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heavi5ideon OTI and Others File Stingray Complaint Against the Baltimore City Police

Today, New America’s Open Technology Institute (OTI), Color Of Change, and Center for Media Justice filed a complaint at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) against the Baltimore City Police Department (BPD) for its extensive and racially-biased use of fake cellular towers known as “cell site simulators” (“CS simulators,” sometimes called “Stingrays”), which it uses to locate and track cellphones. The complaint alleges that BPD’s use of these devices violates the Communications Act.

...BPD’s use of these devices interferes with the cellular network, including with emergency calling services. Worse, these harms fall disproportionately on Black neighborhoods where BPD disproportionately exercises its enforcement authority in a racially biased way.

heavi5ideon How Angular Lets Us Iterate Like Crazy

I didn't really discuss this in the article at all, but frequently we hack up a test version (or a simple graph visualization) for internal evaluation, without showing to users at all. To your point, lots of things that sound great don't end up being that great, and we can catch a lot of those things internally before even showing them to users.

What if we graph this thing over a month? Hmmm, sort of always looks like a straight line for all of our test client datasets, and you can't really gain any insight from it. Let's try something different. etc etc.

heavi5ideon How Angular Lets Us Iterate Like Crazy

Hi, article author here. Our blog doesn't have any functionality tied to tracking services except the tracking functionality. If you're using something that blocks all js and css from *.chartbeat.com and you're trying to read a blog post on blog.chartbeat.com, you might run into an issue though :)

heavi5ideon How Angular Lets Us Iterate Like Crazy

Definitely! I've used Spring's DI container before and while I wasn't a huge fan of the (at the time) XML config, I found the experience to be pretty nice.

heavi5ideon How Angular Lets Us Iterate Like Crazy

Hi, article author here. This was more a comment on the verbosity of Google Closure's syntax. If you're not familiar with it, to get the most out of the closure compiler, you have to add type annotations in javascript comments for pretty much every function parameter, return value, constant, etc. Otherwise the compiler's static analysis doesn't really have much to work with. This makes it kind of a pain to javascript devs who are not used to this sort of thing.

Coming from Java, I probably found it a little less annoying than most javascript devs. Although in Java (as I mentioned in a footnote) you have really powerful and mature tooling like Eclipse, which--whatever else you think of it--does really help with Java's general verbosity. You're not going to find the same sort of tool help for dealing with Closure javascript.