Here’s everything new in iOS 9 (9to5 Mac)
Apple introduced iOS 9 during its WWDC keynote today, and we’ve got a hands-on look at all of the new stuff you can expect to see when it comes out later this year.
TeleRead Take: Not a lot here to get excited about, except for multi-tasking on iPads which support it. I might have to finally upgrade my iPad 4.
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According To The Government, Clearing Your Browser History Is A Felony (Techdirt)
One of the stipulations of Sarbanes-Oxley is the preservation of evidence. Failing to do so, or purposefully destroying records, can result in felony criminal charges. This, unfortunately, doesn’t even have to be willful destruction. The law forbids the destruction of evidence, regardless of personal knowledge of ongoing investigations, or even if no investigation has even commenced.
TeleRead Take: Does anyone really need a take on this? It’s insane is what it is. Every time I get tech support for something related to my computer, clearing history, cache and cookies is the first thing I get asked to do. Good to know I’m being asked to commit a felony.
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Review: HTC One M9 (Android and Me)
Nonetheless, the HTC One M9 is a perfectly capable phone that should satisfy the demands of most people. Don’t mistake it for a bad phone, because it’s a very good phone. It’s just not good enough to put it at the top of our list.
TeleRead Take: In other words, don’t look to it as the savior of HTC’s revenue decline. However, with a good display and snappy processor, it should be a great phone for ereading.
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Root mod brings Apple’s Force Touch gesture to Android (Cult of Android)
Dubbed Force Touch Detector, the mod offers 7 different force gestures, and users can customize each one to perform different actions, such as opening up the app launcher, expanding the notifications pane, or navigation back to previous pages.
TeleRead Take: What will those crazy kids think of next?
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Kindle Daily Deals: The Glory (and others)
Here’s my take on Sarbanes-Oxley, as a working accountant. Sarbanes-Oxley applies to corporations and lays out how they must keep their accounting records and perform audits so as to ensure the public that the financial statements they publish are accurate. It doesn’t have anything to do with individuals clearing their browser histories. If a corporate accountant or executive cleared his browser with the intent of covering up information related to the company’s bookkeeping, he could be culpable.
An analogous situation is public health laws requiring grocers to keep freezers at a certain temperature or below. Nobody is going to prosecute a homeowner on the basis of one of these laws for letting his freezer get too warm.
Is Techdirt in competition with Clickhole now?
Techdirt has always enjoyed being provocative, and every so often I enjoy letting them get away with it.
Thank you for your perspective. As a self-employed person, however, I wonder if it’s potentially more of a concern for me than for other individuals.
If Sarbanes-oxley has nothing to do with a person clearing their web browser history then why does The Nation (techdirt’s source) say that the taxi driver was charged under it?
http://m.thenation.com/article/208593-you-can-be-prosecuted-clearing-your-browser-history
“Federal prosecutors charged Matanov for destroying records under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a law enacted by Congress in the wake of the Enron scandal. The law was, in part, intended to prohibit corporations under federal investigation from shredding incriminating documents. But since Sarbanes-Oxley was passed in 2002 federal prosecutors have applied the law to a wider range of activities.”
I agree that the prosecution is ridiculous but Techdirt was factually correct.
It’s still clickbait. There are certain circumstances when clearing your browser could be a felony, but a headline that says, “According to the government, clearing your browser is a felony” is clickbait. I can name some more items that, under certain circumstances are a felony – driving your car, withdrawing over $10,000 from your checking account, picking your child up from school. If Techdirt wants to make a headline like “According to the government, clearing your browser to cover up unlawful activity may be a felony”, I could go along with that, but then they might not get so many clicks. But all this is just opinion, and I hope a qualified attorney will stop in and let us know – can we clear our browsers without committing a felony? My guess, for the vast majority of us who are not engaged in a criminal conspiracy – the answer is yes.
When I worked for a tech company that sold to the Federal Government, we had to write programming code that was SO compliant. In a nutshell, you had to be able to document approvals and modifications to all code. So nothing would be lost. At the time there were no specifications about browser history, and the company hired a full time SO compliance officer – who ruled over more than just computer code.
Companies that don’t do direct business with the Federal Government aren’t required to follow SO.
Regarding Sarbanes-Oxley as applied to web browser history, why stop there? Should we also be saving every email message we receive or send? Then, what about “private browsing” (aka “porn mode”)? Using this option, no web history is created. That has to be a violation, no? Finally, our computers are constantly writing out logs of this, that and the other thing. Records that most of us are totally unaware of.
Those same computers are also routinely and automatically deleting these records and probably placing us at risk for prosecution. We need to stop all this — and get really high capacity storage devices.
Isn’t reductio ad absurdum a lot of fun?