itwbennett writes: On Wednesday, Sprint customer Johnny Kim discovered an in-store technician adding MDM software to his personal iPhone 6 without prior notice or permission. Kim took to Twitter with his complaint, sparking a heated conversation about privacy and protection. One expert who commented on the issue told CSO’s Steve Ragan that ‘it’s possible Sprint sees the installation of MDM software as an additional security offering, or perhaps as a means to enable phone location services to the consumer.’ But, as Ragan points out, ‘even if that were true, it’s against [Sprint’s] written policy and such offerings are offered at the cost of privacy and control over the user’s own devices.’ (MDM here means “Mobile Device Management.”) Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Sprint Faces Backlash For Adding MDM Software To Devices
Techdirt comments approvingly on a new project from Harvard Law School, called Free the Law, which in a joint effort with a company called Ravel to scan and post in nicely searchable format all federal and state court decisions, and put them all online, for free. As Techdirt puts it, This is pretty huge. While some courts now release most decisions as freely available PDFs, many federal courts still have them hidden behind the ridiculous PACER system, and state court decisions are totally hit or miss. And, of course, tons of historical cases are completely buried. While there are some giant companies like Westlaw and LexisNexis that provide lawyers access to decisions, those cost a ton — and the public is left out. This new project is designed to give much more widespread access to the public. And it sounds like they’re really going above and beyond to make it truly accessible, rather than just dumping PDFs online. … Harvard “owns” the resulting data (assuming what’s ownable), and while there are some initial restrictions that Ravel can put on the corpus of data, that goes away entirely after eight years, and can end earlier if Ravel “does not meet its obligations.” Anything that helps disrupt the stranglehold of the major legal publishers seems like a good thing. Read more of this story at Slashdot.