-
Geofencing used for evil:
What Flynn realized is that he could use [ad targeting] to infer that a woman might be seeking an abortion, and to target her for ads from anti-choice groups [using geofenced advertising]. “We can reach every Planned Parenthood in the U.S.,” he wrote in a PowerPoint display sent to potential clients in February. The Powerpoint included a slide titled “Targets for Pro-Life,” in which Flynn said he could also reach abortion clinics, hospitals, doctors’ offices, colleges, and high schools in the United States and Canada, and then “[d]rill down to age and sex.” “We can gather a tremendous amount of information from the [smartphone] ID,” he wrote. “Some of the break outs include: Gender, age, race, pet owners, Honda owners, online purchases and much more.” Flynn explained that he would then use that data to send anti-choice ads to women “while they’re at the clinic.”
(tags: geofencing grim-meathook-future abortion phones smartphones pro-choice ads)
-
Rapid Fire is a special event we started hosting at our own in-person CTFs in 2014. The idea is pretty simple: Create several CTF challenges that can be solved in a few minutes each. Set up the challenges on 4 identical computers with some basic tools. Mirror the player’s screens so the audience can watch their actions. Whoever solves the most challenges the fastest wins. This event is interesting for a number of reasons: the players are under intense pressure, as everything they do is being watched by several people; the audience can watch several different approaches to the same problems; and people can follow along fairly easily with what is going on with the challenges.
With e-sports-style video!(tags: gaming hacking security e-sports streaming twitch ctf)
-
Twitter are open sourcing their Storm replacement, and moving it to an independent open source foundation
(tags: open-source twitter heron storm streaming architecture lambda-architecture)
Why the Very Silly Oracle v. Google Trial Actually Matters
If it’s illegal to write clean room implementations of APIs, then no one has clean hands. The now-shelved open source project Apache Harmony, like Android, reimplemented Java SE, and tech giant IBM contributed code to that project. Oracle itself built its business off a proprietary implementation of SQL, which was created by IBM. The proposition “Reimplementations of APIs are infringements” creates a recursive rabbit hole of liability that spans across the industry. Even the very 37 Java APIs at issue in this trial contain reimplementations of other APIs. Google witness Joshua Bloch—who, while at Sun Microsystems, wrote many of the Java APIs—testified that specific Java APIs are reimplementations of other APIs from Perl 5 and the C programming language.
(tags: apis fair-use copyright ip android java google oracle law)