Short Reads
While it was only the final, fatal traffic stops of black drivers Sandra Bland and Philando Castille that made headlines, both drivers had long suffered in America’s racist system of traffic policing. Both had been frequently stopped and harassed by police for minor violations, issued tickets, and then overwhelmed by traffic fine debt and license suspensions.
For years, Urban Dictionary has been thought of as nothing more than a fun, if not crude, website frequented by middle schoolers looking for colorful new ways to insult their friends or refer to NSFW topics. But it is 2022. We are living in a time when the ridiculous has become credible. Where the joke is reality. Internet culture is mainstream culture. And in these modern, changing times, Urban Dictionary has been pulled out of middle school and dropped into the American Court system. Judges across the nation are turning to Urban Dictionary for the definitions of slang terms that appear in litigation.
However, unknown to the travelers, there are two individuals not trying to catch a train, but rather trying to smuggle a 3D-printed firearm through security. They are two reporters from The Mail on Sunday, and in an effort to bring awareness to the dangers of 3D-printed firearms, they downloaded the Liberator blueprints online, bought a 3D-printer, printed the 16-part pistol, purchased a common nail you would find at a hardware store to act as the firing pin, and successfully smuggled the pistol parts onto a crowded Eurostar heading to Paris.
The global pandemic has both increased the demand for contactless biometric technologies and pushed for innovation in this industry. This increase in demand and innovation of biometric technology has amplified the inherent data privacy concerns in the technology, making the need for a national biometric law evident.
In today’s digital age, we can’t live without technology. Printed paper is dying because everything we do is online. Our online presence is a digital copy of who we are. Electronic data that we put online, however, is not just for us to see and use, and it would be naïve of us to believe that anything we put online is entirely private and only viewed by us. So, who else is getting access to the digital copy of ourselves?
