Busting a Cyberstalker: How Carla Franklin Fought Back—and Triumphed
I remember feeling stunned, then sick. Sitting at my desk at a New York City consulting firm in 2009, I had randomly Googled my name. The jarring result: a series of strange montages on YouTube—all containing snapshots of me, along with the label “whore.” The photos, cobbled together from various corners of the Internet, were shots from a beauty pageant and a few acting jobs I had held in the past, when I was signed with a regional modeling agency. My mind raced. Who hated me this much to post these things? Who would call me a whore?
Carla Franklin shares her story.
A worthy read, even beyond the insights into Franklin’s compelling and creepy personal story, as it relates to laws (and the lack thereof) on internet harassment.
It will lead to fewer choices, less innovation, and potentially higher prices. It is unfortunate that patent law can be manipulated to give one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners, or technology that is being improved every day by Samsung and other companies.
Get rid of ObamaCare! Now! It’s a really good idea … if your plan is to do the exact opposite of what you’re trying to achieve on controlling the deficit. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday said ObamaCare will actually work to shrink, not enlarge, our fiscal budget headache.More details from the CBO here. Important story for truth. (via hypervocal)
Twitter is appealing a judge’s decision requiring the social media company to turn over an Occupy Wall Street protester’s tweets and account information to Manhattan prosecutors.
In June, Criminal Court Judge Matthew Sciarrino ruled that releasing Malcolm Harris’s tweets would not violate his privacy, since he had posted them on a public website.
Harris, a Brooklyn-based writer, was arrested with hundreds of other Occupy members during a mass march across the Brooklyn Bridge last fall.
The case has focused attention on a number of murky legal questions surrounding the use of social media, including whether users own the content they post publicly and whether companies like Twitter can prevent authorities from using that information to prosecute social media users.
READ ON: Twitter appeals ruling to hand over Occupy protester’s tweets
Twitter has historically fought for its users’ rights in cases like these. So props.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrives at the Supreme Court in London February 1, 2012.
Assange was detained in Britain in December 2010 on a European arrest warrant issued by a Swedish prosecutor after two female former WikiLeaks volunteers accused him of sexual assault. [REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth]
Read more: Julian Assange appeals extradition to UK’s top court
In case you’d like to follow along at home, ABC (Australia) has live video from the event.
“If the president thinks you are a terrorist, let him present charges and evidence to a judge,” Libertarian Party Chair Mark Hinkle said in a statement Friday. “He has no authority to lock you up without any judicial review, just because he and Congress believe he should have unlimited power. That is the kind of power held by tyrants in totalitarian regimes. It has no place in the United States.”
This is the same bill as we noted in our last post. Rand Paul wasn’t able to kill the full thing, but he killed one of the nastier amendments in it, which would have allowed the U.S. to hold detainees even after they had been acquitted in a court of law.
In moments of high drama, the judge at the war crimes trial of former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic ordered him removed from the courtroom on Monday after the Mr. Mladic loudly and repeatedly interrupted the proceedings, challenging the legitimacy of the tribunal…
A word of advice to Mr. Mladic: When you are on trial for genocide, it is unwise to antagonize your judge.
For a big law firm with an international reputation like King and Spalding, this could have gotten very ugly for them. This kind of thing could have stuck to them for decades. People no longer want to be associated with this kind of discrimination.Richard Socarides, gay rights advocate • Speaking about legal firm King and Spalding withdrawing from their plan to defend the Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA) in service of the House GOP. The decision has caused a split within the firm, as Paul Clement, one of the partners involved with the case, has resigned in protest and will continue to work for DOMA’s defense, saying that even unpopular causes deserve legal representation. Socarides disagrees, claiming the law is discriminatory and thus is un-American, and that there’s no merit in defending such a cause. We agree in the moral sense, perhaps, but ultimately Clement is correct — legal representation is a keystone of our system of justice, and even though King and Spalding has every right not to take this case, at some point some lawyer does have to step up, personal beliefs aside. source (via • follow)
Crime and punishment in China: Amnesty International claimed yesterday that while the exact number is guarded as a state secret, they believe thousands of people were executed in the China last year, more than every other country combined. While China has maintained they’ve taken steps to lower their rate of execution, such as mandatory review of all death penalty cases since 2007, Amnesty International says they’ve still been executing people for “a wide range of crimes that include nonviolent offences and after proceedings that did not meet international fair trial standards.” source
Solid state? Not so solid for data recovery. In perhaps the best complement to our earlier post possible is a report that many new solid state drives include a technology which, as a way to increase efficiency, have the side effect of making it easier to wipe data for good. “A few people in the forensics community had some awareness that something funny was going on with some SSDs, but everyone we’ve shown this to has been shocked at the extent of the findings,” said Murdoch University’s Graeme Bell, who co-authored the fairly alarming study. So, if you’re looking to commit a crime involving lots of information, buy a solid state drive. Leave the hard drives for the amateurs who don’t know what they’re doing. source
You tend to split a lot fewer infinitives when you think the FBI might be reading your mail.Cataphora Chief Technology Officer Steve Roberts • Explaining the benefit of his company’s software, which can intelligently parse phrases and figure out when someone is changing their tone (presumably because they have something to hide). This is useful in law cases, particularly ones with a ton of documents – you know, the kind that once required armies of lawyers to do the dirty work. They’re just one of the companies who work in this pretty neat field, and their accuracy rate is actually way better than the people the machines are replacing. “Think about how much money had been spent to be slightly better than a coin toss,” said Bill Herr, a former chemical company lawyer who once herded lawyers in rooms to dig through documents en masse. Like cats. source (via • follow)