Author: David Kravets

A Texas law enforcement officer has been fired after video surfaced that shows the policeman grabbing a 12-year-old student from behind and slamming her to the brick pavement face-first.

The San Antonio Independent School District's superintendent said that 27-year-old district officer Joshua Kehm's use of force at Rhodes Middle School on March 29 was "absolutely unwarranted."

"Additionally, the officer’s report was inconsistent with the video and it was also delayed," Pedro Martinez, the district's superintendent, continued in a statement. He added, "We want to be clear that we will not tolerate this behavior." Martinez said that the officer did not note the violence in his report. The school district has referred the investigation "to a third-party law enforcement agency."

We're all familiar with the Breathalyzer, the brand name for a roadside device that measures a suspected drunken driver's blood-alcohol level. It has been in use for decades. Now there's a so-called "textalyzer" device to help the authorities determine whether someone involved in a motor vehicle accident was unlawfully driving while distracted.

The roadside technology is being developed by Cellebrite, the Israeli firm that many believe assisted the Federal Bureau of Investigation in cracking the iPhone at the center of a heated decryption battle with Apple.

Under the first-of-its-kind legislation proposed in New York, drivers involved in accidents would have to submit their phone to roadside testing from a textalyzer to determine whether the driver was using a mobile phone ahead of a crash. In a bid to get around the Fourth Amendment right to privacy, the textalyzer allegedly would keep conversations, contacts, numbers, photos, and application data private. It will solely say whether the phone was in use prior to a motor-vehicle mishap. Further analysis, which might require a warrant, could be necessary to determine whether such usage was via hands-free dashboard technology and to confirm the original finding.

Apple said Friday that it won't go to court to demand the Federal Bureau of Investigation to inform the gadget maker how the feds broke into the phone of Syed Farook, who along with his wife killed 14 people in a San Bernardino County office building in December.

An Apple attorney, who asked that he not be identified by name, told reporters in a conference call that Apple did not know how the authorities unlocked the 5C running iOS 9. The Apple attorney asked that he be paraphrased and not quoted directly, but he suspected that the hack won't last long as Apple continues to fortify its security.

Apple said it was unclear whether the FBI employed a software or hardware hack, and the company did not understand why it would only work on a 5C, as the government said. The Apple lawyer said the government has not come forward to Apple to explain the workaround.

The Justice Department told a federal judge Friday that it would continue to pursue a court order demanding Apple extract data from a seized iPhone at the center of a New York drug probe.

The move comes weeks after the government withdrew a similar request in an unrelated terror investigation in the Southern California county of San Bernardino. Authorities abandoned their San Bernardino intentions after the feds informed the magistrate presiding over the case that the FBI no longer needed Apple's assistance in unlocking the 5C model because it had done so with the help of an "outside" party. However, it became increasingly clear two days ago that authorities would likely forge ahead with this bid in the New York case after James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said the workaround purchased in the San Bernardino case was exclusive to the 5C and not other models like the 5S involved in this New York drug probe.

"The government’s application is not moot, and the government continues to require Apple’s assistance in accessing the data that it is authorized to search by warrant," the Justice Department wrote (PDF) in a letter to the federal judge presiding over the case.

A federal class action essentially asking whether Uber drivers should be classified as employees instead of contractors was dealt a major blow when a federal appeals court put the brakes on the closely watched lawsuit. The Tuesday move (PDF) by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals will set aside a June trial representing as many as 240,000 current and former Uber drivers in California that was scheduled in San Francisco federal court.

Uber had appealed a federal judge's decision last year certifying the class, saying the ruling paved the way for a "runaway class action." The ride-hailing company, based in San Francisco, said riders agreed to arbitration clauses as a condition of employment. If Uber prevails, that means each driver likely would have to independently arbitrate their claims in a bid to be treated as an employee instead of a contractor. That would amount to a major victory for Uber and a big blow to Uber drivers. In its one-page order, the 9th Circuit cited a 2005 precedent that said appeals courts should intervene in class-action certification decisions if they are "manifestly erroneous." The appeals court said it would hear the challenge this summer.

The California Labor Commission in June set a precedent and sided with a single Uber driver that complained she should be classified as an employee.

On Tuesday, payment processor PayPal said it was abandoning plans to open a new global operations center in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the wake of the state's new legislation that discriminates against the LGBT community. The news comes just two weeks after PayPal, based in San Jose, California, announced plans to bring 400 skilled jobs to the state. But on March 23, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory signed legislation making his state the nation's first to require transgender people to use bathrooms that comport with the sex listed on their birth certificates.

"The new law perpetuates discrimination and it violates the values and principles that are at the core of PayPal’s mission and culture. As a result, PayPal will not move forward with our planned expansion into Charlotte," Dan Schulman, the PayPal president and CEO, said in a statement. "This decision reflects PayPal’s deepest values and our strong belief that every person has the right to be treated equally, and with dignity and respect. These principles of fairness, inclusion, and equality are at the heart of everything we seek to achieve and stand for as a company. And they compel us to take action to oppose discrimination."

The move is the biggest economic backlash to North Carolina because of the recent legislation. Braeburn Pharmaceuticals of New Jersey announced last week it was reconsidering its plans to build a $20 million research and manufacturing plant in the state, which would include 50 new positions paying an average $76,000 annual salary. Lionsgate and the A + E network announced last week that they won't film in North Carolina either.

A federal judge is allowing surge-pricing litigation to move forward against Uber's cofounder, Travis Kalanick. The federal judge presiding over the suit, which alleges Uber's technology unlawfully coordinates fares and surge-pricing fares, agreed that Uber's algorithm was "genius."

"Defendant argues, however, that plaintiff's alleged conspiracy is 'wildly implausible' and 'physically impossible,' since it involves agreement 'among hundreds of thousands of independent transportation providers all across the United States.' Yet as plaintiff's counsel pointed out at oral argument, the capacity to orchestrate such an agreement is the 'genius' of Mr. Kalanick and his company, which, through the magic of smartphone technology, can invite hundreds of thousands of drivers in far-flung locations to agree to Uber’s terms," US District Judge Jed Rakoff of Manhattan ruled (PDF) Thursday. "The advancement of technological means for the orchestration of large-scale price-fixing conspiracies need not leave antitrust law behind."

Trial is set tentatively for November. Rakoff has yet to rule on whether the lawsuit (PDF) could grow to represent millions of US Uber passengers in a nationwide class-action lawsuit. For the moment, Rakoff's ruling allows the antitrust case of a Connecticut passenger to proceed. Uber also faces regulatory challenges and lawsuits about the classification of its drivers as contractors and not employees.

Stop us if you’ve heard this before: a young academic with coding savvy has become frustrated with the incarceration of information. Some of the world's best research continues to be trapped behind subscriptions and paywalls. This academic turns activist, and this activist then plots and executes the plan. It's time to free information from its chains—to give it to the masses free of charge. Along the way, this research Robin Hood is accused of being an illicit, criminal hacker.

This, of course, describes the tale of the late Aaron Swartz. His situation captured the Internet’s collective attention as the data crusader attacked research paywalls. Swartz was notoriously charged as a hacker for trying to free millions of articles from popular academic hub JSTOR. At age 26, he tragically committed suicide just ahead of his federal trial in 2013.

But suddenly in 2016, the tale has new life. The Washington Post decries it as academic research's Napster moment, and it all stems from a 27-year-old bioengineer turned Web programmer from Kazakhstan (who's living in Russia). Just as Swartz did, this hacker is freeing tens of millions of research articles from paywalls, metaphorically hoisting a middle finger to the academic publishing industry, which, by the way, has again reacted with labels like "hacker" and "criminal."

Hollywood's lobbying arm, the Motion Picture Association of America, is opposing a proposed Minnesota revenge porn law on grounds that it could overly restrict speech. This is the same MPAA that fiercely supported the Stop Online Piracy Act of 2012. Known as SOPA, many claimed that legislation would also curtail free speech because SOPA could lead to the removal of domains that host infringing material.

In a letter to Minnesota lawmakers, the MPAA said HF 27411 "could limit the distribution of a wide array of mainstream, Constitutionally protected material, including items of legitimate news, commentary, and historical interest. These items are part of news, public affairs, entertainment or sports programming, and are distributed in motion pictures, television programs, audiovisual works of all kinds, via the Internet and other media." The group added that "images of Holocaust victims, or prisoners at Abu Ghraib, or the Pulitzer-Prize winning photograph entitled 'Napalm Girl'—which shows a young girl running screaming from her village, naked, following a Napalm attack—could be prohibited under the terms of this legislation."

The bill cleared a House committee on Friday. If approved, it would add to the growing number of revenge porn bills nationwide—now at 27. There is no federal revenge porn law, and to varying degrees, these state revenge porn laws prohibit sharing sexually explicit photos of people without their consent. The MPAA's bone of contention on Minnesota's bill is that the person who releases the explicit photos or videos doesn't have to mentally want to harm or humiliate the person in the images.

A Maryland judge who pleaded guilty (PDF) to civil rights violations for ordering a deputy to remotely shock a defendant with a 50,000-volt charge was sentenced Thursday to a year of probation and ordered to attend anger management classes.

The shocking, ordered by then-Charles County Circuit Court Judge Robert Nalley, occurred in July 2014 during jury selection for a trial concerning a man accused of carrying a loaded handgun during a police stop. The judge was asking the defendant if he had questions to submit to prospective jurors, who were not yet in the courtroom. Delvon King, the 25-year-old defendant acting as his own attorney, refused to answer several times. After some verbal back and forth between the two, Nalley told the court deputy "Do it. Use it," according to court documents (PDF).

After Nalley's sentencing, Maryland US Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein said that "disruptive defendants may be excluded from the courtroom and prosecuted for obstruction of justice and contempt of court, but force may not be used in the absence of danger."