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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.

Lots of people seem to have opinions on the whole Apple / FBI thing without actually understand the details. The latest just happens to be Bill Gates, so it's getting a fair bit of attention. On Monday the Financial Times published an interview with Gates emblazened with the title: Bill Gates Backs FBI iPhone Hack Request. The article then quotes Gates appearing to side with the FBI:

The FTC has stepped up to smack ASUS down for selling "secure" routers that were about as impregnable as a child's couch fort.

There's something notable and odd about the conversation around content creation in the digital age: a stark divide between the camp that believes the sky is falling, and the camp that believes things are better than they've ever been. This week, we discuss the question of which narrative is correct... or is it neither? Or both? 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.

The FBI keeps insisting that it's legal fight with Apple is not about the precedent and not about using the tragic incident in San Bernardino as an emotional plug to break down strong encryption. And yet... now it's come out that even before going to court, federal prosecutors from the DOJ went to the families of those killed in the San Bernardino attacks and asked them to file an amicus brief of support with the court:

The folks over at Pew Research usually do pretty good work, but they decided to weigh in on the Apple / FBI backdoor debate by asking a really dumb poll question -- the results of which are now being used to argue that the public supports the FBI over Apple by a pretty wide margin. But, of course, as with everything in polling, the questions you ask and how you phrase them are pretty much everything. And here's the thing. The question asked was:

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On Friday, we debunked a key FBI talking point, which the press has been parroting, that Apple had helped the FBI in 70 previous cases, and only changed its mind now for "marketing" or "business model" reasons. As we explained, that's not even remotely true. In the past, Apple helped out because it had access to the content, and so it got it and turned it over following a lawful search warrant/court order. In this case, the situation is entirely different. Apple does not have access to the content that the FBI wants, and is now being forced to create a backdoor -- build an entirely revamped operating system -- that undermines some key security features found on iPhones today. That's quite different.

In our last post we noted that while FBI Director James Comey insists that it wasn't trying to set a precedent, and this move was just about getting access to a single phone, law enforcement around the country was eagerly lining up behind the FBI to make similar requests. And... then last night it came out that even the DOJ is making similar requests in 12 other cases. And now, the full list of such cases has come out: Now, it's actually not entirely clear from this that all the cases really are the same. All of them do involve the DOJ using the All Writs Act to demand extra assistance from Apple -- and we already knew about some of those earlier cases. And in most of them, the specifics of the "ask" is not actually public yet.

In Jim Comey's defensive blog post over the weekend, he insisted that the FBI was absolutely not doing this to set a precedent or to do anything other than get into a single phone:

While Google Fiber was originally seen as an adorable little experiment primarily designed to bring PR attention to a lack of broadband competition, over the last six months Wall Street has woken up to the fact that Google Fiber isn't playing around. While the number of customers that can actually sign up for Google Fiber remains in the several hundred thousand range, Google's announcements to tackle sprawling areas like Atlanta, San Antonio, Chicago, and Los Angeles has many Wall Street analysts changing their tune.

Remember The Hurt Locker? Yes, the film that perhaps became best known for resulting in all kinds of legal action against those who pirated it also faced a legal challenge of its own. Jeffrey Sarver is a veteran of the Iraq War who claimed in California court that The Hurt Locker was totally about his own life, for which he wanted compensation, but also that it portrayed him in a falsely negative light, for which he alsowanted compensation. In other words, it was a portrayal of him and also not, now gimme some money. That initial battle was decided on First Amendment grounds, with the court affirming the film as a transformative work protected as speech and, without any actual evidence that there was a false portrayal specifically of Sarver, who is not named in the film, there was no grounds for the suit.

The problems with nuclear power via fission have obviously not been overcome by technology (or politics). European countries have started to back off nuclear power, and the US isn't expanding its nuclear power capacity in the near future. However, nuclear power isn't dead yet. Maybe some people think it should be, but what if someone figures out how to prevent meltdowns and burn nuclear waste as fuel?

A small town library in New Hampshire that went to war with the DHS over a Tor relay has become the unlikely impetus for new legislation aimed at protecting public libraries from government overreach.

Jewel v. NSA is the EFF's big case against the NSA over its surveillance efforts. It predates the Snowden revelations (from a lot), and stems from that time an AT&T technician, Mark Klein, just walked through the doors of the EFF to provide the organization with evidence that AT&T basically routes a bunch of data through NSA filters for "upstream" collection (part of the NSA's "702" collection program). The case has gone through a bunch of permutations and procedural issues, many of which have not gone the EFF's way, unfortunately. However, the latest is a big one: the judge has said that EFF can move forward with discovery efforts, basically requiring the government to turn over a bunch of information:

Two can play at the "pull on the heart strings about losses due to terror" game apparently. While the FBI has rolled out the "but the poor victims of San Bernardino" argument for why it wants to force Apple into hacking the security of its own customers, Apple has countered with a big gun of its own: it has hired former Solicitor General Ted Olson to defend the company against the FBI in this case. Olson is a mega-star in legal circles. He's argued tons of cases before the Supreme Court, and of course, was Solicitor General under George W. Bush (whose election he helped ensure in representing him in Bush v. Gore).

Officials at Ft. Leavenworth prison, where Chelsea Manning is confined has apparently become super interested in protecting EFF's copyright. Or so they claim. Manning has been blocked from reading printouts of EFF blog posts, and the US Disciplinary Barracks (USDB) insists it's just about the copyright and not because they might disapprove of the EFF's message.

Over and over again as people keep talking about the Apple / FBI encryption stuff, I keep seeing the same line pop up. It's something along the lines of "but the FBI needs to know what's on that phone, so if Apple can help, why shouldn't it." Let's debunk that myth. The FBI absolutely does not need to know what's on that phone. It might not even care very much about what's on that phone. As the Grugq ably explained last week, there's almost certainly nothing of interest on the phone. As he notes, Farook destroyed his and his wife's personal phones, indicating that if there were anything truly important, he would have destroyed the last phone too. Also:

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Look, let's face facts here. For all the talk coming from the law enforcement community that they need backdoors into encryption to stop crime, they absolutely know that the reverse is true: strong encryption prevents crime. Lots of it. Strong encryption on phones makes stealing those phones a lot less worthwhile, because all the information on them is locked up. As we noted back in 2014, the FBI had a webpage advocating for mobile encryption to protect your phone's data: Of course, after that started to look inconvenient for the FBI, they quietly removed that page. I have a FOIA request in asking why, but the FBI has told me I shouldn't expect an answer for another year or two.

It was evident when the "three strikes" or "graduated response" was first proposed in France back in 2009 that it was a really bad idea. After all, in its crudest form, it cuts people off from what has become a necessity for modern life -- the Internet -- simply because they are accused of copyright infringement, an area of law that is notoriously full of uncertainties. Given that inauspicious start, it's no surprise that over the years, the three strikes system has failed everywhere, with some of the early adopters either dropping it, or putting it on hold. No wonder, then, that a latecomer, Australia, is also having problems with implementing the approach, as this report from c|net makes clear:

Over the weekend the narrative the FBI has been trying to spread around the legal effort to get Apple to build a system that lets the FBI hack Apple customers began to crumble, as it was revealed that the FBI's own actions were largely responsible for the fact that the information on Syed Farook's phone was no longer accessible. That gave more and more weight to the argument that the whole reason that the FBI did this was to set a precedent that judges can force companies to hack their own customers, should the FBI want them to do so. Again, it seems fairly obvious that the FBI chose this case in particular, because basically everyone agrees that Farook and his wife were bad people who murdered a bunch of Farook's co-workers. That obviously makes the FBI's case more sympathetic for setting a precedent. But with the shady actions that resulted in the data being locked up, that nice story was starting to slip away.

On Friday, we noted that one of the reasons that the FBI was unable to get access to the data on the remaining iPhone from Syed Farook was because after the shooting and after the phone was in the hands of the government, Farook's employer, the San Bernardino Health Department, initiated a password change on his iCloud account. That apparently messed stuff up, because without that, it would have been possible to force the phone to backup data to the associated iCloud account, where it would have been available to the FBI. But, after we published that article, a rather salient point came out: the Health Department only did this because the FBI asked it to do so.

That One Guy is back again, this time with both the first and second place wins on the insightful side. First up, it's his response to Sony Music's takedown of a lecture on music copyright:

Five Years Ago This week in 2011, Homeland Security continued its domain-seizure crusade with another 18 targets, again seized with no adversarial due process. It also appeared to have made a pretty big mistake in seizing a dynamic domain and taking down thousands of innocent sites, though when pressed on this it was particularly evasive. We reiterated the point that the seizures were almost certainly not legal, while Congress was getting ready to reintroduce COICA and make online takedowns even easier and more extreme (and it was good to hear Senator Ron Wyden speaking out against it while Senator Patrick Leahy struggled to show evidence for its necessity.) All this appears to have inspired UK law enforcement, who began seeking their own takedown powers, and France was ahead of the game. But, before dealing with COICA, Congress was racing to extend the most controversial provisions of the Patriot Act. First the House agreed to the extension with no discussion or oversight, then the Senate followed suit but mercifully added a better-than-nothing 90 day limit to start with. The administration was defending its vague right to spy on Americans, and yet amidst all this, the US still wanted to be seen as a champion of internet freedom. Ten Years Ago That same irony was present five years earlier in 2006, when the big news on that front was Google's decision to offer a censored version of its search in China. Suddenly, the US government was extremely interested in censorship and internet freedom, and the whole ordeal appeared to be a massive clash of business, politics and culture. China, for its part, seemed to be throwing the US a bone by shutting down some counterfeiting operations at the same time. Additionally, in an ersatz prototype of today's battle over iPhone encryption, UK police were worried that Microsoft's new Windows DRM system would stop them from doing their job, and were negotiating with the company to include backdoors that would let them hack people's machines. Also this week in 2006: the television industry was struggling to figure out what to do with its new stats on DVR viewers, the RIAA was pretending that it's doing you a favor by letting you use your iPod (while also using dirty tricks in its file sharing lawsuits, like gathering private info on the target's kids), and Apple shut down a group that was putting OSX on non-Apple PC hardware (precisely the type of machine from which I am typing this). Fifteen Years Ago On Monday of this week in 2001, the final ruling came down: Napster is bad, and must stop. There was no shortage of analysis on this front, with some predictions that were wildly optimistic, suggesting Napster could retain 25% of its users on a subscription model, some that were much more realistic, pointing to other services that atrophied users after starting to charge a fee, and some that looked deeper and found the real losers here: the music industry. Meanwhile, P2P sharing wasn't going anywhere (and, tangentially, neither was open source software, despite one bizarre assertion that it's un-American). One-Hundred And Five Years Ago In the long history of global communication there have been many critical developments, and one we probably haven't discussed much around here is airmail. It was on February 17th, 1911 that the first unofficial airmail delivery took place (by an airplane, that is — there had been some deliveries by balloon and, of course, pigeon in the past). It was followed the next day by the first official airmail flight.

This week, we've got a lineup of crowdfunded fun with three high-tech toys, only one of which is designed primarily for kids (and it's the most mature and productive of the three). FDL-1 The foam dart arms race continues with the FDL-1, which may be the most fearsome contender yet. It's a high-power, fully-automatic robotic dart launcher that can be configured as a standalone turret or a handheld blaster. But the truly cool part is how it's made: apart from the electronic guts, the entire thing can be produced with most average hobbyist 3D printers with a 6" cube build size (not just high-end professional numbers). All of the schematics, instructions and software is open source and/or Creative Commons ShareAlike, so upon release the FDL-1 will be free and easy for anyone to build and modify. In the mean time, its 3D-printed construction also enables several ways to order one on Kickstarter at different tiers (though the prices of all three are high): as a 3D printing kit that includes components and filament, as an assembly kit with components and pre-printed pieces, or as a fully assembled unit. Kamibot Though I'm sure there are plenty of kids who wouldn't mind getting their hands on an FDL-1, it's a pretty advanced project with a price tag of several hundred dollars to boot. In the mean time, there's the Kamibot: a papercraft robot kit designed to teach kids to code. To keep things at a beginner's level, the robot itself is a single pre-made unit based on open source Arduino, with IR and ultrasound sensors, multicolor LEDs, and a single servo in addition to its dual-motor drive. It's wirelessly controllable and, more importantly, highly programmable via a robust drag-and-drop "learn to code" interface. To keep things fun and interesting for kids, it also has a bunch of papercraft templates for building cool-looking skins on top of the robot itself, from tanks to Frankenstein. Immersit "Moving seats" that rise and fall and tilt and sway according to what's on screen were a staple of Universal Studios when I went there as a kid, and if you'd asked me then (or yesterday, for that matter) whether that technology would be coming to the living room anytime soon, I'd probably have dismissed the possibility. Well, the Immersit has shown otherwise: it's a home system that adds motion and vibration feedback for video games to just about any sofa. It works with PC, X-Box and Playstation and is preconfigured to respond to 120+ games, not to mention a whole bunch of movies (it works with plain old video, too). For games, the motion is based on various signals detected from the game, and can be configured at a granular level to change what motions go with what game actions. For movies, the team is using a combination of software and human adjustment to create motion codes for various movies; the Immersit detects the movie being played, and looks up the appropriate motion track. As with all such devices, it has to be tried to be properly evaluated, and I'd be pretty dubious about dropping $700+ on one without doing so — but the reviews from those who've had the chance are so far pretty positive.

I guess this isn't that surprising, but as the big legal fight heated up this week between Apple and the Justice Department over whether or not Apple can be forced to create a backdoor to let the FBI access the contents of Syed Farook's iPhone, all of the major Presidential candidates have weighed in... and they're all wrong. Donald Trump is getting the most attention. Starting earlier this week he kept saying that Apple should just do what the FBI wants, and then he kicked it up a notch this afternoon saying that everyone should boycott Apple until it gives in to the FBI. Apparently, Trump doesn't even have the first clue about the actual issue at stake, in terms of what a court can compel a company to do, and what it means for our overall security.

I guess this isn't that surprising, but as the big legal fight heated up this week between Apple and the Justice Department over whether or not Apple can be forced to create a backdoor to let the FBI access the contents of Syed Farook's iPhone, all of the major Presidential candidates have weighed in... and they're all wrong. Donald Trump is getting the most attention. Starting earlier this week he kept saying that Apple should just do what the FBI wants, and then he kicked it up a notch this afternoon saying that everyone should boycott Apple until it gives in to the FBI. Apparently, Trump doesn't even have the first clue about the actual issue at stake, in terms of what a court can compel a company to do, and what it means for our overall security.

We already discussed the many issues with the DOJ's motion to compel Apple to create a backdoor to let them brute force the passcode on Syed Farook's iPhone. However, eagle-eyed Chris Soghoian caught something especially interesting in a footnote. Footnote 7, on page 18 details four possible ways that Apple and the FBI had previously discussed accessing the content on the device without having to undermine the basic security system of the iPhone, and one of them only failed because Farook's employers reset the password after the attacks, in an attempt to get into the device. The key line:

Some food additives can be dangerous to public health -- such as adding melamine to infant formula. So understandably, government agencies policing food safety should focus on health issues related to food additives and food poisioning. But there are perfectly safe food additives that are just aimed at increasing the profits of food distributors, and it looks like Americans might want to research their cheese suppliers a bit more closely.

While everyone's waiting for Apple's response (due late next week) to the order to create a backdoor that would help the FBI brute force Syed Farook's work iPhone, the DOJ wasted no time in further pleading its own case, with a motion to compel. I've gone through it and it's one of the most dishonest and misleading filings I've seen from the DOJ -- and that's saying something. Let's dig in a bit:

Two months ago, five San Francisco police officers surrounded a man armed with a knife and shot him 21 times. In response, the police department has introduced reforms meant to keep this sort of "interaction" to a minimum in the future. On the positive side, the reform efforts include training that will hopefully lead to fewer tense situations being resolved by officers emptying their weapons in the direction of their target.

It's hard to imagine in the depths of this frigid New York winter, but last summer the city seemed to be in the grips of a Times Square Problem. Costumed characters -- and the relative newcomers, painted topless women -- were declared a public enemy, begriming the otherwise idyllic tourist mecca of midtown. But the NYPD, tasked with enforcing this mandate, had a problem: with only about one crime reported per day in Times Square, there's not a lot to actually enforce. So, as Techdirt and others reported at the time, the Department tried to get IP law to step in. Posessed of a legal theory that wouldn't have survived much scrutiny, Commissioner Bill Bratton (or one of his employees) approached Disney and Marvel, asking them to sue the costumed performers for copyright infringement. The companies declined. We know all this because Bratton confirmed it to media outlets last August. In CNN:

Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance can't stop griping about phone encryption. He's basically a one-issue politician at this point. His creaky platform is the coming criminal apocalypse, currently being ushered in by smartphone manufacturers. The only person complaining more about phone encryption is FBI Director James Comey, but in Comey's defense, his jurisdiction is the whole of the United States. Vance has only his district, but it encompasses the NYPD -- a police force that often seems to view itself as the pinnacle of American policing.

Amazingly, there are still some people out there who insist that copyright is never used for censorship. But an even bigger concern is how more and more people are looking at the ability to censor via copyright as a feature, not a bug, and are interested in expanding that right. Most bizarre of all, we've seen a number of people, who insist that they're "online activists" who want to stop bullying and trolling, advocating for expanding DMCA style takedowns to trollish behavior.

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In the past couple of days, you may have heard various claims regarding the whole Apple encryption backdoor debate saying things like "but Apple has unlocked iPhones 70 times before." I've seen a bunch of people tweeting and linking to such claims, and it keeps coming up. And it's bullshit. The 70 times that Apple helped law enforcement before were totally different situations involving unencrypted information where Apple had the ability to extract from the phone because it wasn't encrypted. That's kind of the whole point here. Yes, of course, Apple can and does provide access to information that it can easily access. In fact, in this very case the FBI submitted a warrant and was able to get all of the information from the unencrypted aspect of Farook Syed's iCloud account: That's very, very, very, very, very, very different from arguing that because the company was willing to hand over that unencrypted data that Apple had full access to, that it's the same kind of thing as building a hacking tool that undermines the foundations of encryption -- and would set a precedent basically allowing a judge to order any company to backdoor and destroy their encryption.

In California, the FBI is hoping to force Apple to write a hacking tool for it so it can access the contents of an iPhone. Further up the coast in Washington, the compelling force is moving in the opposite direction. The attorney representing a man swept up during the FBI's two-week stint as sysadmins for a child porn server has just had a motion granted that would force the agency to turn over details on the hacking tool it deployed.

We live in a world where a 16-year-old who goes by the handle of "penis" on Twitter can dive into the servers of two of America's most secure federal agencies and fish out their internal files.

For fifteen years now, companies like AT&T and Time Warner Cable (and their various PR and policy tendrils) have whined incessantly about the "burdensome regulations" that saddle the U.S. broadband industry. Less regulation, they argue, will pave the path to broadband nirvana, opening the door to immense innovation and more competition in the sector. So Louisville recently set about reworking its city broadband ordinances to streamline both the pole attachment and franchise agreement processes dramatically, something you'd assume would thrill both companies.

Techdirt has been writing about the question of what constitutes personal information in an online context for over half a decade. A recent decision in Australia, reported by the Guardian, suggests that the matter is far from settled around the world. The case concerns a journalist, Ben Grubb, who has been trying to get his personal data from the mobile phone company he uses, Telstra. Initially, the Australian privacy commissioner ruled that Telstra had failed to comply with local privacy laws when it refused to hand over the data, but that decision was overturned on appeal by an administrative appeals tribunal (AAT) on the following grounds:

The Nature vs Nurture debate may never end, but it could become more interesting as researchers quantify the Nature aspects with genetics (and epigenetics and microbiome information and ...). But we've really only just started to learn about the vast genetic world of biology. We still have a lot to learn from simple fruit flies, so we're not about to crack the enormous number of genomes that exist (or that could even be synthesized). Here are just a few genomes that scientists have started playing with.

The FCC voted 3-2 today to begin dismantling the cable industry's long-standing monopoly over ye olde set top cable box. As noted previously, the FCC is pushing a proposal that would require cable operators make their programming accessible to third-party set top manufacturers, without requiring the use of a CableCARD. The goal is to create competition in the set top box market, giving consumers a choice of better and cheaper gear, in the same way consumers can buy their own cable modems. 99% of consumers currently pay about $231 annually in rental fees for hardware that's generally worth about half that much.

Everyone's talking about the big legal fight that magistrate judge Sheri Pym has kicked off by ordering Apple to build a backdoor into an iPhone to get around security tools that would block attempts to decrypt the contents of the phone. As some are noting, if the ruling is not overturned it could force Congress to change the law. Over the last year or so, it had become clear that Congress did not support laws that mandate backdoors. Yes, some in Congress -- including Senators Richard Burr, Dianne Feinstein and John McCain -- have been pushing for such legislation, but most have admitted that there aren't nearly enough votes in support of that, and there are many in Congress who recognize the ridiculousness of such a law. A year ago, a congressional hearing made it clear that there was a ton of skepticism in Congress about ordering backdoors.

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Of all the arguments for the idea that the government should be able to force Apple to whip up a backdoor for law enforcement, the worst hasn't come from the government. Instead, it's been delivered by The Guardian's San Francisco-based technology reporter, Nellie Bowles.

So... over the past couple days, plenty of folks (including us) have reported that the backdoor demanded by the FBI (and currently granted by a magistrate judge) would likely work on the older iPhone model in question, the iPhone 5C, but that it would not work on modern iPhones that have Apple's "Secure Enclave" -- basically a separate chip that stores the key. Plenty of reports -- including the Robert Graham post that we linked to, and a story by Bruce Schneier -- suggested that an attempt to follow through with the FBI's request in the presence of the Secure Enclave would effectively eliminate the key and make decryption nearly impossible.

If you like messing around with cameras and photo-editing tools, it might be time to check out a light field camera. For just $79.99, you can play around with a First Generation Lytro 16GB Camera that generates an image file that can be adjusted and re-focused after you take a shot. With a microlens array, the Lytro takes in more information about the light coming from all distances in the picture. Download the photos, and with the Lytro app, you can re-focus shots, view them in "3D" or change the perspective. Join some light field enthusiasts who are hacking this camera (or just hack your old DSLR). This Lytro camera stores up to 750 photos, and it weighs under 1 pound for easy portability.

In early November, the "final text" of the TPP was finally released. The USTR even posted the thing to Medium, pretending that after years of secrecy it was now being transparent. As we've been told time and time again, the final document is not open to any changes. The only thing left to do was a "legal scrub" which is a final process in which the lawyers comb through the document word by word, basically to make sure there are no typos or out-and-out errors. The legal scrub is not when any substantial changes can be made.

During a White House press briefing on Wednesday, Press Secretary Josh Earnest apparently kept brushing aside questions about the order to Apple to remove certain security features that would enable the FBI to brute force the passcode and decrypt the contents of Syed Farook's iPhone. However, eventually he insisted that the DOJ is not asking for a backdoor: