2016年2月29日星期一

San Bernardino Survivor's Husband To Judge: Terrorist iPhone “Unlikely” To Hold Valuable Information

Salihin Kondoker

As Apple and the FBI tangle over encryption in courtrooms and Congress, one family who nearly lost a loved one during the mass shooting in San Bernardino is speaking up.

Salihin Kondoker, the husband of Anies Kondoker, who was shot three times but survived the attack, has filed a friend of the court brief in the Apple vs. FBI legal dispute — on Apple’s behalf. In an impassioned letter to judge Sheri Pym, Salihin says he doubts there’s useful information on the confiscated iPhone, and worries that what the government is demanding of Apple will invite rampant government surveillance.

“In my opinion it is unlikely there is any valuable information on this phone,” Salihin wrote in the letter which was obtained by BuzzFeed News.

“This was a work phone. My wife also had an iPhone issued by the County and she did not use it for any personal communication,” Salihin continued. “San Bernardino is one of the largest Counties in the country. They can track the phone on GPS in case they needed to determine where people were. Second, both the iCloud account and carrier account were controlled by the county so they could track any communications. This was common knowledge among my wife and other employees. Why then would someone store vital contacts related to an attack on a phone they knew the county had access to? They destroyed their personal phones after the attack. And I believe they did that for a reason.”

Submitted to Judge Pym on Monday morning, the letter speaks to concerns about the device's value to the investigation — concerns apparently shared by those leading it. In an essay published last week, FBI Director James Comey appeared to concede that the device might not contain useful information. "Maybe the phone holds the clue to finding more terrorists," Comey wrote. "Maybe it doesn’t. But we can't look the survivors in the eye, or ourselves in the mirror, if we don't follow this lead."

In an interview with NPR, San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan also expressed doubt that the confiscated iPhone holds within it information valuable to the FBI investigation. “I'll be honest with you, I think that there is a reasonably good chance that there is nothing of any value on the phone,” he said. “This is an effort to leave no stone unturned in the investigation.”

Below, Salihin's letter in full.

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Some Amazon Prime Now Delivery Drivers Are Now Employees

Four months after a group of Amazon Prime Now delivery drivers filed suit against the company, workers at one of the retailer's Southern California shipping subcontractors have been reclassified as employees.

The lawsuit is ongoing, and the four workers who filed it no longer drive for Amazon. But the contractor they worked for — Scoobeez, a "real-time deliveries" company headquartered in L.A. — has since reclassified Amazon Prime Now delivery drivers throughout California as employees. Two Scoobeez workers confirmed to BuzzFeed News that they had been transitioned from 1099 to W-2 status, though they did not confirm the date on which the shift happened.

With Prime Now, Amazon is competing with UberRUSH, Google Express, Postmates, and other on-demand services that have been at the center of a recent spate of worker-misclassification lawsuits. A notable few on-demand companies, including Instacart and Shyp, have side-stepped further litigation by reclassifying their contractors as W-2 employees, who get more benefits and protections, but at greater cost to their employer.

The attorney in this suit, Beth Ross, was told by Scoobeez's counsel that Amazon pushed the subcontractor to reclassify the workers. "They were facing massive financial liability if they continued to do what they were doing," Ross said at a symposium at Berkeley Law School on Friday. In June, Ross won a $228 million settlement from FedEx in a misclassification case.

"Amazon went to [Scoobeez] and said, 'classify them as employees or you're fired,'" she said. Ross estimated that "maybe a couple hundred" Scoobeez workers had been impacted by the transition, which she said took place in late January or early February.

The most high-profile of the techie 1099 lawsuits, Uber's, will be decided at trial this June. In the meantime, investors in Silicon Valley are keeping an eye on the outcomes of other cases. The change for some Prime Now drivers suggests that even behemoths like Amazon are interested in avoiding the legal costs and bad press associated with misclassification fights.

Reached for comment, an Amazon spokesperson declined to provide one, citing the company's "longstanding practice of not commenting on discussions with suppliers." The company is facing a similar lawsuit from Prime Now drivers in Nevada; the contractor there is Courier Logistics Services. Scoobeez declined multiple requests for comment.

Ross filed the class action lawsuit just two weeks after Amazon launched its Prime Now offering, which she noted meant the damages the workers would receive would be relatively small. "I'm not doing this case for the money," Ross said.

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Turn The New Facebook Emoji Reactions Into Trump Reactions

A Chrome extension so you can “LOL” or “Sad” to your friends’ posts with with The Donald.

You know how Facebook just added those new reaction emojis last week?

Here's a Chrome extension that turns Facebook's new smileys into Donald Trump's face.

The Chrome extension is made by François Grante, the founder of another acutally useful Chrome extension called Email Hunter.

Why? Who knows. Don't ask WHY. What better way to show your friend you love their baby photo than with Donald's loving face?

Of course, only YOU see Trump's face. Your friends with the baby just see the "love" reaction. It only changes the reactions for the person who is using the Chrome extension.

Or if my friend posts about wanting to see Steely Dan, I can be angry. Not just regular angry, but TRUMP-ANGRY.

View Entire List ›

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US cannot make Apple provide iPhone data, NY judge says

A New York judge says the U.S. Justice Department cannot force Apple to provide the FBI with access to locked iPhone data in a routine Brooklyn drug case.

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Google's Self-Driving Car Caused Its First Accident

Tony Avelar / AP

In an accident report made public on Monday, Google disclosed that its self-driving car had caused a crash earlier this month — the first known crash caused by one of its fleet. One of the autonomous Lexus SUVs that Google has been testing on the streets of Mountain View, CA, hit a bus when it tried to pull change lanes.

According to the account the crash was minor — the car was traveling at 2 mph when it sideswiped the public bus. However, with Google pushing to have its self-driving cars consumer-ready in the next few years, this is the first accident that finds fault with the autonomous vehicle. While Google's cars have been in accidents before, this is the first one where another driver was not at fault.

In the report, Google blamed sand bags in the road as the underlying cause for the accident. They were placed around a storm drain, and when the car detected them, it moved one lane over, hitting the bus in the process.

Tomorrow Google will release its own monthly report on the self-driving car program, in which it will address the crash. The company looks on the bright side of the incident, calling the crash "a tricky set of circumstances that’s helped us improve an important skill for navigating similar roads."

"We clearly bear some responsibility, because if our car hadn’t moved there wouldn’t have been a collision," the report reads. "That said, our test driver believed the bus was going to slow or stop to allow us to merge into the traffic, and that there would be sufficient space to do that."

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Microsoft's $3,000 HoloLens ships to developers starting March 30

Developers can pre-order the device starting today, but Redmond will need to approve your application.

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The best thing about Apple's new iPhone SE might not be the phone itself

The new 4-inch iPhone Apple is reportedly going to unveil in the coming weeks is expected to be called the iPhone SE.

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Tech Terms Decoded

No matter what else they build, consumer electronics companies seem to be prolific manufacturers of jargon.

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Apple Will Ask Congress To Step Into Fight Over Encryption

Dado Ruvic / Reuters

WASHINGTON – Bruce Sewell, Apple’s senior vice president and general counsel, will testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee Tuesday, seeking to persuade lawmakers that the FBI's demand that the company help it unlock an iPhone that belonged to the San Bernardino shooter is reckless and without precedent.

Sewell will frame the court battle between Apple and FBI as an "extraordinary circumstance" and tell lawmakers that they, not a judge, should decide the thorny issues surrounding encryption, according to an advanced copy of his opening statements obtained by BuzzFeed News

“The FBI has asked a court to order us to give them something we don’t have,” Sewell will say. “To create an operating system that does not exist — because it would be too dangerous. They are asking for a backdoor into the iPhone — specifically to build a software tool that can break the encryption system which protects personal information on every iPhone.”

For more than two months, FBI technicians have attempted to gain access to the data held by Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone, looking for possible leads pointing to the people Farook had spoken to and the places he had been. Having exhausted its technical capabilities, the FBI has demanded, through a judge, that Apple design special software to disable and bypass several security features built into the phone.

The FBI has argued that the court order entails a very narrow search — a reasonable request of an American tech company to help federal law enforcement break into a single confiscated device.

Apple, however, maintains that this request involves far more than one iPhone. The company has argued that, if forced to create a special government-sanctioned operating system, there would be no limit to this new software’s application. Apple believes this represents an unacceptable risk to its customers across the globe.

“Should the FBI be allowed to stop Apple, or any company, from offering the American people the safest and most secure product it can make?” Sewell will say. “Should the FBI have the right to compel a company to produce a product it doesn't already make, to the FBI’s exact specifications and for the FBI’s use?”

Apple believes the answer to these questions rests not with a judge interpreting the All Writs Act, the 200-year-old statute invoked by the FBI. Instead, Apple insists that Congress should intervene and work through the challenges encryption poses to law enforcement.

"The decisions should be made by you and your colleagues as representatives of the people, rather than through a warrant request based on a 220-year-old-statute," Sewell will tell members of Congress.

Apple and the FBI, despite being locked in a bitter court and public relations battle, are somewhat in agreement on this point. FBI Director James Comey also believes the broader encryption debate that has been brewing for the past several years should be taken up by Congress. “I do think the larger question is not going to be answered in the courts — and shouldn’t be — because it’s really about who we want to be as a country, and how we want to govern ourselves," he said at a congressional hearing last week.

Sewell will conclude: “At Apple, we are ready to have this conversation. The feedback and support we're hearing indicate to us that the American people are ready, too.”

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App can help you conquer the classics in 20 minutes a day

As daunting as it may seem, you can read Crime and Punishment—20 minutes at a time.

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Feds test SkyTracker rogue drone detector

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How to build a time machine

Every now and again, we all indulge in dreams about traveling in time. Wouldn't it be wonderful to return to that specific point in the past to change a bad decision or relive an experience -- those halcyon days of childhood, that night you won an Oscar -- or to zip ahead to see how things turn out in the far future.