We’ve left the teens! This Week in Web is still a passion project, but it would mean the world to me if you share with one friend who you think might like this type of coverage.
The Appalling State of Appeals for Chelsea Manning
Chelsea Manning has been imprisoned for three years already of a 35 year sentence for the leak of over a half million military documents, considered the largest in history. In the years since, her legal team has been working on an appeal for a shorter ten year sentence. Wired has a bit of detail on why exactly the appeal has taken so long.
Manning’s lawyers believe that the case was built on speculation, and does not represent actual harm. This is an important part of the appeal, as the Espionage Act which she was charged under does not have provisions in place for the public good that has come of the leak to come into account.
Contrast this with General david Petraeus, who is somehow different than Chelsea in a way that I can’t quite put my finger on… Whatever it is, it allowed him to sleep with his biographer, hide information, share government secrets, lie about it, and end up with a fine, probation, and the ability to maintain a security clearance and advice the White House.
Chrome deletes Backspace
Simon Sharwood, The Register
Chrome developers might suggest that it’s a limited number of users that are affected by lost form data when they click backspace and leave a page, but it happens to me often enough that I am happy to hear that backspace no longer functions as a page back button in Chrome.
Some users surely have it as part of their workflow, but it was always accidental for me. Of course, it could all be avoided if more form systems incorporated local storage usage and cached field data.
Google’s New Allo Messaging App Gets Its Edge From AI
Cade Metz, Wired
Google IO was this week, and they’ve revealed some cool things. I’ve been waiting for a way to use Google Now around the house, and I’m ready for Allo and Google Home to enter my life. It’d be cool if OnHub had the features of Google Home to replace my Amazon Echo, but I’m prepared for the headaches of new devices and their quirks.
The Urban Legend of the Government’s Mind-Controlling Arcade Game
Natalie Zarrelli, Atlas Obscura
I’d never heard the story of Polybius before, but Atlas Obscura gives a good overview of an urban legend around a mysterious coin-op machine tied to a shady government organization. Now that I’m aware of it, I’ve started looking at the network of stories that have cropped up around this arcade game and the various references made in pop culture. Do you have any video game myths or creepy pasta? I’d be very interested in hearing about it!
Evaluating the privacy properties of telephone metadata
Jonathan Mayer, Patrick Mutchler, John C. Mitchell, Stanford University
I caught this on Bruce Schneier’s Blog, which corroborates stories that security researchers and privacy advocates have been saying for years: metadata is plenty useful for tracking people, even without content logs. Basically, using metadata (location, phone, numbers called to and from, etc) from informed and consenting users of a call and text app, Stanford researchers were able to detail social graphs of their test subjects. Additionally, they demonstrated that under the “two-hop rule” that allowed the NSA to track all people that were within two levels of contact with a surveillance target would net around 25,000 new people to track based on a single suspect.
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