Monthly Archives: July 2015

ReRedistricting Coming to Florida

Posted on July 9, 2015 by Michael Froomkin

In a 100+ page ruling the Florida Supreme Court orders that eight Congressional districts be redrawn, including several in South Florida.

Here, via the Buzz, is the list of districts to be re-drawn (and, potentially, some of their neighbors too):

• District 5, held by Rep. Corinne Brown, D-Jacksonville

• District 13, held by Rep. David Jolly, R-Tampa

• District 14, held by Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Tampa

• District 21, held by Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Boca Raton

• District 22, held by Rep. Lois Frankel, D-West Palm Beach

• District 25, held by Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Miami

• District 26, held by Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Miami

• District 27, held by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Miami

More, maybe, after I plough through it all.

Posted in Florida, Law: Elections | Comments Off on ReRedistricting Coming to Florida

Sounds Like a Great Party

Posted on July 7, 2015 by Michael Froomkin

Electronic Frontier Foundation’s 25th Anniversary Party.

Wish I could go, but SF is a long way away from Miami.

Posted in Internet | Comments Off on Sounds Like a Great Party

What to Read While Being Surveilled

Posted on July 3, 2015 by Michael Froomkin

Dan's PickThe Intercept’s Summer Reading List is full of stuff to stoke your justified paranoia, plus great quirky reads.

Upgrade your beach.

Among the recommendations are Wild Seed by Octavia Butler, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation by Drew Westen, So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government by Robert G. Kaiser, Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush by Geoff Dyer.

The surveillance-related stuff includes The File: A Personal History by Timothy Garton Ash, Little Brother & Homeland by Cory Doctorow, Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, the obligatory Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault (Glenn Greenwald’s choice), and my brother’s selection of a thriller — Inside Out by Barry Eisler.

Posted in Dan Froomkin, Readings | Comments Off on What to Read While Being Surveilled

The Future of Phones Says “Fi”

Posted on July 2, 2015 by Michael Froomkin

Errata Security discusses Google’s Project Fi.

An “MVNO” is a virtual mobile phone company — they don’t have any of their own network backbone or cell towers, but just rent them from the real mobile phone companies (like AT&T or T-Mobile). Most mobile phone companies are actually MVNOs, because building a physical network is expensive.

What makes Google’s MVNO interesting:

  • Straightforward pricing. It’s $20 a month for unlimited calling/texting, plus $10 per gigabyte of data used during the month. It includes tethering.
  • No roaming charges, in 120 countries. I can fly to Japan, Australia, and France, and still use email, Google maps, texting — for no extra charge.

…

In-country phone calls are free, but international phone calls still cost $0.20 a minute — unless you are on WiFi, in which case it’s free. Again, this is a feature provided by other mobile phone companies and MVNOs.

In short, Google is really doing nothing new. They are just providing what you’d expect of a 21st century phone service without all the pricing shenanigans that other companies go through in order to squeeze extra money out of you.

Plus you get to choose what area code you’d like your number to be in.

On thing though: at present Project Fi only works with Google’s Nexus 6 phone.

Posted in Shopping | Comments Off on The Future of Phones Says “Fi”

Oh Joy

Posted on July 1, 2015 by Michael Froomkin

Time to add _optout to the name of every wifi router out there.

A Windows 10 feature, Wi-Fi Sense, smells like a security risk: it shares Wi-Fi passwords with the user’s contacts.

Those contacts include their Outlook.com (nee Hotmail) contacts, Skype contacts and, with an opt-in, their Facebook friends.

But don’t worry!

Wi-Fi Sense doesn’t reveal the plaintext password.

Unless, of course, something goes wrong….

In an attempt to address the security hole it has created, Microsoft offers a kludge of a workaround: you must add _optout to the SSID (the name of your network) to prevent it from working with Wi-Fi Sense.

(So if you want to opt out of Google Maps and Wi-Fi Sense at the same time, you must change your SSID of, say, myhouse to myhouse_optout_nomap. …)

Posted in Sufficiently Advanced Technology | 1 Comment