Month: April 2016

The University of California, Davis has spent at least $175,000 to hire companies that would try to “expedite the eradication of references to the pepper spray incident in search results,” and to counter “venomous rhetoric about UC Davis and the chancellor,” according to new documents obtained by the Sacramento Bee.

The pepper spray incident occurred at the Sacramento, California-area university on November 18, 2011, during a demonstration that was part of the broader “Occupy movement.” After asking seated protesters to leave, UC Davis police officer Lt. John Pike pepper sprayed several of them at close range. Video of his actions were widely distributed and ridiculed.

In October 2013, a judge awarded Pike over $38,000 in worker’s compensation benefits from UC Davis itself to compensate for his apparently psychological pain and suffering stemming from the incident. Pike was fired from the university police force.

A Nebraska inmate who has professed his allegiance to the divine Flying Spaghetti Monster lost his bid demanding that prison officials accommodate his Pastafarianism faith.

A federal judge dismissed the suit (PDF) Tuesday brought by Stephen Cavanaugh, who is serving a 4- to 8-year term on assault and weapons charges at the Nebraska State Penitentiary. US District Judge John Gerrard ruled that "FSMism" isn't a religion like the ones protected under the Constitution.

"The Court finds that FSMism is not a 'religion' within the meaning of the relevant federal statutes and constitutional jurisprudence. It is, rather, a parody, intended to advance an argument about science, the evolution of life, and the place of religion in public education. Those are important issues, and FSMism contains a serious argument—but that does not mean that the trappings of the satire used to make that argument are entitled to protection as a 'religion,'" the judge ruled. (PDF)

Google Fiber is testing a few wireless technologies in an effort to build a wireless home Internet service that would complement its fiber broadband, according to a company executive.

Craig Barratt, a senior vice president at Alphabet who oversees Google Fiber and other projects in the company's Access and Energy division, spoke generally about the plans in an interview with Re/code published today. Though Barratt didn't reveal a timeline or specifics on technology, he said Google Fiber wants to provide fixed wireless Internet to homes where it wouldn't make financial sense to build fiber.

"We are experimenting with a number of different wireless technologies," Barratt said. "One of the things that is intriguing about wireless is that it allows you reach houses and users that are in lower density settings—where fiber becomes too expensive. So providing fixed wireless services using some of the technologies we think are ways of accelerating our deployments."

Visual Studio Code, Microsoft's no-cost and open source developer-oriented editor and debugger, has reached version 1.0.

Over its short life, the editor has made itself remarkably popular, with Microsoft saying it has been installed more than two million times, with half a million active users. It has also grown from a Web-oriented text editor geared toward JavaScript and TypeScript developers into a much more capable multi-language development and debugging tool. Extension support was added less than six months ago, and a healthy range of extensions has already been developed. These extensions have been used to greatly extend the number of languages that Code works with, expanding it from its Web origins to handle C++, Go, Python, PHP, F#, and many more options.

Visual Studio Code is arguably one of the projects that most demonstrates the "new" Microsoft. Code is MIT-licensed open source, and Microsoft is continuing to try to do its open source development the right way—not merely dumping periodic code drops on the outside world but actually working with the broader developer community to fix bugs and develop new features. Some 300 outside contributions have been merged in, making it far more than just a Microsoft project. It also continues to be a solid cross-platform app, running on Windows, OS X, and Linux.

This month the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) updated its offender handbook (PDF) to stipulate that inmates are not allowed to have social media accounts. While blog posts are still permitted, a spokesperson for the TDCJ told Ars that the rule was developed to get social media platforms to comply with the corrections department’s takedown requests more readily.

Since Texas inmates are not allowed Internet access, this rule applies to social media accounts managed by friends or family. As Fusion explains, "Prisoners write posts, send them to a friend or family member through snail mail, and ask the friend to post them on Facebook.” If an inmate is caught having a friend or family member update an account for them, they’re charged with a "level three violation,” which TDCJ characterizes as the lowest level of violation in the Texas prison system.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), however, says that level three violations can result in loss of privileges, extra work duty, or confinement to an inmate’s cell for up to 45 days. The EFF objects to the new rules in Texas, arguing that "a person does not lose all of their rights to participate in public discourse when they are incarcerated… This policy would not only prohibit the prisoners’ exercise of their First Amendment rights, but also prevent the public from exercising their First Amendment rights to gather information about the criminal justice system from those most affected by it.” The TDCJ had no response to the EFF’s argument.

Another federal appeals court is siding with the Obama administration's position that court warrants are not required to track a suspect's cell-site location. The Wednesday decision (PDF) by the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals adds to the growing number of federal appeals court rulings siding with the government, likely meaning the US Supreme Court won't weigh into the legal thicket any time soon. Only one federal circuit has sided against the government, but that ruling was set aside, (PDF) and a new decision is pending after the court accepted the government's petition to rehear the dispute.

In the case decided Wednesday by the Cincinnati-based appeals court, a three-judge panel unanimously upheld the location data evidence of two men convicted of aiding and abetting a string of robberies. The data placed the men near the robberies of Radio Shack and T-Mobile stores in and around Detroit. The men believed that a probable-cause warrant under the Fourth Amendment was required for the government to access their location data. The appeals court disagreed, and it accepted the legal standard requiring a judge to sign off on the tracking if the government asserts the data is "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation."

The decision sides with the other circuit courts, namely the 5th and 11th, that have ruled the same. The 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals' decision that went against the government was re-argued last month and a decision is pending. Without a circuit split, the Supreme Court is likely to stay away from the dispute.