Mediaboss Marketing

A 2008 North Carolina law bans sex offenders from using commercial social networking sites like Facebook that children could join. The U.S. Supreme Court is deciding whether the law is so broad it violates the Constitutions free-speech protections. ( JUSTIN TALLIS / AFP/GETTY IMAGES )

By Emery P. DalesioAssociated Press

Sun., Feb. 26, 2017

RALEIGH, N.C.Fresh from a trip to traffic court, Lester Packingham Jr. celebrated his turn of good fortune by announcing to friends on Facebook that his pending ticket was dismissed without his having said a word.

No fine. No Court costs. No nothing. Praise be to God. Wow. Thanks, Jesus, Packingham wrote in a 2010 post that led to a lawsuit being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday.

Packingham, 36, was forbidden by a 2008 North Carolina law from using commercial social networking sites like Facebook that children could join. Thats because hes a registered sex offender who was convicted of indecent liberties with a minor when he was 21. He served 10 months in prison.

A Durham police officer investigated Packinghams post and determined he used an alias rather than his real name. Packingham was prosecuted, convicted of a felony and received a suspended prison sentence. His lawyers say no evidence pointed to Packingham using Facebook or his computer to communicate with minors or that he posted anything inappropriate or obscene.

Now the Supreme Courts task is deciding whether the law, meant to prevent communications between sex offenders and minors via social media, is so broad that it violates the Constitutions free-speech protections.

The case reaches the Supreme Court after it was upheld by North Carolinas highest court in a divided ruling. The law addressed websites that might allow sex offenders to gather information about minors, the state court said. But dissenting justices argued the ban extends further and could outlaw reading the New York Times and Food Network website.

Lawyers arguing on Monday are expected to continue that dispute.

Groups including the libertarian Cato Institute and the American Civil Liberties Union argue the North Carolina law could bar sex offenders from online life that includes looking for jobs or reading the daily musings of President Donald Trump and is unconstitutional.

Everyday Americans understand that social media, which includes Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, are absolutely central to their daily life and how the First Amendment is exercised in America today, said Stanford law professor David Goldberg, who will represent Packingham at the Supreme Court on Monday.

Though the intent of North Carolina lawmakers may have been to block sexual predators from finding and grooming prey online, Goldberg said, the law goes further and makes it a crime for someone on a sex-offender registry to say anything about any subject on social media.

That goes way, way too far, Goldberg said. Its a crime to do anything, including what Mr. Packingham did, which was to say God is good because he was victorious in traffic court. Theres never been any suggestion that he was up to anything but exercising his freedom of speech.

Georgia, Kentucky and Louisiana also have laws restricting sex offenders use of use of social media sites. Nine other states require offenders to disclose their online usernames and profiles, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

We have to protect young people wherever they are, whether thats at school or at summer camp or increasingly online, said North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, whose office is defending the law. This North Carolina law keeps registered sex offenders off of social networking websites that kids use without denying the offenders access to the Internet. It just keeps them off of certain websites.

The laws supporters contend that it doesnt regulate what sex offenders say, just the time, place and manner of their speech, which most people understand through the legal maxim that you cant yell fire in a crowded movie theatre. The law doesnt ban offenders from using the Internet entirely, just social media sites like Facebook, said Louisiana Deputy Solicitor General Colin Clark, who wrote a brief supporting the law joined by attorneys general in 12 other states.

Theres nothing that a sex offender cant say on the internet. They just cant say it on Facebook, Clark said. His state, Nebraska and Indiana have had laws that federal courts ruled violated the free-speech rights of sex offenders. Louisiana amended its statute to comply with the court decision.

The vast majority of the more than 800,000 sex offenders nationwide are required to register their names, addresses and photographs on registries maintained by states, Clark said.

States are trying to come up with a practical solution to the practical problem of sex offenders being on social media and harvesting information about our children and then soliciting them online, he said.

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

Here is the original post:
US Supreme Court weighs law barring sex offenders from Facebook - Toronto Star

Capital Public Radio News

Sacramento police warn of social networking robbery trend Sacramento Bee Sacramento police say at least 10 men have been robbed in recent weeks after arranging to meet women through online social networking sites. The police department is warning people to beware of the criminal trend. In a news release Friday, officials ... Multiple Local Robberies Connected To Social Networking SitesCapital Public Radio News all 4 news articles »

More:
Sacramento police warn of social networking robbery trend - Sacramento Bee

Freed up by the Supreme Courts ongoing reluctance to engage in depth with the Second Amendment, the Fourth Circuit has taken it upon itself to rewrite Heller en banc. In a 104 decision, issued yesterday afternoon, the court upheld Marylands ban on both assault weapons and high capacity magazines. By so doing, it deprived the people of Maryland, the Carolinas, and the Virginias of the core protections to which the Constitution entitles them.

As Judge Traxlers dissent pointedly establishes, the majority achieved this transformation by contriving a heretofore unknown test, which is whether the firearm in question is most useful in military service. In effect, this test is designed to permit judges to determine that any weapon they might dislike is unprotected by the Second Amendment and can therefore be prohibited with impunity. Forget that Heller contains its own explicit tests. Forget the common use standard. Forget dangerous and unusual. Theres a new kid in town, and hes coming for your rifles.

What counts as most useful in military service under this rubric? Well ... everything, theoretically. Under the majoritys analysis, the dissenters contend, a settlers musket, the only weapon he would likely own and bring to militia service, would be most useful in military service undoubtedly a weapon of war and therefore not protected by the Second Amendment. Indeed, the most useful in military service rubric would remove nearly all firearms from Second Amendment protection as nearly all firearms can be useful in military service. A standard semi-automatic handgun is plausibly most useful in military service. So, too, is a hunting rifle. So is a sword. Perhaps the Fourth Circuit would like to strip the constitutional protection from those weapons, too?

That, of course would be absurd not only because it would render the Second Amendment meaningless as a check on state action, but because the Supreme Court has already delivered clear instructions to the contrary. In Caetano v. Massachusetts, which, recall, was decided per curiam, Justice Alito explained in no uncertain terms that even a stun gun capable of only non-lethal force is suitable for military use, but that this did not mean that stun guns could be banned. Alito sits on the Supreme Court, and was writing in concurrence with the other eight justices.

Perhaps the Fourth Circuit has forgotten where it sits in the pecking order. Or perhaps the Fourths majority is unfamiliar with Caetano. Certainly, its grasp of Heller is wanting. In pushing back against the majoritys newfangled test, the dissenters correctly note that Heller in no way suggests that the military usefulness of a weapon disqualifies it from Second Amendment protection. That is the majoritys singular concoction. Indeed it is. As for Hellers common use and dangerous and unusual standards, both of those are thrown casually out the window. The evidence, notes Judge Traxler, leads one to the unavoidable conclusion that popular semiautomatic rifles such as the AR-15 are commonly possessed by American citizens for lawful purposes within the meaning of Heller. Moreover, the record shows unequivocally that magazines with a capacity of greater than 10 rounds are commonly kept by American citizens, as there are more than 75 million such magazines owned by them in the United States. But the majority doesnt care about that, choosing to apply only the military standard that it has invented. Evidently, it does not matter to Judge King that the standard in Heller is dangerous and unusual [italics mine] i.e. that commonly owned, usual weapons cannot be prohibited on the grounds that they are particularly lethal. Nor, apparently, is King concerned that the Court ruled in Caetano that the relative dangerousness of a weapon is irrelevant when the weapon belongs to a class of arms commonly used for lawful purposes. He and his colleagues had a conclusion to reach, and by gum were they going to get there.

This legal folly notwithstanding, the majoritys characterization of the AR-15 as weapon of war is flat-out wrong. First, the opinion suggests that because the AR looks like an M-16 (a weapon that is not widely owned by the citizenry), it counts as a military firearm. Then, perhaps anticipating the objection that the AR-15 has never been issued to a soldier in American military history, it makes a series of preposterous claims as to the weapons rate of fire, the sole purpose of which is to mislead readers into believing that the model shares more than an aesthetic relationship with the its automatic cousins. Semi-automatic rifles, Judge King suggests, can fire at a rate of between 300 and 500 rounds per minute a capability that makes them virtually indistinguishable from a machine gun.

Judge Traxlers dissent loses no time in taking this claim apart, as well it should:

The majoritys assertion might surprise the United States Army, which sets the maximum effective rates of M4- and M16-series rifles operating in semi-automatic mode at 45 to 65 rounds per minute only about five rounds in five seconds (not 30 rounds as the majority believes). This is far slower than 150 to 200 rounds per minute that may effectively be fired by the same arms operating in fully automatic mode.

(Also surprised will be some of the experts at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who have testified to the same effect before Congress.)

The legal problem here is obvious: If the AR-15 is unacceptably dangerous because it is semi-automatic, then so must be every other gun that fires once per pull of the trigger including the handguns that were protected by Heller. If the majority is correct, writes Traxler, that the semiautomatic AR-15s rate of fire makes it a weapon of war outside the scope of the Second Amendment, then all semiautomatic firearms including the vast majority of semiautomatic handguns enjoy no constitutional protection since the rate of fire for any semiautomatic firearm is determined by how fast the shooter can squeeze the trigger.

Indeed. And a further question must present itself. Since 1934, automatic weapons have been treated differently under the law in the United States. Why? If semi-automatics that are protected by Heller are practically identical to automatics and if the common use standard is to be ignored as it has been here shouldnt the court be striking down the National Firearms Act? Words matter, especially in the law. Common cant mean unusual. And cant mean or. And parlor games can be played both ways: If we are to subject the plain terms of our precedents to the amateurish deliberations of motive-riven judges, there will be nothing to stop a different court from inverting the trick and striking down the NFA on the grounds that fully automatic weapons are so similar to semi-autos as to enjoy all the protections of normal civilian weapons.

Most worrying of all, the majority concludes its trail of destruction by playing preemptive games with the standard of review. Because it sets assault weapons outside of the Constitutions remit, the majority never reaches the question of scrutiny. But it nevertheless wants us to know that it would have applied intermediate scrutiny, and that the law in question would have passed without difficulty. This is extraordinary. For a start, if the majority had decided that the Second Amendment applied, it would have been duty bound to apply strict scrutiny. As Judge Traxler notes, once it is determined that a given weapon is covered by the Second Amendment, then obviously the in-home possession of that weapon for self-defense is core Second Amendment conduct and strict scrutiny must apply to a law that prohibits it. From where, one might ask, did he get that idea? The answer: From United States v. Hosford. And which Circuit decided that case? The Fourth.

Not content simply to break with its own precedent, the majority then has the gall to justify its departure as if Heller had never been issued. How else to account for the submission that Marylands prohibition on assault weapons does not restrict the core lawful purpose of the Second Amendment because the state hasnt touched other sorts of weapons an argument that was explicitly rejected in Heller? It would be one thing for the court to argue that a law might pass strict scrutiny; that, while unlikely to be vindicated, is at least a defensible position. But to deprive the plaintiffs of that chance, and then to justify that denial using reasoning that defies seminal Supreme Court precedent, is something else entirely.

Were this a First Amendment case, those vexed by its outcome could merely wait for the Supreme Court to step in and reverse it. In this instance, however, such relief seems unlikely at least in the foreseeable future. For whatever reason, the Court has been unwilling to take Second Amendment cases of late, a reluctance that has been caustically criticized by Justices Thomas and Scalia, both of whom have accused the judicial branch of treating the keeping and bearing of arms as a second-class right. One can only hope that Thomas is on the phone with the Fourth Circuit today. That was a complaint, he might say, not an invitation.

Charles C. W. Cooke is the editor of National Review Online.

Read more:
In upholding Maryland's 'assault weapons' ban, the court employed dubious legal reasoning to trample on American ... - National Review

(Image: Screenshot by Tas Bindi/ZDNet)

There are more than 18 million open datasets available, but they're often difficult to find, difficult to understand, and difficult to translate into something of value, according to Austin, Texas-based startup Data.World.

As an active participant in the open data movement, Data.World seeks to democratise the vast treasure trove of accumulated data scattered across online and offline environments.

On Tuesday, the startup, which operates as a public benefit corporation with a legal obligation to create value for society, announced that it raised $18.7 million in a Series B funding round led by Pat Ryan's family investment group. The latest round brings the total amount raised by Data.World to $32.7 million.

Founded by CEO Brett Hurt, CTO Bryon Jacob, COO Matt Laessig, and CPO Jon Loyens, Data.World can be described as one of many things: A social network, a discovery tool, a collaboration platform, or a data repository.

10 types of enterprise deployments

As businesses continue to experiment with the Internet of Things, interesting use cases are emerging. Here are some of the most common ways IoT is deployed in the enterprise.

By combining linked datasets with social networking features, Data.World strives to be the place where users -- whether they're data scientists or data enthusiasts, solo entrepreneurs or multinational organisations -- come to discover, discuss, and disseminate datasets, as well as collaborate on data projects to solve academic, commercial, and societal problems.

Data.World links datasets together using semantic technology, which gives concepts within datasets an independent existence, allowing people and machines to work with data without needing to learn everything about it first. The datasets are available in both public and private configurations.

Instead of just presenting .CSV files of raw data, users can visualise the data by choosing from a range of charts. By clicking the information icon, users can also get a quick overview of the datasets, including information such as the number of distinct and missing values, as well as most common and least common values.

Loyens told ZDNet that Data.World was designed to capture, store, and link all the activity -- including discussions and queries -- that take place around the datasets published on the platform.

"If you're working in a company and you're working on a data project, it's really hard to collaborate because you lose a lot of context, you lose a lot of what's been done over time with the data ... they get lost in emails, in old wikis," Loyens said.

"Everything you see is available as APIs ... As a researcher or data analyst, if you put together a really great dataset and you want to make that available to an application developer, you can just drag it and drop it in Data.World and instantly have these query end points where people can actually start creating apps against it."

Since its launch in July 2016, the startup has experienced "phenomenal" traction, according to Hurt, who sold one of his previous companies Coremetrics to IBM in 2010. He told ZDNet that Data.World's traction mirrors the global momentum around open data.

"We had such a great receptivity that it allowed us to get that funding much earlier than I ever anticipated. We now have the runway to really build out this business," Hurt said.

"We really haven't made much of a dent in that first amount, but we wanted to make sure that, with the ambition we have and the growth we're experiencing, we have enough capital available to really do the concept justice," Loyens added.

"We're going to be making sure we get into the right communities and build the features that the community really needs to thrive and collaborate on Data.World."

In addition to funding, Data.World has also attracted partners such as the National Science Foundation, Census Bureau, Anti-Defamation League, US Commerce Department National Technical Information Service, and the Pentagon.

Datasets published on the platform vary widely -- there's data on sports, education, poverty, national security, housing, mental health, and terrorism.

"What's really more important than the debt or the big partnerships or the people that we're working with are the communities that are developing in Data.World," Loyens noted.

Formed in December 2016, Data For Democracy is one of the earliest communities to use Data.World. In a few months, the group has grown to more than 800 data scientists and subject matter experts -- all working to shed light on and bring greater transparency to the democratic process and to government programs, according to Data.World. The group works with data on crime, drug spending, and the presidential election.

Another notable user is data journalist Carl V Lewis who, shortly after the US travel ban was announced, published a dataset around the citizenship status of all perpetrators of terrorist attacks against the US and Americans abroad since 2001. Another user, Marc Santolini, created a visualisation of that dataset, which highlighted the discrepancy between perception and facts.

"Data.World can quickly become the source of truth. People shared that visualisation because they knew it's backed up by real data. They can actually go look at the data. Maybe they themselves are not data scientists, but they know that data scientists are always on the platform running queries," Hurt said.

Ian Greenleigh, head of marketing at Data.World, told ZDNet that as Data.World grows, data will be brought up in every conversation.

"We feel like if data is a source of truth, and if we can host that data on the platform, then a new kind of phenomenon will occur where data will be brought up in every conversation when there are differences of opinion. They'll hopefully resolve some of those differences," Greenleigh said.

He added that the availability of data is the first step, and that Data.World wants to take the open data movement to the next level.

"What we are trying to add to that mix is a collaborative work environment and the social signals you need to decide whether that's the right data for you, whether the originator is respected in the community, whether they have credibility, whether the analysis makes sense, because you're able to dig in and see how the person got there," Greenleigh said.

The startup's end game is "a platform that accelerates research, informs policy, and helps us all combat fake news and 'reality check' the facts around us".

Data.World's founders are cognisant of the privacy and security challenges around data and do not claim to have all the answers. Like other social networks, Data.World has terms of service and rules that community members are required to abide by.

For example, Data.World prohibits users from uploading data that is not their own, or contains personally identifiable information, to the open side of the platform. If any violations come to light, Data.World's terms of service allow it to terminate a user's access to their account and their ability to post. It can also remove files from the site at its discretion.

"For the most part, our community is pretty good at policing itself. But you can't rely on that entirely," Loyens said. "There's the fat finger effect where somebody accidentally clicks the 'public' button. You can put as many warnings in front of them as you want, but sometimes things get out.

"We believe in full auditability, so when things like that happen, you know how it happened, why it happened, and how to correct it. This is really important to us from a design principle standpoint, from a technology standpoint. It's just as easy to make [the data] private again. We provide all the right access control measures to get the data back."

Data.World has not been monetised at scale, though the founders admitted that one undisclosed organisation has insisted on becoming a paid user.

Generally, the startup's monetisation model will revolve around enterprise use. For example, there will be enterprise-friendly features such as single sign-on and administrative controls that organisations will be required to pay for. Also, organisations that want to combine public and private datasets will be required to pay a nominal fee.

"Just like with GitHub, a lot of individual developers started using it on open source projects or personal passion projects and brought in the organisation and the organisations needed to adapt to that. We already have organisations reaching out and asking for those enterprise features, so we're trying to figure out how to navigate those worlds," Loyens said.

Data.World's users are predominantly from the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia, with a growing number of users coming from India.

Read more here:
Social network for data scientists Data.World raises $18.7m - ZDNet

Snapchat is an image messaging & multimedia mobile application created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy & Reggie Brown, former students at Stanford University. One of the principle concepts of Snapchat is that pictures & messages are only available for a short time before they become inaccessible.

Snapchat is primarily used for creating multimedia messages referred to as Snaps, snaps can consist of a photo & it can be edited to include the filters & effects & much more to it.

But now, Snapchat is planning to launch an Android Smartphone that will provide the consumers with more control over the camera features.

A California is a marketing based firm which has unveiled the concept regarding the handset equip with a 360 degree camera & buttons that let users scroll through filters & also a one touch capture function for easy sharing.

The device i.e. the Android Smartphone might also include the lock screen that will allow the user with the facility to easily swipe for the snapchat notifications & updates, messaging & syncing & spectacles. It may also cover the feature to discover the screens that combines the GPS along with the maps, Snapchat stories & advertisements & much more alignments.

In the end period of the year, Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat has also made it a long awaited initial public offering i.e. IPO filing public & also seeking to raise up to $3 billion.

The main aim of Snapchat is to derive most of the revenue from advertising it & where it will compete against Google, Facebook & Twitter.

Snap Inc. has recently rolled out major changes in its app & that will make it easier & quicker to navigate the app with a universal search scale thats always accessible to the top of the app.

So, now just wait for the upcoming Android Smartphone by Snapchat.

Continue reading here:
Social Networking Site Snapchat Is Planning To Launch An Android Smartphone - Facts Herald