TEH 013: The Next Scam is Already Out There

In This Episode: You can share (presumably with trusted people) your exact location, built-in with Google Maps, or with other apps. Is Google helping music pirates -- and profiting from linking to them? Playboy sues a site for "copyright infringement" not because they infringed their copyright, but because they linked to a page that did. And another interesting Amazon-related scam. This Week's Hosts Leo Notenboom, “Chief Question Answerer” at tech education site Ask Leo! Gary Rosenzweig host and producer of MacMost, and mobile game developer at Clever Media. Longer Bios on the Hosts page. Show Notes As Leo discussed, Google's page on how to share locations in Maps. You can set it to share for a specific amount of time (like an hour or a day), or "permanently". The Glympse app that Leo talked about is here. Randy is a volunteer medic, and was called out for a head injury victim. He seemed to be OK, but was cautioned that symptoms in a head injury can show up hours, days, and occasionally even weeks later (and be bad enough to cause death), so to call 911 if he has any problems. Gary talked about how Passports are required to have chips with the passport-holder's information included, but Customs and Border Protection doesn't even have the software to confirm the passport information is real -- and it has been going on for 13 years! (Ars Technica article). Two U.S. senators are demanding CPB be able to authenticate passports by 1 Jan 2019 (their letter to CPB) Gary talked about how Neil Young is lambasting Google for profiting off of links to piracy sites -- and wonders if a traditional career in music is still possible. But Gary and Leo wonder if maybe the Internet is actually giving us signficantly more choices. (article on The Verge) Gary talked about PledgeMusic as a way to help musicians get their stuff out there. Leo talked about Playboy trying to sue Boing Boing for copyright infringement not because they published copyrighted material, but by simply linking to a site with copyrighted material. But a judge threw the suit out -- but not "with prejudice" so they could try to sue again. Here's the judge's decision. Leo mentioned Randy's Honorary Unsubscribe web site as an example because Randy explicitly says "OK to link" in the newsletter just to stop people from asking if it's OK. If it's public, it's OK! Maybe Boing Boing's link wasn't illegal, but was it ethical? Here's the page Playboy is fighting over -- but you won't see the pictures Boing Boing was linking to on imgur.com, since those were removed -- after all, they were infringing copyright. Interesting ethical question, eh? Gary highlighted another interesting Amazon scam: money laundering by posting very expensive, nonsense books. (Security researcher Brian Krebs broke the story.)