable chutzpah.
- Edward Kleinbard, a law professor at USC speaking to NYT about Apple’s overseas tax situation — or lack thereof.
One potentially good thing out of all this, Tim Cook will address it directly tomorrow in front of the Senate:
Mr. Cook is expected to emphasize that Apple is most likely “the largest corporate income tax payer in the U.S., having paid nearly $6 billion in taxes to the U.S. Treasury” in the last fiscal year. “Apple does not use tax gimmicks,” Mr. Cook is expected to testify.
He is expected to seek to rebut the Congressional findings by arguing that some of Apple’s largest subsidiaries do not reduce Apple’s tax liability, and to argue in support of a sweeping overhaul of the United States corporate tax code – in particular, lowering rates on companies moving foreign overseas earnings back to the United States. Apple currently assigns more than $100 billion to offshore subsidiaries.
I figured this would lead to a change in tax policy. Now I’m sure of it.
(via parislemon)
This story, the day before Cook testifies to the Senate, is probably the worst thing Apple PR could have dreamed of. I wouldn’t want to be in Cook’s shoes tomorrow though, by the same token, if I were an American taxpayer I’d be pissed as all hell about Apple’s actions regardless of the legality of those actions.
Yahoo unveils the new Flickr with one terabyte of free space
Looks wild.
As a pretty heavy Google user, I look forward to seeing if Google ups their own storage offerings to ‘compete’ with Yahoo!
Yahoo will need to balance its involvement with Tumblr to let the creative site flourish while also driving some benefits to core Yahoo. While Tumblr likely needs to take its feed advertising slowly so as not to negatively impact the user experience, the company should be able to leverage Yahoo!’s sales force and advertising relationships.
So it’s kind of cool to see what actual analysts say about Yahoo buying Tumblr. But I have a pretty hard time figuring out what benefits the site would be driving to “core Yahoo”. Better integration with Flickr, maybe? Not really sure what core Yahoo comprises, anymore. (via jakke)
This is something I’ve been thinking about a bit. Just off the top of my head, how could Yahoo! leverage Tumblr:
- Use Tumblr to surface popular/emerging content for the various Yahoo! branded home pages that are provided to enterprise customers;
- Offer free blogging services to enterprise customers;
- Integrate Flickr’s communities (somehow) withTumblr to enhance finding and sharing original content;
- Leverage Tumblr to expand Bing search capabilities (which would be part of the Yahoo!/MS search integration, and perhaps offer Yahoo! another line of revenue given Microsoft’s current pursuit of Social searchability)
- Generally provide customized blogging solutions across properties. If Tumblr is eventually de-siloed then Yahoo! would have a blogging platform like Google (i.e. Blogger) except it would be ‘fresh’ like Blogger was at the time of Google acquiring it.
Those are just the most immediate thoughts. I really think that what happens will occur over time and not tomorrow; Yahoo! needs to get ‘integration right’ or else risk drowning their new $1.1 billion dollar baby.
Hackers who breached Google database appeared to seek identities of Chinese spies in U.S. who might be under watch.
This story is incredibly significant: it clarifies an additional target of the Aurora attacks in 2009 (the database that Google stored FISA warrant information in) and, as an extension, provides a notion of why NSA was involved in the investigation (i.e. any revelation of FISA information constitutes a national security issue).
I suspect we’ll never get the full story of what all occurred, but this article very nicely supplements some of the stuff we learned in Levy’s book In the Plex, as well as popular reporting around the series of attacks on major Western companies that happened in late 2009. It also reveals the significant of meta-data/information: it wasn’t necessarily required for attackers to know what specifically waas being monitored to take action to protect agents; all that was needed was information that the surveillance was occurring for countermeasures to be deployed.
The Senates internal economy committee sanitized the original audit of Sen. Mike Duffys expenses to remove damning findings, documents obtained by CTV News show.
I really don’t remember the last time I enjoyed eating popcorn so much whilst watching Canadian politics.
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5/8 chapters done
1 to write over the weekend and do a near-final proof of what’s already written. The end nears…
Raymond Michael Rodden was bored this week, so he drove to downtown Phoenix and began walking around, snapping photos of the federal courthouse and the state capitol with his iPhone.
The 33-year-old man ended up jailed, unemployed and homeless; his iPhone, iPad and Macintosh laptop confiscated as “evidence.”
All because they found it odd he was taking photos at 3 a.m.
“They told me they’re going to keep my computer because they want to see my search history,” he said Saturday evening in a telephone interview with Photography is Not a Crime.
“They wanted to know if I belonged to any extremist groups like the national socialist movement or sovereign citizens. They wanted to know what kind of books I checked out of the library.”
However, the only charges pending against him, if you even want to call them charges, are citations that he walked into an alley – a bogus charge that applies only to motorized vehicles – and that he neglected to change the address on his driver license after moving to Phoenix from Tucson last August.
They couldn’t even keep him jailed on the initial charge of an outdated warrant out of California because the San Obispo County Sheriff’s Office did not want to bother extraditing him from Phoenix.
“The warrant was not even valid in Arizona,” adding that it was over a probation violation for unlawful use of a vehicle, stemming from a 2001 incident in which he took his roommate’s car without permission after a heated argument.
That old roommate is still one of his best friends, allowing him to stay in his Tucson home after he was kicked out of the Phoenix home that was part of his employment.
“I was living in my boss’s house taking care of his son,” he said. “Now he thinks I’m some crazy person.”
The fact that the Phoenix police bomb squad tore his boss’s car apart searching for explosives before impounding it most likely convinced him that Rodden was not the most suitable person to care for his six-year-old son as he worked as a long-distance truck driver.
“The most radical thing I do is read Photography is Not a Crime and Cop Block,” he said.
So like most people who read those sites, he knows his rights when it comes to dealing with police.
And that is exactly why he is going through this ordeal.
It started Thursday at 3 a.m. when he was sitting at home, unable to sleep. He decided to drive to downtown in his boss’s car, which he had permission to do.
He parked the car in front of the Phoenix Police Department and began walking around downtown, which is a ghost town at that time.
This is particularly insane.
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Yahoo! and Service Murder
Indeed. I exported my content out months ago; with the original [albeit about six months out of date] content from TKM being imported into a password protected wordpress account.
To be fair – well who knows? It’d be hypocritical of me to assume the worst, given how I bitched about the people bitching about Amazon buying up GoodReads.
Yeah, but Yahoo! has a history of letting great services languish until they nearly atrophy. Flickr and Delicious are both good examples of what happens under Yahoo! ‘management’.
Excited Pixels 