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The American Petroleum Institute (API), a group that represents the oil industry, apparently releases a fee-based report on oil prices, which is released to paying subscribers a week before the US government releases "official" data. For obvious reasons, this information is fairly valuable to traders, who are more than willing to pay the monthly fee to get early access to some crucial information on the price of oil. Apparently, last week, some people then took that data, and tweeted about it... leading API to issue DMCA takedown notices, which Twitter promptly complied with.

Any time anyone routes around Hollywood's windowed food chain -- theatrical release, delay, video release, delay, VOD, longer delay, pay TV, even longer delay (or never), on-demand streaming -- studios and theaters get bent out of shape. This terrible system makes major studios and theaters happiest (and their own worst enemies), even though it's apparent a large percentage of the public would rather enjoy films on their own terms.

One of the points that seems to be widely misunderstood by people who don't spend much time in computer security worlds, is that building secure encryption systems is really hard and almost everything has some sort of vulnerability somewhere. This is why it's a constant struggle by security researchers, cryptographers and security engineers to continually poke holes in encryption, and try to fix up and patch systems. It's also why the demand for backdoors is idiotic, because they probably already exist in some format. But purposely building in certain kinds of backdoors that can't be closed by law almost certainly blasts open much larger holes for those with nefarious intent to get in.

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Support our crowdfunding campaign to help us keep covering stories like these! Over the weekend, the NY Times ran a big article providing a bunch of details about the Paris attacks from last year, now that the lone surviving member of those attacks has been captured in Belgium. The article is mostly based on a 55-page report put together by French antiterrorism police and given to France's Interior Minister. Someone apparently gave the report to the NY Times as well. And it does includes some interesting background info, including some previously unknown attack details. It also includes a bit about how the attacks were planned and carried out, with the most salient detail being that it's pretty clear that the team used burner phones (i.e., phones purchased just for this purpose, for a very short time, and not easily traced back to individuals):

When we last we checked in with Naruto the monkey, he was suffering a humiliating loss in a California courtroom. It was enough that it probably wiped this smile right off Naruto's face: Aw, who are we kidding? The monkey has no clue about any of this. It's a monkey! The case is really about a giant publicity stunt by PETA, which is pretending to represent the monkey and claiming that a monkey taking a selfie can get a copyright. Incredibly, PETA hired a big time, previously well-respected law firm by the name of Irell & Manella, which argued with apparently straight faces that someone must own the copyright, and thus the monkey (and PETA) were the most obvious choice. But, that's something anyone with even the most marginal knowledge of copyright should know is not true, because we have something called the public domain. No one needs to hold the copyright because there might not be a copyright (and in this case, there is none).

Well, this isn't necessarily a huge surprise, but Friday afternoon a Florida jury sided with Hulk Hogan in his lawsuit against Gawker, awarding him a fairly astounding $115 million (he had asked for $100 million) for posting a short clip of a Hogan sex tape along with an article about it. We hadn't written about this case recently, as it was getting tons of press coverage elsewhere -- but when we discussed it three years ago, when a Florida court first issued an injunction against Gawker, we noted the serious First Amendment issues here. Hogan (real name: Terry Bollea) had originally sued in federal court where it was more or less laughed out of court, mostly on First Amendment grounds. However, he was able to try again in state court, where it's astounding that it even went to trial in the first place.

The unintended but entirely predictable consequences from the UK's disastrous Counter-Terrorism and Security Act keep on a-coming. You will recall that this handy piece of legislation tasked teachers with weeding out possible future-terrorists amongst the young folks they are supposed to be teaching. This has devolved instead into teachers reporting children, usually children that would be peripherally identified as Muslim children, to the authorities for what aren't so much as transgressions as they are kids being kids. It has even turned some teachers into literal grammar police, because the universe is not without a sense of humor.

We've got a double-first-place winner this week, in the form of a comment from Loki that snagged the top spot on both the insightful and funny sides. It came in response to Paramount's detail-laden complaint against a Star Trek fan film:

Five Years Ago The ongoing fight between the FBI and Apple serves to highlight the importance of past disputes between the government and technology companies. This week in 2011, we saw a concerning decision by a judge to allow the feds to access Twitter account data on Wikileaks' associates, and noted that it raised some pretty big questions. And, of course, there was also still the ongoing issue of Homeland Security's domain name seizures where Rep. Zoe Lofgren was fighting the good fight. Relatedly, the acting Register of Copyrights was strategizing about how to "starve" piracy sites, while the IP Czar was making some terrible enforcement recommendations, and the recently-minted MPAA boss, former Senator Chris Dodd, was playing the ol' "infringement is theft" card. The lawns were also well-defended from kids this week in 2011, with Bon Jovi claiming Steve Jobs killed music and Bob Woodward claiming Google killed newspapers. Ten Years Ago This week in 2006, it was Google embroiled in disputes with the feds. While one judge was considering forcing Google to cough up some user info for the feds in what might have been a show-trial covering a settlement, another was ordering the company to comply with a subpoena for a user's complete Gmail records. At least when pitted against someone other than the federal government they fared better, with yet another judge tossing out a lawsuit that blamed Google for Usenet postings. In 2006, the head of the MPAA was Dan Glickman, and he was busy blaming piracy for the troubles of movie theatres, though that effort would be better spent coming up with more substantive promotional tactics. A handful of people were starting to realize the dangers of DRM, and discovering new ones like its toll on battery life. We also got the first whiff of Amazon's AWS platform. Fifteen Years Ago The turmoil in Silicon Valley hadn't changed much this week in 2001. Everyone was still a self-styled augur predicting contradictory futures for the internet, building hype around everything from online dating to the internet-driven death of democracy, then blaming each other for creating too much hype. Some were calling for a better revolution than we'd gotten, while others were pointing out that the true change was incremental and evolutionary. At least there were plenty of interesting layoff stories, including one with a turnaround of less than 24 hours. 85 Years Ago Today everyone knows that India's Bollywood is a global film powerhouse that shares inspiration with Hollywood in both directions — but that cultural conversation extends a lot further back than many people realize. On March 14th, 1931, India's first "talkie" — Alam Ara — was released and became a massive hit. Especially interesting is that the film was inspired by Show Boat, a 1929 Hollywood film that was part-silent, part-talkie (and included a fully-silent version) for a time when not all cinemas were properly equipped for talkies. Then, five years after Alam Ara in 1936, Hollywood released a newly shot all-talkie version of Show Boat. The 1936 Show Boat survives. The 1929 version was thought to be lost, but most of it has since been found and released. Alam Ara, sadly, has had no known surviving copies since the 1960s.

There's no escaping it: our wireless age still requires plenty of wires. Cables for your devices are a dime a dozen these days, but that doesn't mean there isn't occasionally an interesting innovation or an awesome new offering — and that's what we're featuring this week. Connex The picture kind of says it all, doesn't it? The Connex is a clever, convenient idea that appeals to all of us with a drawer full of semi-tangled charging cables of varying lengths, qualities and conditions (so, all of us, right?) It's an ultra-flexible silicon charging cable which, in its folded state, is about the size of a credit card, but which stretches out into an 18" cable then snaps right back when you're done. It's available in both Lightning and Micro USB connectors, and as a fun little bonus it's designed to be easily decorated with pens and markers — dress it up with an image in its flat form, and watch it become a twisty artistic mess when extended. IronWire Though the Connex is designed to be strong and durable despite all the stretching and bending, it's still unlikely to outlast an IronWire — a braided metal charging cable that can famously tow a car. This was demonstrated when the original full-length IronWire was launched last year, and now the team is bringing a new small, ultra-portable version to Kickstarter, with a variety of connection options: USB to Lightning, USB-C to Lightning, USB-C to USB, and USB to MicroUSB. The price of £10 feels a tad steep, but for a cable that can take such a beating that it's likely to last forever it's not a big deal. The Sticker Project This one isn't a cable, but a cable accessory. In truth, it's more focused on traditional power cords than mobile device chargers: it's a solution for that age-old problem of too many plugs. Most of us have come to terms with there being an unnavigable tangle in between our desks and the wall, but it'd be nice if (at least) the plugs on the far end of that tangle were identifiable. That's what The Sticker Project aims to provide: a nice and simple pre-fab solution for labelling all your plugs, with just enough design flair to make them more appealing than scraps of masking tape.

Last month, Techdirt wrote about the growing interest in Sci-Hub, which provides free access to research papers -- more than 47,000,000 of them at the time of writing. As Mike noted then, Elsevier's attempt to make the site go away by suing it has inevitably produced a classic Streisand Effect, whereby many more people know about it as a direct result. That was first pointed out by Mike Taylor in a short post, where he listed a few titles that had written about Sci-Hub. This week, David Rosenthal has produced a kind of update, listing many more posts on the subject that have appeared in the last month alone. Rosenthal's list includes an article entitled "Should All Research Papers Be Free?" that was published in Sunday's edition of The New York Times. It's probably the most significant contribution to spreading the word about Sci-Hub more widely, but it doesn't really add much to the debate. By contrast, another post mentioned by Rosenthal, found on the Inside Higher Ed's site, and written by the college librarian Barbara Fister, may lack the impact of The New York Times news analysis, but does make some genuinely novel observations about what is going on here. Fister notes that alongside people who don't have access to the articles they need because they are not affiliated with a well-funded Western library with the right subscriptions, many researchers turn to Sci-Hub because accessing articles has become a complicated and inconvenient process. As she says:

We've written a few times in the past year about the latest UK efforts to enact its "Snooper's Charter" law, officially the Investigatory Powers Bill, which would give the government much greater surveillance capabilities. Right after last year's election, Prime Minister David Cameron and Home Office Secretary Theresa May made it clear that they were going to go full Orwell, and do whatever possible to grant themselves greater powers to spy on everyone. As more concerns were raised, we noted that the government pretended to back down, while still including all the bad stuff people predicted.

It's not easy to be an environmentalist. If you look into anything deeply enough, you'll find complications that make it tough to paint in black and white without shades of gray. What disruptions of an ecosystem are good or bad? If you think that any disruption is bad, well, too late -- people (and nature itself) have been mucking around with local ecosystems since life began. Biology is just a messy field. Invasive species are generally painted as harmful, but it's not always the case.

The mutual adoration society that is long-running reality show "COPS" has just landed one of its protagonists in the middle of an evidence suppression order. Evidently forgetting his star turn in an episode of the show, Officer Miguel Hernandez of the Fort Myers (FL) Police Department performed an illegal search of a man walking down the street and concocted a story to cover up his actions. (h/t FourthAmendment.com)

It's often claimed that patent and trademark litigation is chiefly employed as a measure to simply lock out otherwise fair competition. That said, the folks making those claims typically like to hide that truth from the general public. The founder of Global Archery, John Jackson, on the other hand, appears perfectly willing to come out and describe his motivation for filing a patent and trademark infringement suit against a LARPing hobbyist that sells some non-lethal foam arrows on the side.

From Zack Whittaker at ZDNet comes the alarming revelation that it's not just Apple looking at possibly having to turn over its source code and/or encryption keys to the government, much like what happened to Lavabit. Many other companies have done this previously as the result of orders granted by the nation's most opaque, non-adversarial court.

I got very excited yesterday when I saw a court system alert that there was a new decision out in the appeal of Lenz v. Universal. This was the Dancing Baby case where a toddler rocking out to a Prince song was seen as such an affront to Prince's exclusive rights in his songs that his agent Universal Music felt it necessary to send a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube to have the video removed. Heaven forbid people share videos of their babies dancing to unlicensed music.

Just to be clear on a few things before I get into the meat of this post. (1) I tend to be a supporter of Wikileaks and its goals to help whistleblowers reveal important information, (2) I'm flabbergasted that Hillary Clinton would use a private server for her emails, (3) I think YouTube made a big mistake in blocking the ridiculous Innocence of Muslims video in various countries, and (4) I'm very concerned about public officials meddling in the affairs of companies in telling them to block certain content.

Chelsea Manning has obtained her "Insider Threat" report from the US government through a FOIA request. It's published in full at The Guardian and it provides additional insight into this administration's war on whistleblowers. Set up in the wake of Manning's Wikileaks document dump, the "Insider Threat" program seeks to weed out future Mannings and Snowdens -- both of whom turned over documents to journalists and activists, rather than the nation's enemies. Manning, in an accompanying editorial, calls it a "blank check for surveillance." And it is.

Have fun learning about electronics and engineering at any age with the $239 Piper Raspberry Pi Computer Kit. You'll learn how to build a self-contained computer running on a Raspberry Pi 2 Project Board. Piper has partnered with Minecraft to create levels and challenges that require adding additional hardware to the basic setup like lights, motion sensors, buzzers and more. The kit includes everything you need to get started having fun while learning some cool new skills.

Why settle for copyright infringement accusations when you can have it all? That seems to be pro se filer Michael Henry Smith's rationale. Apparently, his self-published fictional account of the Waco biker/cop shootout hasn't racked up as many sales as he believes it should. And now, the Internet must pay.

The US government has just undercut one of its own gag orders. It imposed one on Lavabit after demanding its source code and encryption key. It has revealed the target of its demands from the encrypted email provider -- a person everyone already knew was the target, but one that wasn't likely to be officially confirmed for years to come. Kim Zetter at Wired has the details:

In all the discussions about Apple v. the FBI, a few people occasionally ask what would happen if Apple's engineers just refused to write the code demanded (some also ask about writing the code, but purposely messing it up). And now it appears that at least some Apple engineers are thinking about just this scenario. According to the NY Times:

For years, AT&T used contract fine print to prohibit its customers from suing it. Instead, users were forced to participate in binding arbitration, a system whereby company-employed arbitrators weigh the evidence -- and unsurprisingly rule in favor of the company employing them a dramatic majority of the time. Initially, lower courts repeatedly derided this behavior as an "unconscionable" curtailing of consumer rights and abuse of the law. But in 2011 the Supreme Court's AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion ruling declared that what AT&T was doing was perfectly ok, resulting in countless companies now following AT&T's lead.

About a year ago, we wrote about a somewhat strange trademark dispute between Macy's and a company called Strategic Marks. The issue in the case was that Strategic Marks was attempting to sell merchandise and create popup stores for brands that had been dissolved through acquisition into larger companies, such as Macy's. These brands were once staples of the storefront experience, including names like Marshall Field's, Bullock's, and Foley's. All were once well-known regional department stores that Macy's bought and rebranded as Macy's stores. Macy's, despite all of this, claimed it retained trademark ownership over those, despite their being generally unused.

Getting enough sleep has different meaning for different people, even though most people need about 7-9 hours a night. The CDC only started looking at how much sleep Americans have been getting since 2009, but the trend seems to be less and less, unfortunately. An estimated 50-70 million Americans have chronic sleep or wakefulness disorders, so figuring out sleep and its genetic components could benefit a lot of people.

A lawsuit recently filed by an allegedly ousted New York City medical examiner lends more credibility to the theory that the justice system is more concerned with successful prosecutions than actual justice. At the center of the allegations lies a DNA testing technique apparently used nowhere else in the country.

For many years, if you mentioned the term "cybersecurity czar" in the federal government, it only meant Richard Clarke. He was one of the earliest people to focus on computer security as an issue, and as such, became an advisor to multiple presidents on the issue. I haven't always agreed with him -- there have been points in the past where he's appeared as a leading voice in support of greater surveillance and exaggerated claims about a coming "cyberwar". However, in the past few years, Clarke has become much better on these issues, warning (just prior to Snowden's revelations) that the US's focus on surveillance has actually made the public less safe by leaving vulnerabilities open, rather than closing them.

Last year you'll recall that T-Mobile launched its "Binge On" zero rating program, which exempts the biggest video services from the company's usage caps (aka "zero rating"). Net neutrality advocates quickly complained that the practice violated net neutrality, since the very act of giving some companies an advantage automatically disadvantages some others. After T-Mobile spent some time lying about the nature of the program, the EFF came out with a detailed report noting that T-Mobile was just throttling all video files back to 1.5 Mbps, whether the content was being streamed or directly downloaded.

We're back again with another in our weekly reading list posts of books we think our community will find interesting and thought provoking. Once again, buying the book via the Amazon links in this story also helps support Techdirt.

This week is Sunshine Week, and the good folks over at FOIA site Muckrock.com have encouraged us to repost this wonderful/horrifying post on the worst FOIA redactions. You can also view the original MuckRock's FOIA redaction hall of shame over at their site. If you only have a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail — and as we've learned over the years from many an overenthusiastic FOIA officer, if you only have a Sharpie, then every document looks classified. As part of our Sunshine Week coverage, we put together a list of the most ridiculous redactions we've (un)seen. Amtrak's Yes We Have No Snack Car It took Amtrak a little over nine months to process Conor Skelding's request for complaints regarding its lounge cars. While at first that may not seem like the kind of task that would require the same time it takes to fully gestate a human being, it appears that the FOIA officer took Conor's request a bit ... literally and redacted all complaints except those regarding the lounge car, giving you gems like this: And this one, a horrifying short story in its own right. B(6), the Beyoncé Exemption In 2013, there was controversy abounded when The Times of London alleged that Beyoncé's perfect rendition of the "Star Spangled Banner" during Obama's second inauguration was the work of lip-syncing. Unperturbed, MuckRock's founder Michael Morisy seized on this as an opportunity to use FOIA to release those tracks, providing public-domain Bey for all. Sadly, his efforts were thwarted by a combination of FOIA not working that way, and of all things, John Williams. Yes, that John Williams. Adding insult to injury (a phrase that will come up more than once in this article), Michael's follow-up request for the processing notes on his request included a very notable omission. Yes, despite it being a request about the very public performance of a very public figure, Beyoncé's name was redacted, fittingly, under b(6), FOIA's privacy exemption ... But what a strong, independent b(6) she is. Bureau of Prisons' Record Breaking Non-release Also in 2013, the Justice Department's Criminal Division was widely ridiculed for "releasing" 15 completely redacted pages to the ACLU. 141222327-Totally-Redacted-FOIA-Response (PDF)

You can call it irony. Or bullshit. But what you can't call it is good government. Cory Weinberg of The Information reports San Francisco legislators [warning: paywalled link] are using one of those infamous tools o' terrorism -- messaging service Telegram -- to dodge open records requests. [Link to a non-paywalled story covering the same thing]

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With Google Fiber now starting to encroach on some major Comcast territories, the company's suddenly finding itself in the unfamiliar position of actually having to compete on price. In Atlanta, where Google Fiber is expected to appear later this year or early next, Comcast has been circulating flyers urging locals not to fall for the "hype" of ultra-fast, relatively cheap Google Fiber service.

Since the conflict over smartphone security, long simmering between Apple and the FBI, burst into the headlines last month, many of us who advocate for strong encryption have watched the competing legal arguments advanced by the parties with a certain queasiness. Many of the arguments on Apple's side—whether offered by the company itself or the myriad groups who have weighed in with friend-of-the-court briefs—have turned critically on the government's unprecedented invocation of the hoary All Writs Act to compel the company to write and authenticate a novel piece of software effectively dragooning Apple engineers into government service.

Last month, we noted how entrenched broadband providers had found a new way to try and prevent Google Fiber from bringing much-needed competition into their markets: blocking access to carrier-owned utility poles. AT&T recently sued the city of Louisville for embracing so-called "one touch make ready" policies that dramatically streamline the pole-attachment process. The rule rewrites allow third-party contractors to move (often just a few inches) multiple companies' gear, dramatically reducing the cost and time frame for new deployment (in Louisville by an estimated five months or so):

Back in 2010, there was a troubling ruling in Germany, saying that people who ran open WiFi access points needed to secure them, or they could be held liable for people using those connections to download infringing content. This seemed to contradict with the European Ecommerce Directive that gives safe harbors to internet service providers (similar to our DMCA safe harbors in the US). In the fall of 2014, we noted that the EU Court of Justice was taking up that case and now that court's Advocate General has recommended that the court allow open WiFi, in saying that, yes, those who operate WiFi access points can be considered ISPs under the law, and are thus protected from liability.

For whatever reason, we've seen all kinds of trademark actions over logos that are claimed to be very similar, but which aren't. Most often these disputes center on the use of a single identifying thing within the logo, such as the umbrella in the Travelers Insurance logo, or the apple in the logo of, well, Apple. These disputes take trademark law, chiefly designed to aid the public in discerning between brands, and reduce it to slap-fights over the attempted ownership of images of everyday items.

In case you missed it, humanity has been dealt a decisive intellectual blow by a go-playing computer program called AlphaGo. We mentioned AlphaGo back in January when Google announced that it had defeated European Go champion Fan Hui and was challenging Lee Sedol next. So now that the results are in, AlphaGo has shown the world that artificial intelligence can best the best of humanity at our most difficult games. We've seen this already with chess, and if you don't remember, people tried to make a variant of chess called Arimaa that humans could hold up as a game people could win over computers (ahem, that didn't work). We still have Calvinball, Diplomacy and certain forms of poker....

You may recall that we discussed the New York Yankees' bumbling attempt to institute a new ticket policy for Yankee Stadium that disallowed print-at-home tickets. Dressed up as a policy designed to combat fake tickets being sold by scalpers, the policy was actually designed to be a warm hug to the team's partner Ticketmaster and a slap to Ticketmaster rival StubHub, as well as all of the other secondary market resellers out there. Still, some people probably shrugged, assuming that this would only have an effect on Yankees fans, a group that might find the soil of sympathy barren.

I imagine, as a musician, it must be common to come across other music that sounds somewhat similar to one's own. I would think that not all genres of music are created equal in this respect. Jazz, for instance, while sharing common elements across the genre, seems to have enough instruments and space within the music for unique expression that perhaps similarities occur less often or are less severe than, say, industrial rock, which seems to have some more rigid common core elements. How much similarity is there in songs from Ramstein and Nine Inch Nails, for instance, or in songs from Nine Inch Nails and Powerman5000? Or in songs from Powerman5000 and Final Fantasy XIV...wait, what?

So far, the Canadian government's attempt to force innovation and lower prices on the Canadian TV industry doesn't appear to be going so well. As previously noted, the government has demanded that all Canadian cable TV operators begin offering a so-called "skinny" bundles of smaller, cheaper channels starting this month, and the option to buy channels "a la carte" starting in December. But this being the cable industry, companies are finding all manner of ways to tap dance over, under and around the requirements.

It's amazing how much stuff government agencies "take seriously" and claim they're handling in accordance to all sorts of secret, but presumably strict, guidelines… once their actions have been exposed.

With a little more than a week remaining in our crowdfunding campaign to support our coverage of the encryption fight, well known media commentator and professor Dan Gillmor offers his thoughts on why Techdirt's coverage is so important. Help Techdirt Cut Through The Confusion In The Crypto Fight The "FBI-versus-Apple" story of recent weeks has brought a vital issue to the front burner: whether we will have secure technology in the future–or at least the chance to have secure technology–or not. In reality, this isn't only about Apple or the FBI. It's about the considerable weight of government in its zeal to have access to everything we say and do in the digital realm–which is to say, increasingly, almost everything we say and do. The Obama administration, and governments around the world, believe they have an innate right to whatever information they want. This is a law-enforcement-first mentality, and in many ways an understandable one in a sometimes dangerous environment. But governments also want something they assuredly cannot have: a way to crack open our devices and communications, willy-nilly, when we're using encryption tools that make it difficult if not impossible to do so without users turning over the keys to their digital locks. They call this a "privacy versus security" debate. It is, in fact, a "security versus security" issue: If they get backdoors into our devices, software and networks, they will–according to just about every reputable non-government security and encryption expert–guarantee that we will all be less secure in the end, because malicious hackers and criminals (some of whom work for government) will ultimately get access, too. Governments want magic math, and they can't have it. It's also a free speech issue, a huge one, because the government is telling Apple it has to write new code and sign it with a digital signature. Sorry, this is binary. We have to choose. One choice is to acknowledge that bad guys have a way to have some secure conversations using encryption, thereby forcing law enforcement and spies to come up with other ways to find out what the bad guys are doing. The other choice is to reduce everyone's security, on the principle that we simply can't afford to let bad people use these tools. Sadly, the journalism about this has been reprehensibly bad, at least until recently, outside of the tech press. Traditional Big Media basically parrot government people, including most recently President Obama himself, even though they're finally starting to wake up to what's happening. John Oliver's HBO program last Sunday was a sterling example of how media can treat this complex topic in a way that a) tells the truth; and b) explains things with great clarity. Mike Masnick and his site, Techdirt, have been leaders in covering the way various liberties and technology intersect. Now they're crowdfunding to add more coverage of encryption and its ramifications. I'm supporting this initiative and hope you'll give it some thought as well. We need more such coverage, and we can depend on Mike and team to provide it. Reposted from Dan Gillmor's blog Help Techdirt Cut Through The Confusion In The Crypto Fight

Franco Caraccioli, who sued Facebook rather than the party who uploaded a video of him pleasuring himself (under the username "Franco CaraccioliJerkingman"), has lost his lawsuit. This is due to his decision to pursue a party protected under Section 230, rather than the uploader, against whom he might have been able to pursue actual criminal charges.

Keep your computer and its contents secure with a 3-year subscription to Heimdal Security Pro for PC for $69. Heimdal works in the background to automatically install the latest software updates to help close security holes, monitors for phishing attempts, and tracks and filters traffic. It's a must-have addition to your anti-virus program to keep your information secure and safe.

One of the more ridiculous claims in the DOJ's filing against Apple last week, was its decision to pick up on former NSA lawyer Stewart Baker's conspiracy theory that Apple had built backdoors into its products for China (side note: I met Stewart in person for the first time recently, and he mocked me about this, saying that I should agree with him on this point). However, as we noted in our post last week, there doesn't seem to be much evidence to support Baker's claims. The two key issues were using the Chinese wireless standard WAPI -- which some have claimed includes some sort of backdoor, but it was also the only real local area wireless tech in China for a while -- and the decision to store iCloud data in China. However, as we noted, there have been reports that the Chinese government tried to then conduct a man in the middle attack against the iCloud servers. If Apple had actually given the government a backdoor, then why would it need to do that?

We already covered Apple's reply brief in the fight over getting into Syed Farook's encrypted work iPhone, highlighting a number of lies by the DOJ's filing. But I wanted to focus on a few more highlighted in the additional declarations filed by Apple as well. The DOJ kept insisting that Apple built this feature specifically to keep law enforcement out, which is ridiculous. Apple notes repeatedly that it built the feature to keep its customers safer from malicious attacks, most of which are not from law enforcement. But the DOJ keeps pretending that it was a deliberate attempt to mock law enforcement. In the DOJ's filing:

Despite government programs, national broadband plans, billions in subsidies and a lot of recent hype paid to gigabit services like Google Fiber, U.S. broadband is actually getting less competitive than ever before across a huge swath of the country. Companies like AT&T and Verizon have been backing away from unwanted DSL networks they simply don't want to upgrade. In some cases this involves selling these assets to smaller telcos (who take on so much debt they can't upgrade them either), but in many markets this involves actively trying to drive customers away via either rate hikes or outright neglect.