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Chris Soghoian, the ACLU's chief technologist, has decided to troll the DEA. His complaint is valid, though. The problem is, how do you troll the DEA when it's almost impossible to find the contact info of the person you want to speak to? Just like the FBI has more options at its disposal than simply demanding Apple help it beat down an iPhone's front door, Soghoian was able to route around the DEA's unforthcoming attitude.

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This week, three of our four top comments come in response to the ongoing FBI/Apple situation. In first place on the insightful side, it's JD rebutting a strained attempt to claim the FBI is not technically asking for a "backdoor":

Five Years Ago Lots and lots of IP fights this week in 2011. Multiple people were trying to claim they came with the idea for Kung Fu Panda first; the Tolkien Estate was embroiled in a battle over historical fiction that included a depiction of the famous writer, and it looked like they may be gearing up to go after a re-imagining of Lord Of The Rings too; and the lawyers for Settlers Of Catan were abusing IP law to take down legitimate competitors. We saw what might have been the first DMCA notice over 3D printer schematics, an appeals court was considering the possibility of plucking Wizard Of Oz images back out of the public domain, and Hulk Hogan was trying to use publicity rights to establish ownership over calling people "brother" and referring to your muscles as "guns". We also looked at the ridiculous trademark saga of Kennedy Fried Chicken, and examined some subtle copyright questions like whether copying the idea for a magazine cover and reciting song lyrics on television are forms of infringement. Meanwhile, Chris Dodd was fresh out of the Senate and already breaking his promise to never become a lobbyist by joining the MPAA as exactly that (and this wasn't the only example of the revolving door between government and industry). Ten Years Ago Spam, spyware and fraud were big topics this week in 2006. The Washington Post was looking deeply into the world of botnets, Miller Brewing was tracking down customers who used junk email addresses, ESPN was trying to get people to cough up a fee to avoid having their info sent to marketers, and one spammer got eight years in jail for an identity theft hack. We wondered about the responsibilities of anti-spyware researchers while the makers of anti-spyware software were more or less at war with each other. Amidst all this, it was discovered that a group of 419 scammers in Amsterdam pulled in millions of dollars in just a few months. This was also the week of the injunction against Google in the Perfect 10 lawsuit, which was highly problematic but not without its upsides. Fifteen Years Ago The fallout from the Napster ruling was still in full-swing, with the company guaranteeing a billion dollars to record labels if it can stay in business as a subscription service (though the math on that was questionable). The commentators were going wild as usual, some saying Napster must die and others pointing out that anti-piracy laws are often anti-consumer. This week in 2001 also contains two "wow, it was that long ago?" moments. First, it was the announcement that Virgin Mobile was coming to the US. Then, it was one of the biggest and strangest early internet memes, before they were called memes: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US. 138 & 69 Years Ago This week, we mark two historical firsts for important innovations that are all but obsolete today (though one is making a bit of a comeback). First, it was on February 21st, 1878 that the first ever telephone directory (a single piece of cardboard with 50 listings) was published in New Haven, Connecticut. Later, on the same day in 1947, Edwin H. Land demonstrated the first instant camera to the Optical Society of America. Polaroid put 57 units up for sale before Christmas of the following year, estimating that they'd have plenty of time to manufacture more if demand was high — but all 57 units and all of the film sold out on the first day of demonstrations.

More often than not, when dealing with music-related stuff in this column, we've focused on music creation tools. But this week, we've got a pair of crowdfunded products for music and audio lovers. Shameless Self-Promotion: As you may already know, Techdirt is raising money for some of its own awesome stuff right now, via a crowdfunding campaign on Beacon to support our reporting on the vital encryption debate. Check it out, and help make sure there's an anti-fearmongering voice of reason in this all-important fight. Mighty In retrospect, the convergence of mobile phones and portable music players was inevitable — but that doesn't mean the standalone player is entirely dead. iPod sales have been dropping and Apple has been moving away from the product, but not everyone is thrilled with that, as some still prefer a separate device (anecdotally: my girlfriend still uses her Shuffle for most listening, and just this week a friend of mine was pleased as punch to have tracked down a decently-priced iPod Classic on Craigslist). Now, the rise of streaming music has even further reduced your non-phone options for music listening, and that's where the Mighty steps in. Physically, it's more or less a clone of an iPod Shuffle, but it works by first pairing with your smartphone via Bluetooth or WiFi and storing 4GB of offline music from Spotify. That's a first as far as I know, and while I'm sure lots of people will opt to simply stick with their phones, there are at least 1500 people (so far) who would very much like this option. OSSIC X Of course, in many ways, a music player is only as good as the headphones you plug into it — and this is one of the nicest pairs of headphones around. Admittedly though, the appeal of the OSSIC X headphones is more for gamers, VR users and surround-sound movie watchers, because that's what makes them special: 3D sound more customized and advanced than any solution to date. There are lots of 3D sound headphones out there, but getting a truly good pair can be tough — not only is there a vast range of quality requiring a lot of pre-purchase research, there's the fact that everyone's ears are a little different and the experience won't be consistent for all listeners. That's where OSSIC X steps in: these headphones use head tracking and "anatomy calibration" to customize their output to an individual user. They adjust the 3D sound delivery based on the size of your head and torso and the unique shape of your ear, then use the built-in movement tracking to keep sounds fixed at a specific point in space even as you make minor movements with your head. The result is 3D audio with a greater degree of accuracy and immersion than any standard set of Dolby cans.

Surprise, surprise! The NYPD is less enthusiastic about telling its officers to restrain themselves than it is about letting them off their leashes.

I have no idea why, but there seems to be a sudden influx of stories concerning Facebook patrolling its site and taking down content over rather puritanical standards of offense and vulgarity. The most recent examples of this have concerned a couple of pieces of artwork that the Facebook Decency Office deemed to be to risque, despite the fact that neither of the art pieces could reasonably be described as particularly pornographic. The most recent example of this kind of censorious brigade is less to do with scary, scary sex, and more to do with parody content that some might find vulgar.

It's been decades since a human being has traveled beyond low earth orbit. Last year, NASA tested its human-rated Space Launch System to an altitude of 3,600 miles, but getting people to a "human accessible surface" that isn't part of the earth is going to take some time. China could have a taikonaut on the moon before 2030. NASA can say it's "been there, done that" -- but when will it be able to top a manned lunar landing?

We recently noted how Indiana was just the latest state to try and pass auto industry-backed bills banning Tesla's direct-to-consumer sales model. Under the latest GM-backed bill, Tesla's dealer license would have expired in 2018, forcing the company to embrace the traditional franchise dealership model -- or stop selling cars in the state entirely. Telsa had been reaching out for the last few weeks to Tesla fans in the state, quite-correctly highlighting how GM was buying protectionist law instead of competing.

Apple may have been able to convince a jury that Samsung violated a bunch of its patents, on concepts like "slide to unlock," but apparently the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) disagrees. Despite the court's reputation for regularly expanding the power of patents (and getting smacked around by the Supreme Court for doing so), CAFC has sided with Samsung and tossed out a jury's $120 million award and with it some Apple patents -- including "slide to unlock."

We recently noted how the city of Louisville had voted 23-0 to let Google Fiber bring ultra-fast broadband competition to the city. As part of the vote, the city revamped its utility pole-attachment rules, which previously forced competitors through a six-month bureaucratic process to connect to the poles, an estimated 40% of which are owned by AT&T. The new policy streamlines that down to one month, letting competitors like Google Fiber move hardware already attached to the poles, while holding them financially accountable for any potential damages.

It has already been a year since the FCC voted to reclassify ISPs as common carriers under the telecom act. And despite the countless calories spent by the telecom industry and its various mouthpieces claiming Title II and net neutrality would demolish all Internet investment and innovation as we know it, you may have noticed that things by and large did not implode. In fact, while the FCC has been snoozing on things like zero rating and usage caps, the mere threat of rules helped the Internet by putting an end to the interconnection shenanigans causing Netflix performance degradation.

Have you heard? Today is the anniversary of "the dress." You know the one. It was all over the internet exactly a year ago. White and gold or blue and black. It was a phenomenon. And, yes, I know a bunch of you are snidely mocking it as you read this, but shut up. It was a fun way to kill an afternoon a year ago and it made a bunch of people happy, so don't be "that person." A year ago, we wrote a short piece about it, noting that you had fair use to thank for it, because the dress was being shared widely, and that was possible due to fair use. And the timing was great, because it was fair use week -- as it is again.

TL;DR: Support our coverage of the encryption battle!

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Late last night, the NY Times broke a very troubling story. Rather than finally putting an end to Executive Order 12333, it appears that President Obama is going to expand the power of it in dangerous ways. We've written about EO 12333 a bunch of times, but for those of you unfamiliar with it, it's an executive order signed by President Reagan that basically gave the NSA pretty free rein to collect signals intelligence outside of the US. Because it's not (technically) about domestic surveillance, what the NSA does under EO 12333 is not subject to Congressional oversight. That is, Congress is mostly as much in the dark as everyone else is on what the NSA is doing overseas. And, as former State Department official John Napier Tye revealed a couple of years ago, for all the talk of domestic surveillance programs revealed by Ed Snowden, the NSA's real power comes almost entirely from 12333.

Here's quite a scoop from Joe Mullin over at Ars Technica. Apparently, Disney is getting a bit desperate on the whole TPP thing. The company, which has been having a rough go of things because of the next generation not giving a shit about ESPN, decided to take things up a notch. CEO Bob Iger apparently emailed Disney employees asking them to contribute to DisneyPAC, specifically to help Disney pay for lobbyists to push the TPP across the finish line. They even made it so easy that employees can donate directly from their payroll. Here's the letter, with some commentary (how can I resist?):

It will come as no surprise to sophisticated Internet users like Techdirt readers that the UK's attempts to block a growing list of "pirate" sites are easy to circumvent. But a post on TorrentFreak suggests that you don't even need to be a sophisticated Techdirt reader to do that:

As Techdirt has noted, there is evidence from multiple sources that TPP will produce negligible economic benefits for most of the nations involved. Some governments are clearly well aware of this, because they are desperate to avoid an objective cost-benefit evaluation that would show that claims about TPP's value don't stack up. Even given that pig-headed determination to push the deal through, basic prudence would surely dictate that before making all the complex legislative changes required by TPP, countries should at least wait to see whether it's going to happen. Not in New Zealand, apparently, judging by this blog post by Kennedy Graham, a Member of Parliament for the Green party there:

Cops like cameras.

Even though there are less than a handful of ways for people to get into space right now, there may be a few more options in the near future to get close to space or into low earth orbit. If you have the resources, you could just book a seat on a Soyuz for $20-70 million. But for a bit less, you can book a trip on various vehicles without a decades-long track record. Or... you could be paid to be an astronaut if you have the skills, but the odds of getting selected are pretty slim.

Apple didn't need to reply until tomorrow, but has now released its Motion to Vacate the magistrate judge's order from last week, compelling Apple to create a new operating system that undermines a couple of key security features, so that the FBI could then brute force the passcode on Syed Farook's work iPhone. It's clearly a bit of a rush job as there are a few typos (and things like incorrect page numbers in the table of contents). However, it's not too surprising to see the crux of Apple's argument. In summary it's:

Last November, lawyers defending five real estate investors against auction price-rigging allegations discovered the FBI had planted bugs to capture conversations during real estate auctions on the San Mateo (CA) Courthouse steps.

You can add Nissan to the laundry list of companies that aren't making security a priority in the Internet of Things era. A hacker this week revealed that vulnerabilities in the Nissan Leaf companion app allows an attacker to not only track a driver's driving behavior, but to physically control the Leaf's heating and cooling systems. Not quite as severe some other car vulnerabilities that open vehicles to total control, the vulnerability still allows a hacker to cause some notable trouble by running down the Leaf's batteries, potentially leaving an owner stranded.

If you correct for company size, Google is generally pretty decent on intellectual property matters. But, hey, I guess no corporation is perfect. The company whose motto is "don't be evil" is, of course, very big. And they certainly have a very big legal team. I think it might be time for that legal team to get a quick primer on the wider culture at Google and do a quick review on the company motto, because those lawyers apparently suddenly decided that a news site, called 9to5Google, was suddenly violating Google's trademark after a scant five full years in operation.

The FBI's attempt to use an All Writs order to force Apple to help it break into a locked iPhone is seemingly built on a compelling case: a large-scale shooting involving people with ties to terrorist groups. This is exactly the sort of case Comey hoped would help push his anti-encryption agenda forward. Or so it seems.

Rumors that the US government used a university's research institute to uncloak Tor users began floating around nearly two years ago. In July of 2014, the first hint that something weird was going on at Carnegie Mellon took the form of a hastily-cancelled Black Hat Conference talk on the subject of de-anonymizing Tor users. Carnegie Mellon's lawyers stepped in and called the whole thing off at the last minute. The thought process at the time was that CMU's legal team may have been concerned the researchers' actions had broken wiretap laws.

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Earlier this week, we highlighted a questionable poll done by the Pew Research folks concerning the Apple/FBI fight, and noted that the actual questions it asked were wrong and misleading (and also leading...) and that resulted in fairly meaningless results, which were then spun by reporters into false claims that the public backed the FBI in this fight: And then, just days later, Reuters/Ipsos released a poll of its own, saying... basically the exact opposite, and it's being spun to claim that there is "Solid support for Apple in iPhone encryption fight." And, once again, the poll is basically meaningless when it comes to the actual issues in this case. You can read the details of the questions in the linked document, which shows that, before asking the key question, the pollsters asked a bunch of questions about whether or not people were willing to "give up privacy" to help the US government on a variety of things. And lots of people said no. These questions more or less framed the issue as one about protecting your own privacy -- as compared to the Pew poll that framed it more as being about investigating the San Bernardino attacks. Then after all those questions, the poll asks about the specifics of the Apple case, where they frame the question much more broadly than Pew's. Here's Reuters question:

Yesterday the NY Times put out a story claiming that Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can't Hack, with the underlying thrust being that this is a response to the big DOJ case against it, in which the court has ordered Apple to undermine key security features, which would then enable the FBI to brute force the (almost certainly weak) passcode used by Syed Farook on his work iPhone. But, here's the thing: prior to that order and its details coming to light, many people were under the impression that the existing iPhones were ones that it "couldn't hack." After all, it was offering full disk encryption tied to the device where it didn't hold the key.

"Thanks for letting us know about this! We'll get it fixed immediately!" said almost no company ever.

With the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift prepping for launch over the next few months, the public has only just begun to be inundated with a sound wall of virtual reality media coverage. And while that's great if, like me, you've been waiting for functional, non-vomit-inducing VR since childhood, those unnerved by the idea of strapping a $600 plastic and metal headset to their face for hours will react poorly. The folks that believe games make us violent, Google makes us stupid, and cell phones make us antisocial are going to have an absolute field day demonizing VR. Usually, never having tried it.

As we've documented extensively, the auto industry has worked tirelessly to erect barriers to Tesla's market entry. Legacy automakers have been engaged in sustained hysterics specifically regarding Tesla's direct-to-consumer sales model, which lets customers buy vehicles directly from Tesla online, with limited showrooms to view, touch and test drive the Tesla vehicles. Annoyed by this pesky Californian upstart, the auto industry has frequently tied draft legislation to campaign contributions to ban Tesla's successful model. Why compete when you can cheat?

As we've documented extensively, the auto industry has worked tirelessly to erect barriers to Tesla's market entry. Legacy automakers have been engaged in sustained hysterics specifically regarding Tesla's direct-to-consumer sales model, which lets customers buy vehicles directly from Tesla online, with limited showrooms to view, touch and test drive the Tesla vehicles. Annoyed by this pesky Californian upstart, the auto industry has frequently tied draft legislation to campaign contributions to ban Tesla's successful model. Why compete when you can cheat?

Seven years after the idea was first proposed, it finally appears as though the state of Arizona might be on the verge of a traffic camera ban.

They say age is "just a number" -- but it'd be nice if that number could be a little higher before people were expected to die. The aging process has been studied for a long time, but no one has found the silver bullet that stops people from getting older (unless there are some immortals hiding among us). Still, medicine is making some slow progress towards understanding how we age -- and how we might prevent ourselves from aging.

We've seen all sorts of problems with the DMCA's notice and takedown system that is frequently abused. Many companies, either because they want to avoid any risk of liability or because they don't actually understand the details of the law, resort to a stance of automatically taking down anything upon receipt of a takedown notice, no matter how bogus. Some companies have gotten much better at reviewing the details of takedown notices before agreeing to just take down the content. However, some are going even further in trying to find that right balance. A little over a year ago, we wrote about Github moving to a system whereby the company will notify users of DMCA notices first, and give them a chance to modify the code before it's taken down.

There are all sorts of interesting (and frustrating and challenging) legal questions raised by the FBI's use of the All Writs Act to try to force Apple to build a system to allow the FBI to hack Apple's customers. But there's one interesting one raised by Albert Gidari that may cut through a lot of the "bigger" questions (especially the Constitutional ones that everyone leaps to) and just makes a pretty simple point: the DOJ is simply wrong that the All Writs Act applies here, rather than the existing wiretapping statute, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or 47 USC 1002, better known by basically everyone as CALEA. CALEA is the law that some (including the DOJ) have wanted "updated" in ways that might force internet companies and mobile phone companies to make their devices more wiretap-ready. But that hasn't happened.

So here's a pleasant surprise. President Obama has nominated Carla Hayden as the new Librarian of Congress, and at a first glance, she looks perfect for the job. The job is super important for a whole variety of reasons, including that the Librarian of Congress controls the Copyright Office (more on that in a bit...). The former Librarian of Congress, James Billington, was really bad. He apparently was mostly focused on hobnobbing with rich people in fancy places around the globe than doing anything useful. A report by the Government Accountability Office found a massive leadership vacuum with Billington when it came to technology issues, noting that he basically ignored technology entirely. When Billington announced he was retiring, the Washington Post reported that employees were absolutely elated:

Lots of people, mainly those supporting the DOJ/FBI's view of the Apple fight, have been arguing that this isn't a big deal. They're just asking for one small thing. Other people have tried to examine "what's at stake" in the case, with a number of the arguments falling into the typical "privacy v. security" framing, or even something around precedents related to privacy and security. However, Jennifer Granick recently wrote a great piece that does a much better job framing what's truly at stake. It's not privacy vs. security at all, but rather who gets to set the rules over how software works in an era where software controls everything.

The Copyright Office has decided to take a stance on copyright law that requires two slightly odd things. First, it requires ignoring what the Copyright Act actually says and then, separately, it requires pretending that the law says something that it clearly does not say. That's pretty incredible when you think about it.

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Last summer, our writer Tim Cushing put together something of an omnibus post of stupid DMCA takedown requests, none of which probably deserved their own unique post. One of the individuals he highlighted later went on something of a wacky defamatory crusade against Tim, posting blatantly false information about him, and claiming that Techdirt is actually owned by some telecommunications company I'd never even heard of, that is also a patent troll, or something. But now another entity in that very same post has also decided it's upset about the post, and has taken a slightly different strategy.

House Speaker Paul Ryan is apparently none too pleased about the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. We're not very pleased with it either and think large sections of it should be dumped -- but for very different reasons than Ryan I imagine. Ryan is saying that there aren't enough votes in the House to ratify the TPP, while suggesting that the USTR has to go back and renegotiate the deal in an interview he gave on Fox News:

Over the years, the nation's courts have moved towards recognizing First Amendment protections for citizens who film public servants carrying out public duties. Nearly every case has involved a citizen arrested for filming police officers, suggesting far too many law enforcement entities still feel their public actions deserve some sort of secrecy -- even as these agencies deploy broader and more powerful surveillance tools aimed at the same public areas where no expectation of privacy (under the Fourth Amendment) exists.

Starting next week, Canadian cable providers will be forced by the government to do something inherently and violently foreign to them: offer cheaper, more flexible cable bundles. In March of last year, Canadian regulator CRTC announced it would be combating high TV prices by forcing cable operators to offer cable channels a la carte, or so-called "skinny bundles" of cheaper cable channels, by December 2016. The CRTC's full ruling declared that by March 2016, all Canadian TV providers must at least provide a $25, discounted skinny bundle, letting users pick and choose individual channels beyond that.

Did you know that Coca-Cola has been attempting to get a trademark on the word "zero" for beverages in the United States for well over a decade? Yes, the most well-known soft-drink maker, which sells a product called 'Coke Zero', first filed for a trademark on the single word in 2003. The fight has been ongoing ever since, with Dr. Pepper Snapple Group opposing the trademark, because, well, lots of other beverage companies use that common word and because of course it did. Oddly, we covered a trademark case a few years back in which Coca-Cola was on the receiving end of a trademark suit over its use of the word, that time from a water company that offered a product it had named 'Naturally Zero.' Of note was Judge John Lee's justification for siding with Coca-Cola in that case:

As an avid sports fan, and more specifically an avid baseball fan, I can still remember the advent of home-printed tickets. My reaction was perhaps more elation than what was warranted, but having spent years going up to the Wrigley Field box office with my father and later my friends, the idea of being able to purchase tickets online and then print them at home in order to bypass the lines and go directly to the gate was exactly the kind of technological progress that, albeit small, meant something to me.

There are plenty of fictional medical dramas where doctors miraculously discover a wrong diagnosis that leads to a recovery or a cure or... a highly suspicious murder suspect. Some of these stories are based in reality, but they aren't filed under suspense or drama for no good reason. For all the budding script (not of the computer code variety) writers out there, here are just a few medical curiosities that might come in handy.