ProPublica has determined that dozens of state and local agencies have purchased “SCAN” training from a company called LSI for reviewing a suspect’s written statements — even though there’s no scientific evidence that it works. Local, state and federal agencies from the Louisville Metro Police Department to the Michigan State Police to the U.S. State Department have paid for SCAN training. The LSI website lists 417 agencies nationwide, from small-town police departments to the military, that have been trained in SCAN — and that list isn’t comprehensive, because additional ones show up in procurement databases and in public records obtained by ProPublica. Other training recipients include law enforcement agencies in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Africa and the United Kingdom, among others…

Those steps appear on the website for Sapir’s company, based in Phoenix. “SCAN Unlocks the Mystery!” the homepage says, alongside a logo of a question mark stamped on someone’s brain. The site includes dozens of testimonials with no names attached. “Since January when I first attended your course, everybody I meet just walks up to me and confesses!” one says. [Another testimonial says “The Army finally got its money’s worth…”] SCAN saves time, the site says. It saves money. Police can fax a questionnaire to a hundred people at once, the site says. Those hundred people can fax it back “and then, in less than an hour, the investigator will be able to review the questionnaires and solve the case.”
In 2009 the U.S. government created a special interagency task force to review scientific studies and independently investigate which interrogation techniques worked, assessed by the FBI, CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense. “When all 12 SCAN criteria were used in a laboratory study, SCAN did not distinguish truth-tellers from liars above the level of chance,” the review said, also challenging two of the method’s 12 criteria. “Both gaps in memory and spontaneous corrections have been shown to be indicators of truth, contrary to what is claimed by SCAN.”
In a footnote, the review identified three specific agencies that use SCAN: the FBI, CIA and U.S. Army military intelligence, which falls under the Department of Defense…

Steven Drizin, a Northwestern University law professor who specializes in wrongful convictions, said SCAN and assorted other lie-detection tools suffer from “over-claim syndrome” — big claims made without scientific grounding. Asked why police would trust such tools, Drizin said: “A lot has to do with hubris — a belief on the part of police officers that they can tell when someone is lying to them with a high degree of accuracy. These tools play in to that belief and confirm that belief.”
SCAN’s creator “declined to be interviewed for this story,” but they spoke to some users of the technique. Travis Marsh, the head of an Indiana sheriff’s department, has been using the tool for nearly two decades, while acknowledging that he can’t explain how it works. “It really is, for lack of a better term, a faith-based system because you can’t see behind the curtain.”

Pro Publica also reports that “Years ago his wife left a note saying she and the kids were off doing one thing, whereas Marsh, analyzing her writing, could tell they had actually gone shopping. His wife has not left him another note in at least 15 years…”

Source: ‘Why Are Cops Around the World Using This Outlandish Mind-Reading Tool?’ – Slashdot

After two weeks of no uploads, a notable Borderlands personality on YouTube returned to the platform yesterday with a video explaining his absence. He said that the game’s publisher Take-Two Interactive hit his channel with several copyright strikes and sent investigators to his home in response to months of Borderlands coverage on his channel, which included leaks about upcoming games in the series.

[…]

Take-Two subsidiary 2K Games, however, said the YouTuber’s actions were sometimes illegal and harmful to the Borderlands community. “The action we’ve taken is the result of a 10-month investigation and a history of this creator profiting from breaking our policies, leaking confidential information about our product, and infringing our copyrights,” a 2K Games rep said in a statement. “Not only were many of his actions illegal, but they were negatively impacting the experiences of other content creators and our fans in anticipation for the game.”

The company did not specify what it was that Somers did that they think broke the law.

Somers’ videos include playthroughs of the Borderlands series as well as tips, tricks, and an in-depth history series that explores the lore of the Borderlands universe. For the last year, Somers’ channel has also been home to Borderlands 3 leaks and speculation, which he always attributed to either unnamed sources or the work of a community of fans digging through SteamDB, a third-party data repository that shows the work being done behind-the-scenes to get games ready for the PC platform.

Wherever he was getting his information from, Somers got a lot of things right

[…]

In his return video, Somers goes into great detail about what happened to him, his YouTube channel, and his Discord server. Somers claims that on July 25, investigators showed up at his home in New Jersey and questioned him on behalf of the New York-based Take-Two Interactive, the parent company of Borderlands publisher 2K Games. He describes being tense due to strangers trespassing on his private property and regrets having spoken with them. Somers allegedly answered questions about his channel and various information he had previously reported on

[…]

his YouTube channel, which was later hit by seven copyright strikes he says Take-Two handed down following his visit from the private investigators. Since then, all but one of these copyright strikes have been removed from his channel, allowing it to remain live, although he’s unsure if this means they were rescinded by Take-Two or removed by YouTube.

In addition to the strikes against his YouTube channel, Somers says that his Discord server and his Discord account were terminated 20 minutes after the private investigators left. The explanation he got from an automated Discord email was that his account was “involved in selling, promoting, or distributing cheats, hacks, or cracked accounts.” He says that no information was provided as to who was behind this shutdown and denies that anything of the sort took place in his Discord server.

[…]

A rep for 2K Games, however, called the video “incomplete and in some cases untrue.” They noted that “Take-Two and 2K take the security and confidentiality of trade secrets very seriously,” adding that the company “will take the necessary actions to defend against leaks and infringement of our intellectual property that not only potentially impact our business and partners, but more importantly may negatively impact the experiences of our fans and customers.”

The rep declined to provide further information on Take-Two and 2K’s investigation.

Source: Take-Two Sends Investigators To YouTuber’s House To Crack Down On Borderlands 3 Leaks

What really gets me here is the callous way in which he was booted from several services (YouTube and Discord) with no idea why or how to fix his problem or how they were fixed in the end. It’s the same black hole Amazon sellers live of in terror. These services are now  too big to allow them to get away with “it’s a free service and you can choose not to use them” – there are no viable alternatives. The creation of the rules and enforcement of these rules cannot be left in the hands of entities that are solely interested in profit.

Charges announced by the Justice Department on Thursday against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange provide fresh insight into why federal prosecutors sought to question whistleblower Chelsea Manning last month before a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia.

Manning, convicted in 2013 of leaking classified U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks, was jailed in early March as a recalcitrant witness after refusing to answer the grand jury’s questions. After her arrest, she was held in solitary confinement in a Virginia jail for nearly a month before being moved into its general population—all in an attempt to coerce her into answering questions about conversations she allegedly had with Assange at the time of her illegal disclosures, according to court filings.

Though Manning confessed to leaking more than 725,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks following her deployment to Iraq in 2009—including battlefield reports and five Guantanamo Bay detainee profiles—she was charged with leaking portions of only a couple hundred documents, including dozens of diplomatic cables that have since been declassified.

British authorities on Thursday removed Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, his home for nearly seven years, following Ecuador’s decision to rescind his asylum. The U.S. government has requested that he be extradited to the United States to face a federal charge of conspiracy to commit computer crimes.

Source: Assange Charges Finally Reveal Why Chelsea Manning Is Sitting in Jail

Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who served years in prison for leaking one of the largest troves of classified documents in U.S. history, has been sent to jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating Wikileaks.

U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton ordered Manning to jail for contempt of court Friday after a brief hearing in which Manning confirmed she has no intention of testifying. She told the judge she “will accept whatever you bring upon me.”

Manning has said she objects to the secrecy of the grand jury process, and that she already revealed everything she knows at her court-martial.

The judge said she will remain jailed until she testifies or until the grand jury concludes its work.

[…]

Manning anticipated being jailed. In a statement before Friday’s hearing, she said she invoked her First, Fourth and Sixth amendment protections when she appeared before the grand jury in Alexandria on Wednesday. She said she already answered every substantive question during her 2013 court-martial, and is prepared to face the consequences of refusing to answer again.

“In solidarity with many activists facing the odds, I will stand by my principles. I will exhaust every legal remedy available,” she said.

Manning served seven years of a 35-year military sentence for leaking a trove of military and diplomatic documents to the anti-secrecy website before then-President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.

Source: Chelsea Manning jailed for refusing to testify on Wikileaks

An explosive new report by Reuters released Friday may upturn the narrative surrounding the potential cancer risks of talcum powder. According to the report, Johnson & Johnson—the makers of the most popular consumer talc product, Baby Powder—knew for decades that its products at times contained carcinogenic asbestos, but did everything possible to keep its findings shrouded from the public and even health officials.

The report’s allegations are sourced from hundreds of internal company documents, according to Reuters, which the news agency has also made available to the public. Many of the documents were obtained during the course of legal battles waged against Johnson & Johnson over the years by customers alleging its products had caused their cancers; others were obtained by various journalists and news organizations.

Collectively, the documents seem to paint a damning picture of the company’s actions—and inaction—surrounding its products.

Talc is a soft white clay pulled up from the earth in mines. In these mines, asbestos—a broad term for six kinds of minerals that can be found in long, thin fibers—is regularly found alongside deposits of talc. But for decades, the company assured the public and regulators that its products were free of asbestos, even as some internal and independent tests found otherwise, according to the report.

Per Reuters:

In 1976, as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was weighing limits on asbestos in cosmetic talc products, J&J assured the regulator that no asbestos was “detected in any sample” of talc produced between December 1972 and October 1973. It didn’t tell the agency that at least three tests by three different labs from 1972 to 1975 had found asbestos in its talc – in one case at levels reported as “rather high.”

Reuters reports that the company was particularly sneaky in handling the first known lawsuit from a former customer, Darlene Coker, who alleged in 1997 that its products had caused her mesothelioma, a form of lung cancer. According to the Reuters report, J&J successfully denied requests by Coker’s attorney to turn over internal documents that would have demonstrated the presence of asbestos in its mining operations and products (Coker’s lungs were shown to be loaded with the sort of asbestos often seen in workers who are exposed to talc in large quantities). Without the documents, Coker dropped the case in 1999 and died a decade later.

Since Coker’s failed lawsuit, there have been more than 11,000 plaintiffs who have alleged that J&J’s products caused their cancers, according to Reuters. Many of these lawsuits, which often did not assert that asbestos contamination might have been the major contributing factor, have similarly failed, but cases that have gone to trial have resulted in verdicts in favor of the plaintiff. Just this July, a Missouri jury ordered the company to pay $4.69 billion in damages to 22 women and their families. In 2017, however, a California judge reversed a $417 million verdict and ordered a new trial.

Source: Report: Johnson & Johnson Knew About Asbestos in Its Baby Powder Products for Decades

Thousands of machine-learning wizards have signed an open statement boycotting a new AI-focused academic journal, disapproving of the paper’s policy of closed-access.Nature Machine Intelligence is a specialized journal concentrating on intelligent systems and robotics research. It’s expected to launch in January next year, and is part of Nature Publishing Group, one of the world’s top academic publishers.The joint statement written by Thomas Dietterich, a professor of computer science at Oregon State University in the US, and signed by more than 2,000 academics and researchers in industry, states that “they will not submit to, review, or edit for this new journal.”He said that free and open access journals speeds up scientific progress since it allows anyone to read the latest research and contribute their own findings. It also helps universities who can’t afford subscription fees or pay for their own papers to be open access.“It is important to note that in the modern scientific journal, virtually all of the work is done by academic researchers. We write the papers, we edit the papers, we typeset the papers, and we review the papers,” he told The Register.

Source: AI boffins rebel against closed-access academic journal that wants to have its cake and eat it • The Register

GitHub user Zeffy has created a patch that removes a limitation that Microsoft imposed on users of 7th generation processors, a limit that prevents users from receiving Windows updates if they still use Windows 7 and 8.1.

Source: User-Made Patch Lets Owners of Next-Gen CPUs Install Updates on Windows 7 & 8.1

MS wants to force you to update to that privacy invasion Windows 10 and has thought of another way to strongarm people into it.

A recent study from researchers at University of Twente (UT) and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS) has found that three-phase static (electronic) energy meters, which are replacing traditional electromechanical meters, can exaggerate energy consumption by as much as 582 per cent.

Estimates of the number of households in the Netherlands with smart meters range from 750,000 to 1.5 million. In the US, smart meter penetration at the end of 2016 has been estimated at 70 million, according to the Edison Foundation [PDF].

The government of the Netherlands aims to replace at least 80 per cent of the energy meters in the country with smart meters by 2020, in keeping with EU goals. EU authorities suggest that smart meters, on average, result in energy savings of 3 per cent.

But as researchers Frank Leferink, Cees Keyer, and Anton Melentjev report, “Some consumers are complaining about their energy bills after replacement of the energy meter, because the registered energy is higher with the static meter compared to the old Ferraris meter.” Smart meter billing problems have also been documented in the US.

Source: Watt the f… Dim smart meters caught simply making up readings • The Register

So what problem are these smart meters solving anyway? Nowadays the energy companies don’t need to send someone to the house to check the meter, a photo will do?

Welcome to the Central Intelligence Agency’s Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room. Do UFOs fascinate you? Are you a history buff who wants to learn more about the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam or the A-12 Oxcart? Have stories about spies always fascinated you? You can find information about all of these topics and more in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Electronic Reading Room.

Source: Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room | CIA FOIA (foia.cia.gov)

Apparently the CIA has just released 12m documents into this

The CIA Just Dumped 12 Million Declassified Documents Online

An 18-year-old broke France’s anti-terror laws by naming his home Wi-Fi network “Daesh 21” – after the medieval murder bastards ISIS.

The unnamed teen was given a three-month jail sentence, suspended for now, after he was found guilty of essentially publicly condoning a terrorist act or group.

Source: Teen in the dock on terror apologist charge for naming Wi-Fi network ‘Daesh 21’

No. Humor is dead.

Somewhere a Lenovo engineer is crying over how your OS is accessing the SSD

Source: Lenovo downward dogs with Yoga BIOS update supporting Linux installs

Finally – wtf is with Lenovo!?

You find a fault in a Tesla. You ask for repairs. Tesla comes back offering 50% of the repair price, but only if you promise to not tell anyone about the problem you found!

This offer, to repair a defective part in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement, is unheard of in the auto industry. More troublingly, it represents a potential assault by Tesla Motors on the right of vehicle owners to report defects to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s complaint database, the auto safety regulators sole means of discovering defects independent of the automakers they regulate.

Source: Tesla Suspension Breakage: It’s Not The Crime, It’s The Coverup – Slashdot

Ouch!

Recently, Microsoft’s policy had been to throw up a dialogue box asking you whether you wanted to install Windows 10.

If you clicked the red “X” to close the box – the tried-and-tested way to make dialogue boxes vanish without agreeing to do anything – Microsoft began taking that as permission for the upgrade to go ahead.

Now Microsoft is changing gears.

It has eliminated the option to re-schedule a chosen upgrade time once you’ve confirmed it while also removing the red “X” close option from the screen.

Linksys has been collaborating with chipmaker Marvell and the makers of OpenWrt to make sure its latest WRT routers can comply with the new rules without blocking open source firmware, company officials told Ars.

Linksys’s effort stands in contrast with TP-Link, which said it would entirely prevent loading of open source firmware on its routers to satisfy the new Federal Communications Commission requirements.

Blocking third-party firmware is the easiest way to comply with the FCC rules, which aim to limit interference with other devices by preventing user modifications that cause radios to operate outside their licensed RF (radio frequency) parameters.

Source: Linksys WRT routers won’t block open source firmware despite FCC rules

Nearly two-and-a-half months ago, I started a daily examination of the Trans Pacific Partnership focused on the intellectual property and digital policy issues raised by the agreement. My initial plan for the Trouble with the TPP series was to write for one month leading up to the planned signing in New Zealand on February 4th. However, the more I dug into the TPP, the more trouble I found. With this final post in the series, I wrap up the key IP and digital policy concerns with links to all the original posts. Canadians interested in the TPP now have an opportunity to have their voices heard. The Standing Committee on International Trade has been conducting hearings on the agreement for several weeks and has announced plans for cross-country consultations. Canadians can provide written submissions by April 30th. Alternatively, they can ask the committee to appear as a witness. Details on the committee opportunities can be found here. In addition, Canadians can send their comments directly to Global Affairs Canada, which is managing the government’s consultation. The email address is TPP-PTP.Consultations@international.gc.ca. Why should Canadians speak out on the TPP?  The former co-CEO of Research in Motion Jim Balsillie, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke, Ford Canada CEO Dianne Craig, the Sierra Club, Doctors Without Borders, Canadian library groups, innovation expert Dan Breznitz, former deputy chief economist at Global Affairs Canada Dan Ciuriak, Canadian publisher Don LePan of Broadview Press, political science professor Blayne Haggart, investment dispute settlement expert professor Gus Van Harten, my colleague Professor Jeremy de Beer, and the Canadian Labour Congress are among those that have voiced concern with the agreement. My assessment of the IP and digital issues in the Trouble with the TPP series identified at least 49 reasons:

Source: The Trouble With the TPP, Day 50: The Case Against Ratifying the Trans Pacific Partnership – Michael Geist

Dr Grimes initially created an equation to express the probability of a conspiracy being either deliberately uncovered by a whistle-blower or inadvertently revealed by a bungler. This factors in the number of conspirators, the length of time, and even the effects of conspirators dying, whether of old age or more nefarious means, for those conspiracies that do not require active maintenance.

Source: Equation shows that large-scale conspiracies would quickly reveal themselves

The equation was compared to known conspiracies to validate it. Turns out most conspiracies will make themselves known pretty quickly.

Following up Lenovo’s blunders regarding the Superfish malware and altered BIOS, Michael Horowitz at ComputerWorld reports that a refurbished ThinkPad he bought includes Lenovo spyware under the guise of “Customer Feedback”. After some digging around, he found the following in a support document: “Lenovo says here that all ThinkPad, ThinkCentre and ThinkStation PCs, running Windows 7 and 8.1, may upload ‘non-personal and non-identifying information about Lenovo software application usage’ to 112.2o7.net.”

Source: Lenovo Collects Usage Data On ThinkPad, ThinkCentre and ThinkStation PCs – Slashdot

Wikipedia is no stranger to scandals, but a quiet update on its administrators’ announcement board reveals a big problem. The site’s CheckUser team recently banned 381 editors’ accounts for “undisclosed paid advocacy.” In other words, these Wikipedians were secretly shilling for brands and even resorting to extortion.

The scam is relatively straightforward. Using sockpuppet accounts, the fraudster editors would create complete but unpublished articles about anything from Bitcoin casinos to rock bands. They’d then approach the subject of the article and offer to publish it for a fee. If the subject agreed, the page would go live, and the Wikipedia editors would then offer the subject of the article an insurance policy of sorts. For about $30 a month, they’d “protect the article from vandalism and prevent its deletion.” That’s kind of like how you can pay off the mafia so that you don’t get robbed.

Source: Wikipedia Bans Hundreds of Editors Who Extorted Users for Cash

Pinterest promoters zonder werk na 'spamklem' – Emerce.

wow – killing your most active userbase is an awesome plan!

Don’t be evil?

via Google Public Policy Blog: Continued progress on fighting piracy.

From 1972 onwards, until his retirement in 1984, he took extensive manuscript notes of many of the papers passing through his hands. Following his retirement he organised this material geographically and typed out systematic studies of KGB operations in different parts of the world in 10 volumes. He and his family and his archive were exfiltrated from the Soviet Union by the Secret Intelligence Service in 1992. Once in London, Mitrokhin continued to work on transcribing and typing his manuscript notes, producing a further 26 typed volumes, which provided the basis for the two volume book with Professor Christopher Andrew, "The Mitrokhin Archive" (Penguin, 1999). Vasiliy Mitrokhin died in January 2004.

The collection comprises manuscript notes, and the redacted and edited typescript copies of the original notes, of documents from the KGB archive. All documents are in Russian.

via Janus: The Papers of Vasiliy Mitrokhin.

The database that will store the entire nation’s health records has a series of "backdoors" that will allow police and government bodies to access people’s medical data.

David Davis MP, a former shadow home secretary, told the Guardian he has established that police will be able to access the health records of patients when investigating serious crimes even if they had opted out of the new database, which will hold the entire population’s medical data in a single repository for the first time from May.

via Police will have 'backdoor' access to health records despite opt-out, says MP.

This despite the UK’s long and torrid history of giving out huge unencrypted centralised databases on USB sticks and laptops to seemingly whoever wants them. Don’t they realise the backdoor will also be usable for hackers, insurance companies, etc? It also shows the mission creep these centralised databases allow themselves to be misused for.