This Week In Techdirt History: July 31st – August 6th
Five Years Ago
This week in 2017, Russia banned VPNs, Australian prosecutors were seeking to make it illegal to refuse to turn passwords over to law enforcement, the UK Home Secretary wanted companies to stop offering encryption altogether, and another US federal court said cops can get historic cell site location info without a warrant. There was some strange drama going on at Snopes, Twitter suspended Popehat (and then reversed course), and the guy who accidentally stopped the WannaCry ransomware was detained after Defcon and then hit with a pretty weird indictment. Also, the ACLU weighed in on the John Oliver/Bob Murray lawsuit.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2012, UK politicians didn't seem to mind that current copyright law made every website you load an act of infringement, a French t-shirt company made the unwise move of trying to trademark the Anonymous logo, and the US was ignoring a New Zealand court order to return the data it seized from Megaupload. The Senate rejected the latest Cybersecurity Act, and we looked at how the stats used to push for it were as bogus as Hollywood's loss claims. We also took a look at the many reasons not to give the NSA power to spy on you, and were surprised to see YouTube videos being hit with takedown requests straight from Homeland Security.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2007, we examined what might be the real reason the RIAA hated webcasters so much, while the agency was backing down slightly after being countersued in one of its shakedown attempts, and record labels were trying to get the kids they had been calling criminals for years to shill for them on MySpace. A UK teachers union was demanding the shutdown of YouTube and RateMyTeacher, the Senate proposed letting the FCC regulate the internet for the children, and Elton John was calling for a five-year shutdown of... the entire internet. It was also a bad week for e-voting machines as security experts were able to hack into nearly all of them and code reviews were revealing all kinds of vulnerabilities, but as usual election officials were for some reason siding with the e-voting firms.