Amazon is giving the police video taken by private homeowners’ Amazon Ring doorbells not only without a warrant, not only without the consent of the homeowner, but without even the knowledge of the homeowner! And what Amazon has to say about the program is stunning. The Internet Patrol obtained the letter that Amazon sent to Senator Markey in response to Markey’s alarmed request to Amazon for disclosure, and what Amazon has disclosed is, frankly, frightening. Amazon’s Ring Neighbors app includes a ‘Neighbors Public Safety Service’ (NPSS) component, and through that portal a total of 2,161 law enforcement agencies have joined the Ring Neighbor app (so far), as have 455 fire departments. You can think of the Ring Neighbor app as being like Nextdoor, but specifically for Ring Doorbell owners. And, increasingly, the police. However unlike Nextdoor, Amazon is handing over private homeowners’ videos to the police without a warrant, and they’ve done it nearly a dozen times in the first half of 2022 alone. And they clearly fully intend to keep doing it.

Professor Daniel Kammen, up until today the State Department’s ‘Science Envoy’, has served in various Federal agency roles for over 20 years, since 1996. Today the UC Berkeley Professor of Energy, and Director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab (RAEL), sent President Trump a letter of resignation in which the first letter of each paragraph spells out “IMPEACH”. Here is the full text of that letter, which Professor Kammen posted on Twitter.

As we reported earlier today, Verizon has acquired Yahoo for nearly 5 billion dollars. You can read more about that here. However here, below, is the full text of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s email letter to Yahoo employees announcing the acquisition.

The State Bar of California has issued an alert warning of a fraudulent complaint email being sent in their name. In an emailed statement this morning (June 8, 2016), the California State Bar said that it had received numerous inquiries about the email that supposedly had come from them, going out to members of the California bar.

Late yesterday afternoon a Federal court ordered Apple to assist the FBI in their investigation into the San Bernardino shootings by unlocking the iPhone belonging to the shooters. In response, this morning, Apple CEO Tim Cook released a public statement in which Apple refuses to comply, explaining the reasons that even if Apple can comply with the order, they will refuse to do so.

During a diplomatic visit to China, Argentine president Cristina Fernandez Kirchner sent out a tweet mocking the Chinese, and perpetuating the stereotype that native Chinese speakers cannot pronounce the letter R.

Copyright infringement is wrong, and it’s darned easy to do on the Internet. But lots of website proprietors publish images for which they have purchased the right to display the images, often from a stock photo site. So you can imagine their surprise when they get a demand letter from Getty Images, stating that they are guilty of copyright infringement under U.S. Title 17 (the Copyright Act) and that they must provide “payment for the attached demand amount” if they cannot produce a valid license. Is the Getty Images demand letter a scam? Well, not exactly.

The issue of Flash – or rather lack thereof – on the iPhone and iPods (and now the iPad), has long been a source of frustration and consternation for Apple devotees. More and more discontent has spilled into public discussion, with Apple openly taking what some perceive as potshots at Adobe, the makers of Flash, and Adobe, in turn, responding. Now it has erupted into open discussion (ok, attacks), with none less than Steve Jobs openly publishing on the Apple web site his “Thoughts on Flash”, and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen responding in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.