Bytes: What’s new in tech
Surveillance in the college dorm
A federal judge said a university’s use of monitoring software that scanned a student’s bedroom before he took a remote test violated the Fourth Amendment right to privacy, said Amanda Holpuch and April Rubin in The New York Times. Cleveland State, like many schools that offered online classes during the pandemic, employed software that “collects feeds from a computer’s camera and microphone” to prevent cheating on exams. Aaron Ogletree initially protested the policy when it was introduced in his class, and the school relented. But a month later, “two hours before a test, the university’s testing service told Ogletree in an email that a proctor would be checking his work area.” Ogletree complied, then sued the school.
Twitter reinstates Berenson
Covid vaccine skeptic Alex Berenson won a rare reinstatement back on Twitter, said Kaitlin Tiffany in The Atlantic. Former New York Times journalist Berenson’s account had 340,000 followers when it was permanently suspended last year for “repeated violations of our Covid-19 misinformation rules.” Berenson sued demanding reinstatement. Most of the time, such cases have gotten dismissed. Indeed, a judge rejected Berenson’s First Amendment argument. Instead, his success “seems to have hinged on promises made to him by a highlevel Twitter employee,” prompting Twitter to settle. Berenson also showed evidence of Twitter’s employees discussing his posts with the Biden administration, which, one Twitter executive said in a Slack message, demanded to know “why Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform.”
An embarrassing security breach
“The world’s most popular password manager says it was hacked,” said Margi Murphy in Bloomberg. LastPass, a password manager used by more than 33 million people, said last week that “a hacker stole its source code and other proprietary information about breaking into its system.” The company doesn’t believe any passwords were taken as part of the breach. Allan Liska, an analyst at cybersecurity company Recorded Future, agreed that the stolen source code wasn’t likely to yield access to password vaults. But the attack was nonetheless unnerving for a company that has long promoted the safety and security of its service, which automatically “generates and stores hard-to-crack passwords on behalf of its users.”