mostlysignssomeportents:

US court records are not copyrighted, but the US court system operates a paywall called “PACER” that is supposed to recoup the costs of serving text files on the internet; charging $0.10/page for access to the public domain, and illegally profiting to the tune of $80,000,000/year.

The response to PACER is RECAP, a browser plugin that captures all the pages anyone pays for in PACER and puts them in a free repository mirrored on the Internet Archvie that anyone can access for free. Among other things, RECAP revealed that the courts were failing in their duty to remove sensitive personal information (like Social Security Numbers or the home addresses of stalking survivors) from their records. Aaron Swartz was key in revealing the scandal of PACER, and it cost him the ire of the federal prosecutors who later hounded him to his suicide, so further editions of RECAP were dedicated to his memory.

Now the Free Law project has made the most significant advance in RECAP to date: liberating “approximately 3.4 million orders and opinions from approximately 1.5 million federal district and bankruptcy court cases dating back to 1960,” and doing text-extraction on older files that were served as bitmaps, making them fully searchable.

https://boingboing.net/2017/08/15/the-public-law.html

mostlysignssomeportents:

Earlier this month, UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd idiotically insisted that “real people” don’t need encrypted messaging apps; but as foolish a statement as that was, there was a kernel of truth to it.

Because real people don’t just need encrypted messaging apps that offer end-to-end protection, they also need end-point security – the kinds of thoughtful design and expedient updating and transparent code that enables them to defend their devices from attackers who gain access to their messages by compromising their phones and computers.

Computer scientist Megan Square writes in The Conversation that “Inventing new ways to protect our digital endpoints without reducing their usefulness is very challenging, but some new technologies just over the horizon might help.”

https://boingboing.net/2017/08/14/evilregime.html

mostlysignssomeportents:

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s guide, The Alt-Right on Campus: What Students Need to Know basically advises you to network with everyone on your campus who isn’t a closet Nazi, meet with the Young Republicans (or whatever) and remind them that they’re inviting Nazis to come speak, and then to throw a big, fun event far from whatever Nazi is addressing your school and starve them of publicity and attention.

The rest of the guide is basically a Monster Manual for shitty people, with profiles of the chief Nazis, and their useful idiot shock troops like the “Proud Boys.”

The theory here is that trolls are fringey and naturally struggle to find people who are broken enough to join with them – but when we turn them into cause celebres, the ensuing publicity goes so far and wide that those thinly distributed potential supporters hear about the Nazis’ messages.

https://boingboing.net/2017/08/14/hate-feeds-on-crowds.html