The ability to connect attorneys with potential clients in drunken driving cases, potentially before they are ticketed, is now possible due to the new smartphone app, the Duey Dialer. According to developer Daniel Delgado, the application allows a driver to trigger a traffic stop audio recording with the touch of a button and even contacts a lawyer with expertise in drunken driving cases automatically if not turned off within 45 minutes. The information sent includes the audio recording, location, identity, home address and contact information of the client. The attorneys pay for the app, which is available for Android use only and is currently used in six states.

Article via ABA Journal, 26 May 2015

Photo: Police Lights via J J  [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

 

Having lived in Korea for the past 2 and a half years, I can say that I love this place. It is an amazing culture and a truly amazing country. It also helps that I am an internet junkie, and the service here is unbelievable. I pay 41,000 won per month (around $39.00) for 100mb internet service with no contract. This is truly a place where connectivity is king.

However, I have consistently had one major issue, and that is with online shopping and banking. When I want to go to my bank website, I have to download at least 5 security programs, including keylogging pretection software. These are all designed to keep you safe, and your information secure. Funny, that the only time my information was compromised was when it had nothing to do with e-commerce. These programs also degrade the performance of your computer.

One of the biggest issues I have is that most online shopping websites use ActiveX security from Microsoft. ActiveX is outdated, and really only works well with Internet Explorer. While I have nothing against IE, I do have issue with this,as it inherently limits browser choice. In fact, until about 2 years ago, my (soon-to-be) wife thought Internet Explorer WAS the Internet…

After searching, I found out that Korea passed a law in 1999 to protect consumers that required the use of ActiveX security. I see serious issues with laws such as these, and that is due to the inherent difference in pace between law and technology. The world has moved beyond ActiveX, and South Korea is for once, lagging behind, and this is due to enshrining ActiveX into law. However this will be changing soon.

This April, after months of rumors, the Government has finally announced plans to fix things!! This is wonderful news, however I fear that it has come too late in the game. I wonder if this had any effect on ticket sales for the Incheon Asian games(I had to have my wife order them, because the payment system was exclusively in Korean)?

All I can say is that I am glad that things are moving in the right direction, and that Korean consumers will finally have a choice in browsers.

CIJT: Do you think that it is beneficial to enshrine specific technologies into law? Any ideas on how to have law keep pace with technology?

 

Source article: BusinessKorea

Photo: ClipDealer GmbH

Pandora holds out olive branch of data to musicians (LA Times, 22 Oct 2014) – Pandora Media, the king of personalized online radio services, pays recording artists, songwriters, record labels and music publishers close to $300 million a year in royalties. That’s not nearly enough to satisfy the company’s critics in the music industry, who resent how little Pandora pays each time a user plays a track. On Wednesday, the company plans to start offering artists more than just royalties. It’s opening a new Artists Marketing Platform that provides detailed analytics for bands and their managers about their songs and their fans. Pandora AMP will be available free to any artist whose music is available on the service. Among other things, artists will be able to see which cities are home to the greatest clusters of their fans, the number of thumbs up (the Pandora equivalent of a Facebook “like”) each of their tracks have received from listeners, and some basic demographic information on the users who have created playlists based on their music. * * * Yet AMP has been in the works for some time. Company founder Tim Westergren, a former professional musician himself, revealed plans for the service in a January 2013 speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Westergren argued then that Pandora can offer struggling musicians a path into the middle class by making it easier for them to attract, find and connect with fans. He returned to that theme in a blog post Wednesday announcing the service.

 

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/kongsky

NIH tells genomic researchers: ‘You must share data’ (Chronicle of Higher Ed, 28 August 2014) – Scientists who use government money to conduct genomic research will now be required to quickly share the data they gather under a policy announced on Wednesday by the National Institutes of Health. The data-sharing policy, which will take effect with grants awarded in January, will give agency-financed researchers six months to load any genomic data they collect-from human or nonhuman subjects-into a government-established database or a recognized alternative. NIH officials described the move as the latest in a series of efforts by the federal government to improve the efficiency of taxpayer-financed research by ensuring that scientific findings are shared as widely as possible. “We’ve gone from a circumstance of saying, ‘Everybody should share data,’ to now saying, in the case of genomic data, ‘You must share data,’” said Eric D. Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH. The NIH’s plan to require data-sharing hasn’t been entirely popular with the researchers themselves, at least not in the early stages. When it appeared last year, the initial version of the NIH’s policy proposal drew criticism from the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, the nation’s largest coalition of biomedical researchers, and the Association of American Medical Colleges, whose members include all 141 accredited U.S. medical schools.

 

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/cooldesign

Austrian TOR exit node operator found guilty as an accomplice because someone used his node to commit a crime (TechDirt, 2 July 2014) – Three years ago we wrote about how Austrian police had seized computers from someone running a Tor exit node. This kind of thing happens from time to time, but it appears that folks in Austria have taken it up a notch by… effectively now making it illegal to run a Tor exit node . * * * It’s pretty standard to name criminal accomplices liable for “aiding and abetting” the activities of others, but it’s amassive and incredibly dangerous stretch to argue that merely running a Tor exit node makes you an accomplice that “contributes to the completion” of a crime. Under this sort of thinking, Volkswagen would be liable if someone drove a VW as the getaway car in a bank robbery. It’s a very, very broad interpretation of accomplice liability, in a situation where it clearly does not make sense. Tragically, this comes out the same day that the EFF is promoting why everyone should use Tor . While it accurately notes that no one in the US has been prosecuted for running Tor, it may want to make a note about Austria. Hopefully there is some way to fight back on this ruling and take it to a higher court—and hopefully whoever reviews it will be better informed about how Tor works and what it means to run an exit node.

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/Victor Habbick.

What your cell phone can’t tell the police (The New Yorker, 26 June 2014) – On May 28th, Lisa Marie Roberts, of Portland, Oregon, was released from prison after serving nine and a half years for a murder she didn’t commit. A key piece of overturned evidence was cell-phone records that allegedly put her at the scene. Roberts pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2004, after her court-appointed attorney persuaded her that she had no hope of acquittal. The state’s attorney had told him that phone records had put Roberts at the scene of the crime, and, to her lawyer, that was almost as damning as DNA. But he was wrong, as are many other attorneys, prosecutors, judges, and juries, who overestimate the precision of cell-phone location records. Rather than pinpoint a suspect’s whereabouts, cell-tower records can put someone within an area of several hundred square miles or, in a congested urban area, several square miles. Yet years of prosecutions and plea bargains have been based on a misunderstanding of how cell networks operate. No one knows how often this occurs, but each year police make more than a million requests for cell-phone records. “We think the whole paradigm is absolutely flawed at every level, and shouldn’t be used in the courtroom,” Michael Cherry, the C.E.O. of Cherry Biometrics, a consulting firm in Falls Church, Virginia, told me. “This whole thing is junk science, a farce.” The paradigm is the assumption that, when you make a call on your cell phone, it automatically routes to the nearest cell tower, and that by capturing those records police can determine where you made a call-and thus where you were-at a particular time. That, he explained, is not how the system works. When you hit “send” on your cell phone, a complicated series of events takes place that is governed by algorithms and proprietary software, not just by the location of the cell tower. First, your cell phone sends out a radio-frequency signal to the towers within a radius of up to roughly twenty miles-or fewer, in urban areas-depending on the topography and atmospheric conditions.

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/nokhoog_buchachon.