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Well, this is disappointing in the extreme. The NY Times is a famous defender of free speech, and has been a key player in many important free speech battles. And now it's filed a ridiculously petty lawsuit claiming copyright infringement over some thumbnail images of NYT's covers in a book (ht Rebecca Tushnet for blogging about this). The book in question is War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict*. The asterisk then reads *(in which the author explains why he no longer reads The New York Times). Here's the cover: As you might have already figured out, the book is an exploration, by author David Shields, of how the NYT has a history of glorifying war with the images it puts on the front page. The book was a bit controversial, and as the Mother Jones link in the previous sentence shows, not only is it somewhat selective in choosing certain images while ignoring others, it also appears to have a very subjective view of what photos are too glamorous for war (some appear to be pretty unglamorous).

You really can't find a pair of cozier bosom buddies than AT&T and the NSA. Long before Snowden, whistleblowers like 22-year AT&T employee Mark Klein highlighted (pdf) how AT&T was duplicating fiber streams, effectively providing the NSA with its own mirror copy of every shred of data that touched the AT&T network. More recent documents have also highlighted AT&T's "extreme willingness" to help, whether that involves having its employees act as intelligence analysts themselves, or giving advice to the government on the best ways to skirt, dance around, or smash directly through privacy and surveillance law.

In which we learn the Idaho State Police Department isn't so much interested in law enforcement as it is with easy wins.

We just reported on a good ruling in Canada that threw out a criminal (yes, criminal) harassment case over what appeared to be a somewhat ridiculous Twitter spat. As we noted, basically no one came out of the spat looking particularly good, but to argue that such a spat should be criminal seemed ridiculous no matter how you looked at it. In the ruling, the judge did find that the tweets sent by Greg Elliott were harassing, but that it wasn't criminal because of the circumstances, including the fact that it was a public discussion and many of the tweets involved Elliott trying (perhaps aggressively) to defend himself against attacks against himself. However, as the very first commenter on our post pointed out, and which other reporters have now reported as well, at least one of the tweets that the judge pointed to as an example of Elliott's aggressive language actually came from a parody account.

Ashkat Rathi at Quartz points to an interesting algorithm developed by Michael Kearns of the University of Pennsylvania -- one that might give the government something to consider when conducting surveillance. It gauges the possibility of non-targets inadvertently being exposed during investigations, providing intelligence/investigative agencies with warnings that perhaps other tactics should be deployed.

Plastics are incredibly useful materials. Unfortunately, being extremely durable also means plastics are annoyingly persistent in the environment as pollution. Less than 10% of plastic gets recycled, so the rest either ends up in landfills -- or floats into waterways to the ocean. We'll probably figure out some way to make use of landfill materials someday, but it'll be much harder to clean up the oceans if we continue at the rate we're going.

The city of Chicago has decided it's not going to wait for a judge to order it to release video footage depicting another unarmed person being shot by one of its police officers. It has released surveillance video showing Cedric Chatman being killed by Officer Kevin Fry. Fry claimed Chatman was carrying a gun. It turned out to be an iPhone box, allegedly taken from the victim of a carjacking.

Up in Baltimore, where law enforcement Stingray device use hit critical mass faster and more furiously than anywhere else in the country (to date...) with the exposure of 4,300 deployments in seven years, the government is still arguing there's no reason to bring search warrants into this.

Honey badger may not care, but "comedic narrator" Christopher Gordon certainly does. The voice behind viral "Honey Badger Don't Care" video is suing (yet another) entity, alleging that Papyrus Recycled Greeting, Inc. infringed on his trademarks with its line of honey badger greeting cards.

Just about a year ago, the FCC voted to raise the base definition of broadband from 4 Mbps downstream, 1 Mbps upstream -- to 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream. This, of course, annoyed the nation's mega providers, since the higher standard highlights the lack of competition and next-generation upgrades in countless markets. It especially annoyed the nation's phone companies, given that the expensive, sub-6 Mbps DSL foisted upon millions of customers can no longer even technically be called broadband.

A few decades ago, Bill Gates got involved in something of a "side project" in which he tried to gain control over the licensing rights of tons of photographs and artwork, in a project that was eventually called Corbis. Gates had a vision of licensing artwork to special digital frames in people's homes, but eventually it shifted into a standard photo licensing service. Late last week, the news broke that Gates had finally sold Corbis to a Chinese firm called Visual China Group. Part of the deal is that Corbis' main competitor, Getty Images (which is fairly well-known for its copyright trolling) will get to handle all licensing on Corbis images outside of China for a period of 10 years. Considering that this effectively gives Getty control over its largest rival's library, I wonder if the DOJ may take an interest in the deal on anti-trust grounds.

Prop up your smartphones, tablets or cameras anywhere you want with the $35 Dundabunga Universal Unipod Stand. It twists and bends to let you position your device any way you choose, whether on a flat surface or around a tree branch. It attaches to your devices via magnets. Fold it up and take it with you for a handy stand when you want one.

The NSA may know lots of stuff about lots of people, but it's still fairly clueless about how the world works. Documents obtained by Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski show the NSA was shocked to find it hadn't been portrayed more favorably in a major motion picture.

As you may recall, late last year Australia put into effect a wonderfully ambitious data retention law that required ISPs in the country to do... well... something involving data retention. The problems began immediately, with ISPs unsure of exactly when they were supposed to start collecting all of this data, as the law allowed for some to petition to delay implementing the data collection, but the government hadn't bothered to get back to many of them. Never mind what would happen once this same inept government actually received the mountains of data it had requested.

Last summer, we wrote about a troubling criminal case up in Canada, exploring whether or not a Twitter fight constituted criminal harassment. The details are long and complex and I tried to summarize them in the last post so if you want more details go there. However, the super short version was as follows:

In 2013, it was revealed the DOJ had added First Amendment-trampling to its always-cavalier treatment of the Fourth Amendment by gathering journalists' phone records. Under the guise of investigating leaks, the DOJ crossed over into totalitarian territory. Following the backlash, the DOJ "revised" its rules on surveilling the press.

We've got another double winner this week! This time, it's That Anonymous Coward who responded to MTV's claim that it will start focusing more on music with a small prediction that scored first place for both funny and insightful:

Five Years Ago There was lots of grappling over censorship this week in 2011. While the European Commission was planning draconian new "anti-piracy" laws, the head of the ICE was defending the recent domain seizures and getting some distressing support from a wide variety of companies (Senator Ron Wyden, at least, called these companies out for supporting censorship). We also learned more worrisome details about the settlement over the unauthorized Catcher In The Rye sequel, saw Zynga start turning into a trademark bully, and watched as Righthaven started suing message board posters in its ongoing crusade. Also of note this week in 2011: the world was learning the fascinating details of the Stuxnet worm, and the FCC gave the okay to the Comcast/NBC Universal merger. Ten Years Ago Five years earlier in 2006, similar censorship battles were still unfolding. One big question (that has never been entirely solved) was simply that of jurisdictions online. Major League Baseball was fighting to claim ownership of facts, and the organizers of the 2012 London Olympics were getting an extreme head start — which is what you need when your plan is to rewrite the host country's laws to give you special censorship powers. And speaking of bold legislative changes, Hollywood made an amusing and telling attempt to explicitly preserve the past by protecting "customary historic use of broadcast content by consumers". That's what happens when an industry fears innovation — that, and theaters boycotting a film because it will be released on DVD at the same time. Fifteen Years Ago Last week, we talked about the hype over what would eventually turn out to be the Segway — and by this week in 2001, the inventor was already struggling to manage expectations. Other hypes, such as that around online dating and the wireless web, were also disappointing people. Affiliate programs were losing some steam too, with both Google and the Wall Street Journal ditching theirs. The FBI was decidedly not immune to the hype of some script kiddies in a chat room, and the people behind famous the almost (and might-as-well-have-been) vaporware Duke Nukem game were so eager to exercise control over their hype that they went intellectual property crazy. Thirty-Five Years Ago Since we're venturing back through time, how about a nod to one of the most famous vessels for that very task? It was on January 21st, 1981 that the first iconic DeLorean DMC-12 rolled off the line in Belfast.

This week, we're taking a look at a trio of interesting crowdfunded offerings that each take a lot of craftsmanship of entirely different sorts. JS Shoes This project comes from a designer with a pretty hefty portfolio, and claims to be a world's first: not 3D-printed but rather 3D-knitted shoes, made on demand using the latest automated knitting machines. The result of this process is an extremely lightweight shoe that is manufactured with zero wasted material, and it unlocks some interesting design options: not only can a pair of shoes be customized, each shoe can be designed separately. Will people want to experiment with asymmetrical footwear? Nixie Tube Clocks This project comes from another experienced designer with a specific vision, but this time it's one of retro-futurism and handcrafted art. Two Nixie Tube Clocks have already been funded on Kickstarter, and now there's a third design in the works alongside reissues of the others. Though they aren't cheap, they certainly are works of art, and they aren't assembled from cheap parts or even inauthentic ones: the clocks use genuine Soviet-era vacuum tubes sourced from Russia and Ukraine, and are hand-built from a selection of premium hardwoods then finished with custom etch-work in brass and steel. The Boy And The Computer Finally, we've got a veteran programmer offering up something a little different: an educational graphic novel based around real-world coding, hacking and hardware. The pages shown so far look great, seamlessly bringing actual information about technology (and refreshingly accurate depictions of it) into the comic book format. Born of the challenges the artist faced trying to teach his own kids about computer science, it looks like a labor of love that should be worth checking out.

A common lament these days is that people have no real political power. Yes, elections take place, but after that, politicians just seem to do what they want, with little concern for what the public really thinks about the laws that they push through, as many stories here on Techdirt indicate. In particular, there is generally no mechanism to cancel a new law except by waiting for the next elections, and voting for a party that might repeal it. Often that's not an option, which means the public has no way to stop harmful legislation from going into effect. Most assume that's just the way things are, but the example of Switzerland shows that's not the case. Citizens there have a number of options if they want to influence politicians directly. For example, when new laws are passed, they can collect signatures in support of a formal referendum on the measure:

Ron Wyden, Martin Heinrich and Mazie Hirono -- all members of Senate Intelligence Committee -- have sent a letter to the President demanding an official apology from CIA head John Brennan for the agency's surveillance of Senate staffers working on the Torture Report.

If you're young enough, you were only taught about the eight planets in our solar system -- and possibly that there was a mysterious 'Planet X' or planet Tyche beyond Neptune. More recently, there's a new ninth planet proposal from the same folks who re-named Pluto as a dwarf planet. Check out these links on Pluto and this new ninth planet that might redefine the outer edge of our solar system.

We had just relayed a story via the BBC about an elementary school kid in the UK earning a visit to his home from the authorities after writing in an English assignment that he lived in a "terrorist house", when he reportedly was trying to say he lived in a "terraced house." The crux of this story was that the UK's Anti-Terrorism law, which requires that school teachers act as surveillance agents for the state in an attempt to weed out future-radicalized will-be-terrorists is a policy built for unintended chaos, given that teachers are neither trained nor properly equipped to fulfill this role. The resulting visit to the boy's home by the authorities from a misspelled word was billed as an example of this overreach by government.

The NSA has released its first post-USA Freedom Act "Transparency Report," highlighting the changes made to its bulk records collection as a result of the legislation. The NSA is now limited to approaching service providers for records using RAS (Reasonable Articulable Suspicion)-approved selectors, rather than simply gathering everything and sorting through it at its convenience.

Usually when we talk about the Oscars behaving badly about intellectual property, it has to do with either its combat against film piracy or its rather stunning tradition of facilitating it. What's clear in most of those stories, though, is that when the Motion Picture Academy decides to sink its collective teeth into something, it is bulldog-ish in its unwillingness to let it go. It seems that this is the case on matters of trademark, as well. Unimaginably petty trademark matters.

The administration is trying to draft tech companies into the War on Terror. Encryption -- despite being given an unofficial "hands-off" by President Obama -- is still being debated, with FBI Director James Comey and a few law enforcement officials leading the charge up the hill they apparently want to die on.

Ad blocking and the software that powers it seems to be in the news lately, and for all the wrong reasons. Recently, several prominent sites have attacked ad blockers in several different ways, ranging from lawsuits on the extreme end down to simply withholding content. These attempts are all misguided in the same way, however, in that they attack the software that readers find useful rather than attacking the core problem that makes users turn to ad blockers in the first place: incredibly crappy and occasionally downright dangerous advertising inventory.

Darlene Love, the voice on the Phil Spector-produced hit "He's A Rebel," is suing Google and its ad producer, 72 & Sunny, for violating her publicity rights by using a song she recorded in one of its ads without her permission.

Keep tabs on your home while you're away with the $119 Oco Wireless HD Security Camera. This super simple home monitoring system delivers a live, 720p HD video feed right to your smartphone. It comes with infrared night vision, two-way talk, and sound and motion detection. The Oco Camera also comes with one year free of 1-Day Cloud video archive and a $100 credit to use the next year for the same service.

If you're a cable customer you've probably been met with at least one cable retrans blackout. It's what happens when broadcasters and cable operators can't behave like adults and agree on rates for a new programming contract, so instead decide that whining and punishing paying customers is the best course of action. The feuds usually involve months of public bickering, public announcements, ads and on-screen tickers declaring that the other guy is the villain, then blacked out content for paying customers, who almost never see refunds for the inconvenience.

If all goes according to these legislators' plans, Flyover Country will have something the coasts don't: encrypted cell phones. Because there's always room for one more bad idea, California assemblyman Jim Cooper is following up New York assemblyman Matthew Titone's call for a ban on encrypted phones with one of his own.

The Supreme Court's Rileydecision made it clear: law enforcement cannot search cell phones without a warrant. Seems pretty straightforward. Cell phones aren't mere "containers" -- they contain a great deal of information that has historically been afforded a reasonable expectation of privacy. Get a warrant.

We've already talked a couple of times about the intersection with the UK's disastrous Counter-Terrorism and Security Act and its intersection with the country's educational system. As part of its effort to weed out terrorists, the UK tasked teachers with keeping a watchful eye on their students to try to identify those that would be radicalized in the future, a concept that sounds like something out of Airstrip One rather than England. Shortly thereafter it was discovered that a software package that teachers had been given to help with this was exploitable in the typically laughable ways. But the tech isn't the only shortfall here. As one would expect when you take a group of people whose profession has in absolutely no way prepared them to act as counter-terrorism psychologists and ask them to be just that, it turns out that the human intelligence portion of this insane equation is off by several integers as well.

Body cameras are working as intended. Of course, this is a very limited sampling and the fact that anything happened at all to the abusive cop was reliant on him being either too stupid or too arrogant to shut his body-worn camera off.

Textbooks are surprisingly expensive items. The classic example is an introductory math textbook: where the math hasn't changed significantly for over a hundred years, but the price of the newest edition seems to suggest that there should be a lot of new material added to the book. Sure, there's a used book market -- and even rental books nowadays -- but the trend of rising textbook prices has some students and faculty questioning some of the publishing industry's practices.

A former cop is trying to legislate some First Amendment-violating protection for his blue-clad brothers. Everyone's carrying a camera these days and Arizona Senator John Kavanaugh wants them to be as far away as possible from police officers performing their public duties. Ken White (aka Popehat) summarizes the proposed legislation for FaultLines.

You may recall that Activision's Call of Duty games have already been the subject of a lawsuit by a historical figure. Previously, notorious figure Manuel Noriega brought a publicity rights case against the game company in the United States, claiming that the game depicted him without his permission. Pretty much everyone agreed that Activision was on solid First Amendment grounds in depicting a historical figure, including Rudy Giuliani, who galloped in to represent Activision and quickly got the case summarily dismissed.

Last week, NBC executive Alan Wurtzel boldly claimed that Netflix and YouTube weren't threats to traditional cable. His only evidence? Data purchased from a company named Symphony that guesstimates Netflix's closely guarded viewership numbers. That data actually showed Netflix's viewership numbers for its original series are impressive, but found that viewership wanes a little once users get done binge watching. That's it. The data didn't really support Wurtzel's claim that Netflix doesn't pose a threat to traditional cable, NBC was just boasting that it had figured out Netflix's viewership tallies.

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.

Have we mentioned lately that when it comes to the so-called "internet of things," security is an afterthought? Whether it's your automobile, your refrigerator or your tea kettle, so-called "smart" internet of things devices are consistently and alarmingly showing that they're anything but. If these devices aren't busy giving intruders access to your networks and passwords, they're often making life more difficult than so-called dumb devices. Last week, for example, the popular Nest smart thermostat simply stopped working after a software update, resulting in thousands of customers being unable to heat their homes.

As law enforcement and politicians still keep pushing American companies to backdoor encryption, making the technology less secure and more dangerous for everyone, no one has explained how this will actually help in stopping terrorists from communicating secretly. Back in December, the Open Technology Institute released a paper that detailed how so many encrypted messaging systems were either open source or not controlled by US companies. It even took a WSJ report on the messaging apps that ISIS apparently was "recommending" to people and noted how most of them are not controllable by US laws: And, of course, it should come as little surprise that some security folks are reporting that they've spotted a new secure messaging app that appears to have been created by ISIS itself:

Pay what you want for the Complete 2016 Coder Bundle. The basic bundle includes two courses on Android Marshmallow and Ruby programming. If you beat the average price paid, you gain access to eight other courses. These cover topics like building Apple Watch apps, AngularJS, HTML, CSS, web development and much more.

About once a week now you'll see a legacy broadcast executive take to the media to try and "change the narrative" surrounding cord cutting. Usually this involves claiming that things are nowhere near as bad as the data clearly shows, with a little bit of whining about an unfair media for good measure. ESPN, which has lost 7 million subscribers in the last two years, has been particularly busy on this front. The broadcast giant has been trying to argue that cord cutting worries (which caused Disney stock to lose $22 billion in value in just two days) are simply part of some kind of overblown, mass hallucination.

Over the last few weeks, there's been increasing focus on what "else" Silicon Valley can do in the fight against ISIS. Backdooring encryption is a dumb idea that won't work and will make everyone less safe. So, a second idea keeps getting floated: what if we just stopped letting ISIS use the internet. Hell, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump supported the idea recently. And then you have some wacky law professors suggesting the same thing.

Last year, you might recall that Netflix took some heat for striking zero rating deals with Australian ISPs, exempting Netflix content from broadband usage caps. Australia was a relatively unique scenario in that the cost of transit is so high, most big content services had struck similar deals, and Netflix didn't want to put itself at a disadvantage in the newly launched Australian market by stubbornly holding on to neutrality principles. Still, it's worth recalling what Netflix said after a few weeks of criticism:

Years back, Georgia dentist Gordon Austin was indicted on 12 counts "with multiple counts of simple battery, aggravated assault, and cruelty to children." The details of the case were pretty horrifying, involving claims of Medicare fraud, along with multiple claims that Austin hit his patients when they would complain loudly (apparently after the anesthesia did not work properly). When he was indicted, the local news covered the story as you can see below: That video was uploaded by a user named "gordonaustinsacoward," and it was uploaded on March 1, 2009, while the case was still ongoing. Eventually, Austin appeared to have worked out a plea deal, in which he pled guilty to Medicare fraud, while the assault and cruelty to children charges were dropped. His dental license was pulled and he got five years probation, along with $15,000 in fines.

Sometimes the courts realize today's smartphones can't be reasonably compared to anything else people have historically carried with them, like wallets, address books and the contents of their pockets. In the Supreme Court's Rileydecision, it noted that searching a smartphone is roughly analogous to searching someone's house -- people's entire livesare contained in these devices. Hence, the warrant requirement, which turns phones from a "container" to the most sacrosanct domain under the Fourth Amendment.

One aspect of the open educational resources movement (OER) is open textbooks that are free to use -- content in the public domain or with copyright terms that require only attribution (or attribution and share-alike clauses). Open textbooks have taken some time to get written, reviewed and adopted -- but now that there are hundreds of these books available, students should be able to use them freely and benefit from (and even contribute to) these educational materials.

[Update: as has been pointed out by Ars Technica's Joe Mullin, Judge Mosman is not a chief judge yet and could not have signed those orders. As was correctly noted by Fight Copyright Trolls [and in the part I quoted!], these are only drafts. So, these have not been implemented at this point, but appear to be in the works. My apologies for raising the hopes of those on the receiving end of Crowell's tactics and for failing to note that these were drafts in my post.]