e dot dot dot
a mostly about the Internet blog by

December 2018
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
           
         


Atlanta Cops Caught Deleting Body Cam Footage, Failing To Activate Recording Devices

Furnished content.


Atlanta, Georgia, August 23, 2016:

Officials are promising more transparency on the part of law enforcement, and greater trust between cops and the community. The body cameras “will strengthen trust among our officers and the communities they serve by providing transparency to officer interactions,” said Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed this past week in announcing a purchase.

Oh, we were all so very young then. Look at us (including me!), pointing to the increasing adoption of body cameras as the ushering in of a new era of transparency and accountability. Didn't take long for this lily to get unceremoniously de-gilded.

Cameras are great tools of accountability. They just can't be controlled and maintained by cops. Two years after promising a better police force brimming with accountable officers steadily working to rebuild relationships with the citizens they police, Atlanta residents are being informed their servants/protectors are cheats and liars.

The audit looked at a random sample of 150 videos from officers’ body cameras. In more than half the cases, officers failed to activate and deactivate their cameras at the required time, the audit said.

Officers also miscategorized 22 of the videos, including a use of force incident. Auditors said mislabeling the videos may have led to some being deleted prematurely.

And the audit said that officers failed to capture two-thirds of dispatched calls between November 2017 and May 2018.

These results shouldn't shock Atlanta residents or readers of this site. It doesn't even shock Atlanta Police officials. Police Chief Erika Shields says she's "not happy" with the results of the audit, but also "not surprised." She excuses her officers actions in the worst possible way:

"I knew that what we are asking of officers is a culture shift."

It's your job to make sure the "culture" actually "shifts," Chief Shields. That it hasn't budged despite the addition of body cameras says a whole lot about the culture at the top of the PD. Whatever discipline Shields has meted out (she only says it happens, not how frequently or severely) clearly isn't enough. And the culture that remains in place in the Atlanta PD is downright nasty.

Auditors identified 64 videos “that were deleted by users who should not have had been authorized to delete videos from the system” from November 2016 to 2018.

Officer use-of-force incident videos are supposed to be handled differently. Supervisors are supposed to upload them and they to be labeled properly in case the department or the public needs to review them later.

But the audit found APD supervisors routinely didn’t understand their responsibilities. One zone supervisor told auditors he was unaware that it was his job to upload use of force videos.

Officers know the system is flawed and abuse it. Those in charge of securing recordings officers may not want retained either don't know what they're doing or are playing dumb when questioned by auditors. At the top of the miserable heap is a chief who has allowed flagrant policy violations to occur under her watch.

An official worth a damn would never express their lack of surprise at this sort of behavior from underlings. There should be shock and dismay at these results, not a shrug of "They're cops, what can you do?" emanating from the top person in Atlanta law enforcement. If that's the official reaction, the next audit will just find more of the same.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story


Read more here


posted at: 12:11am on 11-Dec-2018
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

0 comments, click here to add the first



Denuvo-Protected Just Cause 4 Cracked In A Day, Suffering From Shitty Reviews

Furnished content.


Two common topics here at Techdirt are about to converge in what will likely serve as a lovely example of how piracy is often a scapegoat rather than a legitimate business issue. The first topic is Denuvo, the once-unbeatable DRM that has since become a DRM that has been defeated in sub-zero days before game releases. The exception that used to prove the rule that DRM is always defeated has become another example that yet again proves that rule. On the other hand, we've also talked at length that the real antidote for piracy is creating a great product and connecting with fans to give them a reason to buy. The flipside of that formula is that no amount of piracy protection is going to result in big sales numbers for a product that sucks.While that's typically obvious, we're all about to watch what happens when a game both has its piracy protection fail completely and is deemed to be a shitty product, with Just Cause 4 having its Denuvo protection defeated a day after launch while the game is suffering from withering reviews.

This long-anticipated AAA action-adventure title is the follow-up to Just Cause 3, which was also protected by Denuvo. That game was released in December 2015 but wasn’t cracked until the end of February 2017.Compare that with Just Cause 4. The game was released on December 4, 2018 then cracked and leaked online December 5, 2018. Just Cause 3 and Just Cause 4 were both defeated by cracking group CPY, who are clearly getting very familiar with Denuvo’s technology.
Okay, so the game is available on all the regular torrent forums, fully cracked in a day. This again raises the question as to why game publishers even bother with Denuvo any longer. The instances in which Denuvo games are defeated immediately after release are so commonplace at this point that I don't even bother writing them all up. The assumption at this point should be that Denuvo is useless. Somehow, game publishers don't appear to be getting the memo.But Just Cause 4 is also being thoroughly panned by reviews.
While having the game appear online the day after release is bad enough, another problem is raising its head. According to numerous reviewers on Steam, the game is only worthy of a ‘thumbs down’ based on complaints about graphics, gameplay, and numerous other issues.While these things are often handled via early patches from developers, the negative reviews mean that the average score on Steam is currently just 5/10. That, combined with the availability of a pirated version online, seems like a possible recipe for disaster and something that could raise its head later should sales fail to impress.
And if that in fact happens, we'll all get a front row seat to watch a game publisher decide exactly how to respond to all of this. On the one hand, the focus could be on the quality of the product, with reasonable communications sent out acknowledging customer concerns and promising to address them with quality patching and updating. On the other hand, the company could simply point to the pirated versions available online and scapegoat piracy as the reason for all that ails the sales numbers.Given that this is Square we're talking about, it seems practically inevitable that what we'll see is the latter. But when you do see that, keep in mind that customers didn't like this game and reviewed it poorly. And recognize it for what it is: blame-shifting.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story


Read more here

posted at: 12:11am on 11-Dec-2018
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

0 comments, click here to add the first



December 2018
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
           
         







RSS (site)  RSS (path)

ATOM (site)  ATOM (path)

Categories
 - blog home

 - Announcements  (0)
 - Annoyances  (0)
 - Career_Advice  (0)
 - Domains  (0)
 - Downloads  (3)
 - Ecommerce  (0)
 - Fitness  (0)
 - Home_and_Garden  (0)
     - Cooking  (0)
     - Tools  (0)
 - Humor  (0)
 - Notices  (0)
 - Observations  (1)
 - Oddities  (2)
 - Online_Marketing  (0)
     - Affiliates  (1)
     - Merchants  (1)
 - Policy  (3743)
 - Programming  (0)
     - Bookmarklets  (1)
     - Browsers  (1)
     - DHTML  (0)
     - Javascript  (3)
     - PHP  (0)
     - PayPal  (1)
     - Perl  (37)
          - blosxom  (0)
     - Unidata_Universe  (22)
 - Random_Advice  (1)
 - Reading  (0)
     - Books  (0)
     - Ebooks  (0)
     - Magazines  (0)
     - Online_Articles  (5)
 - Resume_or_CV  (1)
 - Reviews  (2)
 - Rhode_Island_USA  (0)
     - Providence  (1)
 - Shop  (0)
 - Sports  (0)
     - Football  (0)
          - Cowboys  (0)
          - Patriots  (0)
     - Futbol  (0)
          - The_Rest  (0)
          - USA  (0)
 - Technology  (1049)
 - Windows  (1)
 - Woodworking  (0)


Archives
 -2024  March  (164)
 -2024  February  (168)
 -2024  January  (146)
 -2023  December  (140)
 -2023  November  (174)
 -2023  October  (156)
 -2023  September  (161)
 -2023  August  (49)
 -2023  July  (40)
 -2023  June  (44)
 -2023  May  (45)
 -2023  April  (45)
 -2023  March  (53)
 -2023  February  (40)


My Sites

 - Millennium3Publishing.com

 - SponsorWorks.net

 - ListBug.com

 - TextEx.net

 - FindAdsHere.com

 - VisitLater.com