Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

EFF Urges California to Place Meaningful Restrictions on the Use of Pretrial Risk Assessment Tools EFF has filed comments on two proposed rules in California regarding the use of pretrial risk assessment tools in courts, urging the Judicial Council to place meaningful restrictions on the use of pretrial risk assessment tools in the state. The California Judicial Council issued the draft rules in accordance with the state’s new  bail reform law, S.B. 10 , which replaces cash bail with algorithmic pretrial risk assessments. Under the law, each county in California must use some form of pretrial risk assessment to categorize every person arrested as a “low,” “medium,” or “high” risk of failing to appear for court, or committing another crime that poses a risk to public safety in the period before trial. The Judicial Council rules are supposed to guide how courts use pretrial risk assessment information and make detention decisions for individuals assessed as “medium” risk. Bu...

Transparency Win: Federal Circuit Makes Briefs Immediately Available to the Public In a modest victory for public access, the Federal Circuit has changed its policies to allow the public to immediately access briefs. Previously, the court had marked briefs as “tendered” and withheld them from the public pending review by the Clerk’s Office. That process sometimes took a number of days. EFF wrote a letter [ PDF ] asking the court to make briefs available as soon as they are filed. The court has now changed its policies to allow immediate access. Earlier this month, the Federal Circuit announced a new compliance review policy. While that new policy [ PDF ] doesn’t specifically mention the practice of withholding briefs as “tendered,” we have confirmed with the Clerk’s Office that briefs are now available on PACER as soon as they are filed. Our review of recent dockets also suggests that briefs are now available to the public right away.  While this is perhaps a small change, w...

Defending Users: Initial Ideas for Cryptocurrency Exchanges, Payment Processors, and Other Choke Points Within the Blockchain Ecosystem The blockchain ecosystem has drastically changed over the last nine years, and the realities of today don’t closely resemble how many early enthusiasts imagined Bitcoin would evolve. People are no longer mining Bitcoin on their home laptops, and most people aren’t storing private keys on their own hard drives and then sending Bitcoin directly to friends and merchants. Instead, we’ve seen the rise of companies building software that handles these and other tasks on behalf of users. At the same time, creators are developing dozens of new tools to interact with the Bitcoin blockchain and many alternative blockchains. This in turn has inspired a wide array of new companies that mine, store, and exchange these alternative coins. The result? Many users in the cryptocurrency space have traded banks and credit card networks for cryptocurrency exchanges, w...