We discuss the details of the current crop of smart phones, then look at Microsoft’s new Surface 3, get skeptical about Project Spartan & celebrate the Supreme Court’s GPS Tracker decision.
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Microsoft’s Surface 3 is a $499 tablet that could be a full Windows laptop | The Verge
Surface 3 will start at just $499, and it’s available to pre-order today with devices shipping on May 5th in the US / Canada and May 7th internationally.
Introducing Project Spartan: The New Browser Built for Windows 10
As we started building Project Spartan, we took a hard look at everything we were doing with the browser — from the way we engineered it, to the way we designed the user experience, to the way we approached compatibility and interoperability, to the way we interacted with our customers and Web developers, to the way we released it.
License Details Hint MS Undecided On Suing Users of Its Open Source Net Runtime – Slashdot
With Microsoft proudly declaring its .NET runtime open source, a colleague and I decided to look at the licensing aspects. One part, the MIT licence, is straightforward, but there’s also a patent promise. The first two-thirds of the first sentence seems to announce good news about Microsoft not suing people. Then the conditions begin. It seems Microsoft can’t yet bring itself to release something as free software without retaining a patent threat to limit how those freedoms can be exercised. Overall, we found 4 Shifty Details About Microsoft’s “Open Source” .NET.
U.S. Supreme Court: GPS Trackers Are a Form of Search and Seizure — The Atlantic
The Supreme Court clarified and affirmed that law on Monday, when it ruled on _Torrey Dale Grady v. North Carolina, _before sending the case back to that state’s high court. The Court’s short but unanimous opinion helps make sense of how the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, interacts with the expanding technological powers of the U.S. government.
“It doesn’t matter what the context is, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a car or a person. Putting that tracking device on a car or a person is a search,” said Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF).
In this case, that context was punishment. Grady was twice convicted as a sex offender. In 2013, North Carolina ordered that, as a recidivist, he had to wear a GPS monitor at all times so that his location could be monitored. He challenged the court, saying that the tracking device qualified as an unreasonable search.
North Carolina’s highest court at first ruled that the tracker was no search at all. It’s that decision that the Supreme Court took aim at today, quoting the state’s rationale and snarking: