I'm going to tell you a little bit how we work on features at GitHub. It's simple, but very powerful in my opinion. At GitHub we have a high performance culture.

A thread on teaching live lessons using @MicrosoftTeams Meet Now function where students follow their normal timetable except online - will go into more detail on every point in a blog post later. Have used Teams for live teaching have supported over 100 live lessons since March

1. If you are using the desktop app, check you have the latest version of Teams so that you should have Breakout rooms enabled. Check by clicking your profile picture, then About - I have version 1.3.00.28779. If you have 1.2..., click on check for updates to get the latest

2. Set your entry routine. I get my students to enter with their microphone muted - you can also not allow attendees to unmute by opening the participants list, clicking the ellipsis and selecting that option.

3. Make sure students arrive as attendees - some organisations have this set up to automatically happen that only meeting organizer is the presenter and others are attendees. Can change this in the manage permissions menu to only me if not already set (opens in a web browser).

4. Classroom routine and expectations - first lesson I share my screen and show the students the raise hand function for when they want to ask questions, how to access the chat function and how to react to questions as opposed to typing answers

What are the implications of using hacked data for research?

A short thread inspired by the fact that, before AWs took it down, #Parler was extensively hacked and user data was leaked.

The #Parler dataset seems crazy interesting for doing research, and my first reaction after the breach was to shre it with other #CompSocSci ppl.

However, I started having second thoughts, so what follows is to organize ideas and have it somewhere I can look back to.

2/n

Generally speaking, as far as the ethics of research goes a good advice would be to handle hacked data with caution.

First of all, there's an issue of quality. Data might be altered or incomplete, and the source cannot be considered accountable (assuming src is anonymous).

3/n

Secondly and more importantly, a researcher using the data would probably be violating users’ consent and acting against the data collector's will.

Finally, users’ privacy is at stake, since researchers could see material that users didn’t agree for other people to see.

4/n

Sharing private information without consent might put people at risk of harm.

This is all the more true in cases such as the #ParlerHack, where the leaked information is of particularly sensitive nature, and there’s a high risk of unintended consequences.

5/n

Today WhatsApp wished it's users good morning. Accept the updated terms and conditions or say goodbye. (Thread 1/n) It is effective from Feb 8, 2021.

There are seperate hyperlinks for terms and privacy policies. Both these hyperlinks lead to multiple pages of contracts written in a very jargonised language. A few things I noted :

The information 'we' provide to #WhatsApp include our messages. Also WhatsApp claims that it is end to end encrypted BUT,

BUT if your friend / enemy / boyfriend / family or anyone is offline and your message sent to him cannot be delivered #immediately, it will be saved on #WhatsApp servers for 30 days.

Also: When you forward media msg in #WhatsApp that media is stored temporarily in encrypted form on it's servers to aid in more efficient delivery of additional forwards. Tada! (Consider a thousand times before sending any images; news anchors can officially read your chats.)

I’m going to riff on this for a bit about how this works in the real world.

—-Every Deleted Parler Post, Many With Users' Location Data, Has Been Archived

Law enforcement generally doesn’t use work by hackers i their investigations because 𝒉𝒂𝒄𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒊𝒔 𝒊𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒈𝒂𝒍. And while it’s permissible for law enforcement to use evidence that was illegally obtained by a private citizen, the government doesn’t like to do it.

The first reason for this is because the government doesn’t want to be perceived as encouraging illegal activity. In fact, if the government goes over the line the court might and has in many cases said the private party was acting on behalf of the government.

If the evidence is thrown out then you risk losing the evidence and everything you leaned from that evidence.

The second reason is that LE doesn’t need somebody else to archive the data during an active investigation. Law enforcement does this all day everyday with the company

It’s called a preservation letter and it requires the company to keep all data it has at that moment for the length of time stated in the letter (usually 90 days).