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Submission + - Woman charged with wiretapping for filming cops wins $57,000 payout (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: A local New Hampshire police department agreed Thursday to pay a woman who was arrested and charged with wiretapping $57,000 to settle her civil rights lawsuit. The deal comes a week after a federal appeals court ruled that the public has a "First Amendment" right to film cops.

The plaintiff in the case, Carla Gericke, was arrested on wiretapping allegations in 2010 for filming her friend being pulled over by the Weare Police Department during a late-night traffic stop. Although Gericke was never brought to trial, she sued, alleging that her arrest constituted retaliatory prosecution in breach of her constitutional rights. The department, without admitting wrongdoing, settled Thursday in a move that the woman's attorney speculated would deter future police "retaliation."

The First US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled (PDF) in Gericke's case last week that she was "exercising a clearly established First Amendment right when she attempted to film the traffic stop in the absence of a police order to stop filming or leave the area."

Submission + - World's largest Wikipedia evaluation finds: Finnish Wikipedia largely error free (helsinkitimes.fi)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat evaluated 134 articles in the Finnish-language version of Wikipedia with 96 experts, most of them professors and other academics. That is said to be the most extensive individual investigation on the trustworthiness of Wikipedia in the whole world.
According to results, Wikipedia is better than it’s reputation: seventy per cent of the articles got good points for accuracy. But in many ways the Finnish Wikipedia is also far from flawless.
Read the story in English (17 000 characters) here. You can also download the result dataset as an open data here.
The story also states that Finnish Wikipedia is largely written by only three hundred active writers, and could use some more.

Submission + - Microsoft Takes Steps for Protecting customer data from government snooping

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: Microsoft has announced that it is taking various step including data encryption process for Protecting customer data from government snooping. Brad Smith, General Counsel of Microsoft had written a detailed plan about its step to prevent government snooping.

Though he didn’t specifically mention “NSA”, he had said that Microsoft was alarmed by allegations that “some governments” had collected customer data from the Internet without warrants.

He is telling about below three action items for preventing such snooping activities.
  • Expanding encryption across Microsoft services.
  • Reinforcing legal protections for customers’ data.
  • Enhancing the transparency of software code, making it easier for customers to reassure themselves that Microsoft products do not contain back doors.

Brand Smith says Microsoft will pursue a comprehensive engineering effort to strengthen the encryption of customer data across networks and services. This effort will include major communications, productivity and developer services such as Outlook.com, Office 365, SkyDrive and Windows Azure, and will provide protection across the full lifecycle of customer-created content.

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