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Five Years AgoThis week in 2011, a terribly-kept secret was confirmed: the government worked with the RIAA/MPAA to negotiate the "six strikes" system. In Denmark, a judge handed down a crazy reward of 84% of the royalties for a song to the owner of a 10-second sample used therein. In Germany, the Pirate Party was building an impressive base of support, and better ideas about copyright were spreading through the government — even as infamous collection society GEMA was demanding licensing fees for songs it didn't own. And one confused columnist was bemoaning the death of the "creative class" because... nobody works at Tower Records anymore.Ten Years AgoIf you thought that was a bit late to still be lamenting the death of Tower Records, you're right: five whole years earlier, the same week in 2006, people were doing the exact same thing (at the time it was two months after the company declared bankruptcy). Meanwhile, one movie executive was insisting that shortening release windows is technically impossible, while Intel and Morgan Freeman were continuing to vaguely promise a movie simultaneously released in theaters and online. But the big news of the week was Google's confirmed purchase of YouTube, which spawned all sorts of speculation about the future, and of course an increased rate of lawsuit threats from media companies negotiating licensing deals with the platform.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2001, a hoax story about the death of Britney Spears spawned conversation about how hard it is to figure out what's true online. And indeed a prime example came that very week: we fell for a story about secret meetings between the RIAA and government officials that turned out to be entirely made up.The hoaxes haven't changed much, but we've upped our scrutiny. As for something that has really changed, get a blast from the past by looking at the 2006 browser statistics: Internet Explorer still dominated with 76% of traffic, and half of people were still surfing at a screen resolution of 800x600.Thirty-Three Years AgoIn the western world, the first analog cellular network that took hold was the Analog Mobile Phone System, which followed networks deployed in Japan and Scandinavia. It was on October 13th, 1983 that AMPS was commercially introduced in the US, kickstarting the cellphone revolution.

In the last episode of the Techdirt Podcast, we discussed the DRM implications of Apple's decision to remove the analog headphone jack from the iPhone -- specifically, the idea that in the future we may see music services that can only be played through specific output devices, such as a headphone-only subscription. We're not quite there yet, but now Amazon is blazing the trail with the first major music subscription offering with a strict one-device limitation:

This has the makings of a movement along the lines of the highly-unofficial "Magistrates Revolt." More efforts are being made more frequently to push federal courts out of their default secrecy mode. The government prefers to do a lot of its work under the cover of judicial darkness, asking for dockets and documents to be sealed in a large percentage of its criminal cases.Just in the last month, we've seen the ACLU petition the court to unseal dockets related to the FBI's takedown of Freedom Hosting using a Tor exploit and Judge Beryl Howell grant FOIA enthusiast Jason Leopold's request to have a large number of 2012 pen register cases unsealed.Now, we have researchers Jennifer Granick and Riana Pfefferkorn petitioning [PDF] the Northern District of California court to unseal documents related to "technical assistance" cases -- like the one involving the DOJ's attempted use of an All Writs Order to force Apple to crack open a phone for it.

Another lawsuit against the NSA has been revived. Previously dismissed by a district court for lack of standing, attorney Elliott Schuchardt's suit against the NSA for its domestic surveillance has been remanded back to the court that tossed it.Like several other surveillance lawsuits, Schuchardt's springs from the Snowden leaks. Unlike some of the others, it doesn't focus on the NSA's phone metadata collection -- the subject of the first Snowden leak. Instead, his challenges the constitutionality of the NSA's Section 702 collection. With this program, the NSA apparently collects not just metadata on electronic communications, but also the content.The Appeals Court found the leaks themselves provide enough evidence to make Schuchardt's allegations plausible -- or at least strong enough to survive the government's motion to dismiss. From the opinion [PDF]:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration earned plaudits from across the tech sphere for its recently released safety guidelines for self-driving cars.

You'd be hard pressed to find companies more bone-grafted to the nation's intelligence gathering apparatus than AT&T and Verizon. So much so that it's often difficult to determine where the government ends, and where the telecom duopoly begins. From Mark Klein highlighting how AT&T was giving the NSA live access to every shred of data that touched the AT&T network, to Snowden's revelation of Verizon's handover of customer metadata, these are companies that were not only eager to tap dance around privacy and surveillance law, but actively mocked companies that actually stood up for consumer privacy.

Two years ago, we wrote about the ridiculousness of police arresting reporters for reporting in Ferguson, Missouri, even though courts had told police to knock it off. Even more ridiculous is that those reporters were eventually charged, leading to a ridiculous settlement earlier this year.

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It's no secret that there's been a huge number of totally fake news websites popping up in the past few years. Apparently, it's a fun and profitable venture. While some of the fake news sites come up with generic names, like National Report, Hot Global, The Valley Report and Associated Media Coverage, some of the most successful fake news sites just make use of the big well-known broadcaster websites... and just get a .co domain: using nbc.com.co or abcnews.com.co. Some of the hoax stories are really well done -- and, yes, even we've been fooled, though in our defense, the fake story we fell for... was so believable it became true just months later. But, of course, we're just a bunch of random bloggers, not a Presidential campaign.

Let's jump right into this, because this post is going to be a bit on the wonky side. It's presidential silly season, as we have said before, and this iteration of it is particularly bad, like a dumpster fire that suddenly has a thousand gallons of gasoline dropped onto it from a crop-duster flown by a blind zombie. Which, of course, makes it quite fascinating to watch for those of us with an independent persuasion. Chiefly interesting for myself is watching how the polls shift and change with each landmark on this sad, sad journey. It makes poll aggregating groups, such as the excellent Project FiveThirtyEight, quite useful in getting a ten-thousand foot view as to how the public is reacting to the news of the day.But sites like that obviously rely on individual polls in order to generate their aggregate outlooks, which makes understanding, at least at a high level, just how these political polls get their results interesting as well. And, if you watch these things like I do, you have probably been curious about one particular poll, the U.S.C. Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll, commonly shortened to the USC/LAT poll, which has consistently put out results on the Presidential race that differ significantly from other major polls. That difference has generally amounted to wider support for Donald Trump in the race, with specific differences in support for Trump among certain demographics. To the credit of those that run the poll, they have been exceptionally transparent about how they generate their numbers, which led the New York Times to dig in and try to figure out the reason for the skewed results. It seems an answer was found and it's gloriously absurd.

For decades Verizon has enjoyed billions in tax breaks and subsidies in exchange for fiber optic upgrades the telco either partially or never actually deploys. Now, for the last half decade or so, the telco has been trying to hang up on these unwanted, un-upgraded DSL customers entirely as it shifts its focus to more profitable (read: usage capped) wireless service. Well, that and buying up old and uninteresting 90s internet brands in a quest to become the next media and advertising juggernaut (note: it's not going all that well).

Oh Charles Harder. You just keep supplying more and more fodder for Techdirt stories. You may remember Harder as the lawyer thrust into the public realm after Peter Thiel allegedly bankrolled him to start a new law firm with a focus on taking on any lawsuit that might help bring down Gawker. Having succeeded in bringing down Gawker through dubious lawsuits, Harder has moved on (well, not entirely) to bigger fish, including Roger Ailes and Melania Trump.

There have been plenty of really bad ideas coming out of France in the digital arena recently, as Techdirt has been reporting. So it makes a pleasant change to be able to write about a new law that has quite a few good ideas. One reason for that might be that the French government used a form of crowdsourcing to help shape what is known as the "Digital Republic Bill":

This opinion -- written by Texas appeals court judge Brian Quinn -- is a breath of fresh air for those of us who have watched as courts have continually deferred to law enforcement officers and their declarations that nearly everything drivers do -- or DON'T do -- is "suspicious."It's also a slap in the face of those same law enforcement officers -- the ones who use their "experience and training" to find nearly any action, or lack thereof, to be supportive of a warrantless search.As Scott Greenfield points out, Judge Quinn does something few judges are willing to do: be honest.

Just last week, we discussed Donald Trump's ridiculous and almost instinctual reaction to threaten to sue the media any time they write something about him that he dislikes. That's not how defamation law works, and Trump should know since he's sued for defamation a few times in the past, and lost. Of course, Trump has also flat out admitted that he sometimes sues for defamation just to cost opponents money, which is the classic definition of a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) lawsuit.

In a rather quick turnaround, the EFF has had its brief [PDF] it filed under seal in September unsealed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The brief challenges the FBI's use of gag orders with its National Security Letters -- the administrative subpoenas the FBI issues to recipients without having to run them by a judge.Unfortunately, the brief has been heavily redacted and both the appellee and appellant remain undisclosed. The filing challenges NSL gag orders, claiming them to be unconstitutional infringements on the First Amendment. The EFF is arguing on behalf of its redacted clients, both "electronic communications providers."Beyond preventing the providers from informing the FBI's targets that their communications/data are being turned over to the government, the EFF points out that the gag orders have been stopping them from discussing these limitations with Congress -- even to the point of correcting bad information given to legislators by the FBI itself.

The New York Times editorial board speculates on where we're going from here following President Obama's not-doing-much-until-forced-to approach to surveillance and surveillance reform. Two candidates -- neither of them improvements -- are roughly a month away from one of them taking the nation's top office. As the Times' board points out, there's not much in it for anyone hoping the incoming White House will push forward with more reform efforts or better oversight.

With wireless and fixed-line broadband growth slowing, Verizon has been steadily expanding into new growth territories to try and please insatiable investors. So far, that apparently includes buying failed 90s internet brands like Yahoo and AOL in the belief that it can somehow become a Millennial advertising juggernaut. Except that hasn't been going particularly well, as the stodgy old telco realizes that it's kind of hard to innovate when you've spent the last thirty years bumbling about as a government-pampered telecom monopoly almost solely focused on turf protection.

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So, last year, we wrote about the ridiculous situation in which the heirs of Abbott and Costello had sued for copyright infringement over a broadway play, Hand to God. In that play, which is a dark drama, and not a comedy, about a puppeteer, there's a scene in which the puppeteer performs a bit of the famous "Who's On First?" routine with puppets. The district court wasted little time in dumping the lawsuit. As we detailed in our first post, the copyright issues here were already somewhat complex for a variety of reasons. The short version is that (1) lots of comedy teams performed the same basic act before Abbott & Costello, and (2) the "copyright" is not actually for the whole routine, but rather two separate performances in two separate movies, where Abbott & Costello did (different) versions of the act. It is true that Universal Pictures transferred whatever copyright interest it might have in those two scenes to the heirs of Abbott & Costello in 1984, but it was never clear what copyright they could actually claim in those particular scenes & whether or not it had been properly registered and renewed.

The US Chamber of Commerce is somewhat infamous for its dishonest and misleading claims about copyright, which are often so ridiculous as to be laughable. But, even then, I wasn't expected the following:

Guess who's bringing back "broken windows" policing!

We've noted several times how launching cyberwar (or real war) on Russia over the recent spike in hack attacks is a notably idiotic idea. One, the United States effectively wrote the book on hacking other countries causing all manner of harm (hello, Stuxnet), making the narrative that we're somehow defending our honor from shady international operatives foundationally incorrect. And two, any hacker worth his or her salt either doesn't leave footprints advertising their presence, or may conduct false flag operations raising the risk of attacking the wrong party.

Techdirt has been writing about the apparently unstoppable introduction of the Aadhaar identity card system in India for some time. Judging by this article on Global Voices, it seems that India's eastern neighbor, Bangladesh, has not noticed the serious problems that are emerging with the idea:

A couple of months ago, a study was released claiming to show a link between body camera use and a rise in shootings by officers. The small increase in shootings in 2015 -- an increase that wasn't shown in 2013 and 2014 -- could be nothing more than a normal deviation, but it was portrayed by the authors as something a bit more sinister.

A court order demanding the retention of digital evidence morphed into the worst-case scenario for a defendant in a Canadian "breach of confidence" lawsuit. Even though the defendant's actions were ultimately deemed lawful, the intended effect of the questioned action was undone by the judicial discussion of them.Melissa Caldwell of CyberLex has more details on the events leading up to this unfortunate conclusion:

We had just discussed the NFL's strange edict to its member teams to significantly scale back the amount of video content they were sharing from NFL games, particularly during lead-ups to kickoff. As the news came out alongside some fairly significant reports of ratings drops for the NFL, many, including this writer, assumed that the NFL thought that such video content was a factor in the viewership decline. The NFL, meanwhile, denied this, instead claiming that the ratings drops had more to do with the election season, noting how many people were busily watching Presidential debates, with many of us watching whatever car-wreck zombie-apocalypse our political discourse has devolved into.Whether that's true or not, it certainly seems as though the NFL itself does not think of video content and social media as some kind of enemy to ratings after all. Over this past weekend, immediately after its edict to its teams went out, the NFL was pushing even more video content out via social media than it had in the past.

Yesterday we wrote about the bizarre story of Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald completely overselling his story about Trump repeating some misinformation that was printed by a Russian news site. I won't replay the whole thing, but the short version: WikiLeaks released a cache of Clinton campaign boss John Podesta's emails. In them was an email from Clinton friend Sidney Blumenthal, with a link and text of an Eichenwald piece. Some people -- first on Twitter, apparently, and then in an article on the Russian site Sputnik News -- misrepresented the email in two ways. First, they took a single sentence of the long article out of context and second, they attributed that one sentence to Blumenthal instead of Eichenwald. Then, Donald Trump, at a rally, repeated the false claim that Blumenthal had said this. Again, there is a story here: Trump is willing to repeat false information from sketchy sources (whether Twitter or a Russian news organization). That's interesting (though, perhaps not a new revelation).

Back in 2013, a young Shawn Musgrave filed a FOIA request with the State Department for its cables regarding former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. To his surprise, he was given an estimated completion date (ECD) of December 2015 -- a full 18 months of processing time.Curious about where the agency got that oddly specific number from -- and with plenty of time on his hands -- Shawn filed a follow-up request for any documentation outlining State's methodology for estimating FOIA completion dates. This is on August 5th, 2013, and he gets an acknowledgement back August 8th, just three days later.Don't get used to that kind of timeliness.Two months later, he's given his first ECD for this request -- December 2013.Only a few months of processing, perfectly reasonable for operational manuals that FOIA officers should have easily accessible.Except apparently not, because come December, he's given a new ECD -- May 2014.Well, okay, we should cut them some slack -- as they said, there are extenuating factors, and if they feel they need another five months, that shouldn't be too big of a deal, so long as they-Oh, you've got to be kidding.December 2014. A full year since the initial filing. Alright, not great, but how much longer could it take, really?Oh, come on! Now you're just being ridiculous, State -- the original ECD for the Thatcher docs was February 2015. How could this be a month harder to process than that? Why not just go ahead and take the rest of the year if you're feeling swamped.Wait, no, it was a joke, don't-Nooooooo. Why are you doing this? Are you just messing with us?You are just messing us, aren't you!Come on, that's not even a date!Alright, that's better.Wait, no it's not, that's actually much worse -- how could you possibly need until June? You finally released the Thatcher docs that started this whole mess in May!... Are we dead? Is this Hell?NooooooooooooooIt's October 2016. Shawn Musgrave is a sadder and a wiser man. And we are still waiting for the State Department to tell us how long it takes to process its FOIA requests.Maybe we'll wait forever. Maybe we've always been waiting.Or maybe the State Department can hire some new FOIA officers already. Jeez.Republished from Muckrock

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Back in June, rumors floated that Gawker was exploring a lawsuit against Peter Thiel for "tortious interference and racketeering" for his decision to fund a series of lawsuits (mostly bogus) against Gawker with the clear aim of destroying the company. Despite the fact that we think this was a really bad thing for Thiel to do, and dangerous for a functioning free press, we felt that suing back would be equally problematic.

Last year the Indian government forged new net neutrality rules that shut down Facebook's "Free Basics" service, which provided a Facebook-curated "light" version of the internet -- for free. And while Facebook consistently claimed its program was simply altruistic, critics (including Facebook content partners) consistently claimed that Facebook's concept gave the company too much power, potentially harmed free speech, undermined the open nature of the Internet, and provided a new, centralized repository of user data for hackers, governments and intelligence agencies.

When you're among the worst ranked companies for customer service in America, you consistently need to find new ways to ramp up your game if you want to take malicious incompetence to the next level. Enter Comcast, which despite constant promises that it's getting better, routinely keeps finding itself in the headlines for immeasurably shady business practices. Earlier this year, for example, the company was sued by Washington's Attorney General for charging users a $5 per month "Service Protection Plan," then routinely and intentionally charging users for repairs that should have been covered under it.

Techdirt has written a number of stories about how Big Pharma is never content with the patent bargain -- that, in return for a time-limited, government-enforced intellectual monopoly, products will afterwards enter the public domain. Instead, companies have come up with various schemes to extend the life of that monopoly -- and thus to cheat the public of the low-cost generic versions of the drug in question that should have appeared. The Daily Beast points to an antitrust lawsuit brought by 35 states and the District of Columbia against the makers of Suboxone, a prescription drug used to treat opioid addiction, over the alleged use of one such scheme, known as "product hopping". That's where:

I will occasionally have someone suggest to me that we don't cover enough good or positive news about intellectual property disputes here at Techdirt, and I know our other writers occasionally hear that as well. I think it's probably not as true as those folks think it is, but certainly we talk about the problems in the IP realm more than when courts and businesses get it right. Still, it's a good idea to highlight that the entire collective world isn't insane on these kinds of issues.Which brings us to a trademark dispute in New Zealand, brought by credit card company MasterCard against a sporting event. And the dispute itself is certainly laughable.

It's been a time of remarkable progress of late when it comes to professional sports organizations being smart about how to pursue viewers in this here digital era. Major athletic institutions are finally opening up the door to wider streaming options, putting aside the doomsayers. Add to that that other leagues are starting to realize what a boon Major League Baseball's Advanced Media product has been to viewership and attendance and it seemed like we were on the precipice of a golden age in digital sports media.Leave it to the NFL to ensure that we take at least one step backwards. What once seemed like a never ending funnel of money and upward trending viewership, the NFL has undergone something of a ratings correction as of late. It seems that amidst the controversy over head injury, bad officiating, the contraction of one-day fantasy football, and what some think is a generally declining quality of the on-field product, less people are watching games, both in person and on television. This had to happen at some point, if for no other reason than because NFL ratings over the past 2 decades were completely boffo. But the NFL's choice to combat this inevitable decline takes a page from the days we finally just got over.

Yup, we're doing it — we're tackling the much-derided controversy over Apple's decision to remove the analog headphone jack from the iPhone! I join this week's episode myself as a guest host, and in truth none of us really think it's any kind of "apocalypse" — but none of us are huge fans of the move either. We discuss the questionable technical advantages, the looming spectre of DRM, and more.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Yeah, so I get that it's political silly season, and people like to throw around all kinds of arguments of "bias" -- especially towards the media. I've been on the receiving end of those accusations, but for the most part, I think claims of media bias are silly and over-hyped. What's true, though, is that it's all too easy to be sloppy in reporting and to try to hype up a nothing story into a something story. Here's a story where no one comes out of it looking very good and the end result is a complete mess. It starts with Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald. Last night I saw a marginally interesting story by Eichenwald about how a Russian government connected news website, Sputnik, misread an email leaked via Wikileaks from Hillary Clinton pal Sidney Blumenthal to campaign chief John Podesta. The email contained a link and full text to a much earlier Eichnwald story about Benghazi and Clinton. The Sputnik story incorrectly stated that the text in the email was by Blumenthal, and not by Eichenwald. It took one sentence out of this longer article, and falsely claimed that Blumenthal was admitting that the mess in Benghazi was "preventable." As Eichenwald notes, this is wrong:

It's no secret that cab companies and many cab drivers don't much like Uber and Lyft. Competition is tough. And cabs in most cities have survived thanks to artificial limits on competition through medallions and the like. This has always been a stupid, and frequently corrupt, system. For years, before Uber and Lyft came along, people talked about the ridiculousness of artificially limiting competition in this manner, but it was only once those companies came along that the true ridiculousness was made clear. While some forward looking cabbies have embraced these and similar systems, others have been fighting the new reality, often in fairly ridiculous ways. In Milwaukee and Chicago, cab companies sued those cities, arguing that allowing this type of competition amounted to a Fifth Amendment violation, in the form of "taking private property for public use without just compensation." What private property, you might ask? Well, according to the cab companies, the artificially restricted competition is their property. No, really.

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Remember how the billionaire funder of Facebook and Palantir, Peter Thiel, insisted that he was bankrupting Gawker to protect your privacy? Well, the lawyer, Charles Harder, that Thiel set up with a monthly retainer, specifically to focus on lawsuits that could kill Gawker dead, has become something of a "celebrity" in the "let's stomp out free speech" circle of celebrities. Last month, the Hollywood Reporter did a big profile on Harder and his newfound fame (and rapidly growing client list of famous people upset about press coverage). In some "bonus cuts," reporter Eriq Gardner noted on Twitter that Harder told him he no longer "monitors" what's left of Gawker (now called Gizmodo Media, and owned by Univision).

Paul Alan Levy has gone digging and possibly found one of the entities tied to the bogus defamation suits being used to delist negative reviews. Working with Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy (where this article is cross-posted), Levy has discovered even more lawsuits being filed against nonexistent defendants to expedite the removal of content from the web.

So just this past Thursday, we wrote about Trump's habit of threatening to sue the press over any coverage he considers negative. In the past, we've also covered his stated plans to open up libel laws. The comments on that post got pretty ridiculous after people who can't possibly be regular Techdirt readers complained that I was clearly just stirring up shit because I'm a Hillary Clinton supporter. This despite the fact that pretty much everything we've ever written about her has been critical too -- including her own ridiculous comments mocking free speech and praising censorship. It also ignores that just a few days earlier I had also sided with the Trump campaign when it received a bogus, censorious, cease & desist letter from the city of Phoenix. We're staying pretty consistent here: we don't support censorship, no matter whose team you're on. But, sure, I know. It's crunch time and people are really concerned about supporting their team, rather than actually discussing issues.

The reanimated CISA, redubbed The Cybersecurity Act (a.k.a., OmniCISA) and hurried through the legislative process by stapling its 2000 pages to the back of a "must-pass" budget bill, is still in the processes of implementation. Not much is known about what the law is intended to do on the granular level, other than open up private companies to government surveillance so the USA can beat back "the cyber."Surveillance aficionados were quick to lean on private companies to start sharing information, but the government needs to be taught new tricks as well. There's plenty of info siloing at the federal level, which keeps the DHS, FBI, and others involved in the cyberwar from effectively communicating, much less sharing anything interesting they might have had forwarded to them by the private sector.The federal government has been less than successful in securing its own information -- something CISA was also supposed to fix. The DHS's Inspector General has performed a follow-up investigation on the department's implementation of CISA's requirements. For the most part, things seem to be moving forward, albeit in a vague, undefined direction.The OIG notes that the DHS has put together policies and procedures and, amazingly, actually implemented some of them. Better still, it has moved many critical account holders to multi-factor authorization. Unfortunately, the DHS still has a number of standalone systems that can't handle multi-factor authorization, which will make them more vulnerable to being breached.That's pretty much the end of the good news. There are still holes in the DHS's data systems at a very critical juncture. From the report [PDF]:

This week, our top spot on the insightful side goes to frequent winner That One Guy for a thorough response to the bizarre pimping charges against Backpage executives:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2011, the Supreme Court let stand an important ruling that downloads are not public performances. Of course, some media rushed to interpret this as saying that unauthorized music downloads are legal, but this was not at all the case. Meanwhile, a former anti-piracy investigator was admitting how he fed the police cases and inflated piracy statistics, and over in Australia, the band Men At Work shockingly lost its appeal over use of a brief riff from a folk song that went unnoticed for decades.Also this week in 2011, the world said hello to Siri — and, sadly, goodbye to Steve Jobs.Ten Years AgoSpeaking of inflated piracy statistics, this week in 2006 we watched how they become accepted facts as an utterly bogus industry report started being parroted by news organizations. At least one Swedish court was demanding actual evidence from the recording industry. Yahoo, Amazon and Apple were all dragged into a copyright lawsuit over sampling in a Run DMC song, too.The HP spying scandal's latest development was felony charges against former chairwoman Patricia Dunn, and a new and still extremely dubious rumor started spreading that would eventually come to pass: there were whispers of Google buying YouTube.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2001, the notion of broadband connections in the home was still struggling to take sustainable hold, and the notion of internet access in airplanes was put on hold for a while. Meanwhile, the notion of a 3D web refused to die. Thanks to the epidemic of pop-ups, the internet got its first taste of rudimentary ad blockers, but they didn't work great and websites were already starting to fight back. And the recording industry was continuing its campaign against file sharing services by sweeping up with a new lawsuit against Music City and Kazaa.Thirty-One Years AgoRichard Stallman's Free Software Foundation, creator of the GNU, has been one of the driving forces and defining voices in the entire open source movement — and it was founded on October 4th, 1985.

It's been quite a crazy Friday, and in the midst of it all, the US government finally came out with an official accusation that Russia is behind various hack attacks concerning the US election:

The story behind Yahoo's apparently scanning over every email for the NSA continues to be... confusing. Earlier this week we noted some conflicting reports in the media on what was actually happening. The NY Times report said that it was via a FISA Court Order, which would be interesting, and would almost certainly require a declassification of the FISA opinion. However, Reuters insisted that it was actually under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (which doesn't involve a FISA Court Order). So, confusion abounded.

So, one of the things in the USA Freedom Act is a provision requiring that the White House declassify any "novel interpretations" of the law in ordering surveillance. This was to avoid the situations, such as under the Section 215 program, where the intelligence community reads words to mean things differently than anyone else would read them. Now, given what we've learned so far about the Yahoo email scanning case and the fact that it clearly goes beyond what people thought the law enabled, it seems clear that there's some interpretation somewhere that's "novel."