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14th Street Apple Store In-Store Personal Pickup Problems

Yesterday, I decided to test the new “In-Store Personal Pickup” option Apple is now offering customers when you order from the online Apple Store.  I had to take the iPad 2 plunge — times two! — and I placed a nine-item order online at 10:30am in the morning and planned to pick up everything from the 14th Street Apple Store in New York City when I finished teaching later that night.

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The Loaded Gun to Cuba and the TSA

For the last eight years, we have been subject to ever increasing scrutiny by airport security when traveling by air. From taking off our shoes to measuring out exact measures of shampoo, going from point A to point B by air has slowly turned into an exercise in greater and greater public humiliation at the hands of the TSA.

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Your Picture is Being Taken

Your picture is being taken. There are hundreds of thousands of phones, many of them iPhones, being sold every month that have the capability of taking high quality digital images and it’s nearly impossible to tell when your picture is being taken.  You could be waiting for a train and someone is waiting with you, taking pictures of you without you realizing it. This is one of the first photos I took. I was waiting for a train and people were standing all around me, also absentmindedly
waiting for a train. I wondered what was the chance that I could take photos of people without their noticing.

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Careless Government vs. Malicious Agents

Jamie Grace wrote this article.

The e-governance initiatives that Anderson et al deplored in their Database State report are not, as I’ve argued previously here in Panopticonic, malicious works of a totalitarian state – they are about deploying information in a timely and accurate manner, about citizens in need of healthcare or social care. The true risk to information security and privacy comes from individuals working to intrude illegitimately into these databases and caches of personal data. I term these individuals, rather abstractly, ‘malicious agents.’

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Respected UK Trust Slams Government Databases

Jamie Grace wrote this article.

Sunday Times journalist David Leppard has given an important pointer to an upcoming political tug-of-war in the UK. The Jospeh Rowntree Foundation (an important ‘liberty & democracy’ campaigning funder) has produced a report – published on Monday the 23rd of March – that slams the myriad of Government-sponsored ‘giant databases’ that exist or are planned for implementation in the UK.

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Incarcerating the Amateur Photographer

It was once a hobby of many – taking photographs of the beautiful trains that crisscross the countryside. There are so many different trains and, judging by the number of model train enthusiasts, a considerable number of people interested in looking at them.  Amtrak recently sponsored a contest to take photographs of its own trains. The winner would get a thousand dollars in travel vouchers and get their photo published in Amtrak’s annual calendar.

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