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Marty McFly visited us in the year 2015 in the Back To The Future franchise... but we still don't have flying cars or Mr. Fusion generators. There are some pretty cool DeLoreans out there that people have modified, but no "flux capacitor"-level upgrades, unfortunately. Fusion is making some slow progress, though. Check out a few of these baby steps towards a fusion generator. Just another 30 years or so....

LEGOs. Yes, the basic building block of our youthful imagination also holds a rather ugly over-protective side, in which it uses whatever tool happens to be nearest by to smash up any use of its products that it doesn't fully endorse. Which, when you think about it, is really weird for a company that makes products that are essentially all about imaginative uses. Children building their own colorful castle? Awesome! But an adult using LEGOs to create political art? Oh, no, no, no.

Over the summer, when the NFL and Yahoo inked a deal for a one-game test run of an NFL game exclusively streamed by a service provider, I tried to temper everyone's excitement. Baby steps, is what I called the deal, which it absolutely was. In many ways, the NFL either set this all up to minimize risk to its reputation and revenue, or set it up to fail, depending on who you believe. The game featured two teams expected to be bad, with followings and markets on the smaller side of the league, and the game was played overseas in the UK absurdly early in the morning in all the time zones state-side. That meant that the game would never have the viewership that a prime-time matchup between two good teams might have, but that probably worked for the NFL's test run, in that any failure would be minimized for all the reasons listed above.

Last month, as a feature of the Copia Institute, we kicked off our Content Creator of the Month series, in an attempt to profile content creators who are doing new and compelling things to embrace the internet in innovative ways. Here's the second post in that series..

Techdirt has been writing about open access for many years. The idea and practice are certainly spreading, but they're spreading more slowly than many in the academic world had hoped. That's particularly frustrating when you're a researcher who can't find a particular academic paper freely available as open access, and you really need it now. So it's no surprise that people resort to other methods, like asking around if anyone has a copy they could send. The Internet being the Internet, it's also no surprise that this ad-hoc practice has evolved into a formalized system, using Twitter and the hashtag #icanhazpdf to ask other researchers if they have a copy of the article in question. But what is surprising is that recently there have been two articles on mainstream sites that treat the approach as if it's really quite a reasonable thing to do. Here's Quartz:

Earlier this year, we wrote about a ridiculous lawsuit in Australia where Janice Duffy was suing Google because the search engine returned links to some Ripoff Report pages that Duffy claimed were defamatory. As we noted at the time, this is just a ridiculously misguided lawsuit on multiple levels. It's not targeting whoever wrote the supposedly defamatory material. It's not even targeting who hosted the supposedly defamatory material (which would be problematic enough). It's targeting... Google. Because it finds the supposedly defamatory material. After our story was published, Duffy took to Twitter to yell at us, but refused to provide any further details, other than to complain that we were trying to "humiliate" her.

Have you ever wanted to develop your own games? Learning Unity 3D, a game development tool used for mobile and web-based games, can get you well on your way to creating production-ready games. The Unity 5 Developer Course can help you master the skills needed with over 278 lectures and 49 hours of content for $35. You'll learn how to use object-oriented C# and how to utilize the free tools from Unity and Blender that are included in the bundle. By the end of the course, you'll have created 7 different 2D and 3D games and be ready to create the kind of games you've always wanted.

There's probably never been a greattime to be a security researcher, what with the attacks they suffer in response to their work, not to mention far too many corporations greeting the discovery of vulnerabilities with legal threats and criminal charges.

For many years now, the General Accounting Office has warned the FCC that if it's going to throw billions of dollars at giant ISPs, it might just want to track how that money is spent. GAO reports like this one from 2009 (pdf) noted that not only has the FCC historically done a dismal job at tracking subsidy spending, most government broadband policies have been based on flawed, incomplete or downright hallucinated data (just check out our $300 million US broadband map). In other words, for the better part of fifteen years our government not only didn't really know where broadband funding was needed, it couldn't be bothered to track if it was actually going there.

Two recent legislative efforts have been mounted to add police to the rolls of "disadvantaged" citizens in need of the additional shelter of "hate crime" laws. Hate crime laws are immediately problematic. They add additional punishments to criminal acts already punishable under existing laws. It's exactly the sort of thing justice isn't meant to be: vindictive. A murder is a murder, whether or not it was propelled by someone's underlying biases. A threat is a threat, no matter the threatener's personal views on race, marriage or human sexuality. Adding additional punishments solely because of a perceived motive serves no purpose other than to make those who support these laws feel like past racial/sexual wrongs are slowly being righted. The sinners of the present pay for the sins of the past sinners.

Two recent legislative efforts have been mounted to add police to the rolls of "disadvantaged" citizens in need of the additional shelter of "hate crime" laws. Hate crime laws are immediately problematic. They add additional punishments to criminal acts already punishable under existing laws. It's exactly the sort of thing justice isn't meant to be: vindictive. A murder is a murder, whether or not it was propelled by someone's underlying biases. A threat is a threat, no matter the threatener's personal views on race, marriage or human sexuality. Adding additional punishments solely because of a perceived motive serves no purpose other than to make those who support these laws feel like past racial/sexual wrongs are slowly being righted. The sinners of the present pay for the sins of the past sinners.

The DC Appeals Court has just come to an unfortunate conclusion: because terrorism exists, your rights as a citizen will not be upheld if you travel outside of the United States. This summary of the case is from Lawfare's David Ryan, whose article claims this is a "victory" for the DOJ, rather than a loss for the American public.

Suspicions confirmed (well, at least by the FBI…): the FBI has been flying its surveillance planes over cities, often at the behest of local law enforcement.

Dogs are often referred to as man's best friend, but it's not certain how this relationship developed in the first place. Did early humans purposefully domesticate dogs from their wild ancestors, or did we just stumble upon nearly tame dogs and develop a bond? Experiments such as the domesticated fox demonstrate that it's not too hard to tame certain animals in a relatively short period of time. Perhaps we're on the cusp of even more advanced domestication techniques, and hyper-intelligent parrots are just around the corner. GMO pets could be our next best friends.

After rejecting all the good privacy amendments to CISA, the Senate has now officially passed the legislation by a 74 to 21 vote. About the only "good" news is that the vote is lower than the 83 Senators who voted for cloture on it last week. Either way, the Senate basically just passed a bill that will almost certainly be used mainly for warrantless domestic surveillance, rather than any actual cybersecurity concern.

After pretty much vanishing from the public eye, Paul Ceglia's (he of the "I own 50% of Facebook" lawsuit) former attorney, Dean Boland, has resurfaced. Considering his handling of the issue that has prompted his reemergence into the public eye, he would have been better served by staying off the Google radar.

If you're a Techdirt regular, you probably know that there are some serious problems with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Drafted in 1986 with extremely broad language, the CFAA has grown into an easily abused law that lets prosecutors go after people for minor activities that don't meet any reasonable definition of hacking or computer fraud. This week, we discuss the utter mess that our hacking laws have become, and look into ways they might be fixed. 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.

In case you weren't already convinced that CISA is a surveillance bill masquerading as a cybersecurity bill, today the Senate rejected four separate amendments to the bill that attempted to better protect the privacy of Americans. Senator Wyden had an amendment to require the removal of personal information before information could be shared, which was voted down 55 to 41. Senator Heller had an amendment that was basically a backstop against the Wyden amendment, saying that if the Wyden amendment didn't pass, Homeland Security would be responsible for removing such personal information. That amendment also failed by a 49 to 47 vote. Senator Leahy had an amendment that would have removed FOIA exemptions in the bill (making it much less transparent how CISA was used). That amendment was voted down 59 to 37. Senator Franken then had an amendment that would have "tightened" the definition of cybersecurity threats, so that the shared information needed to be "reasonably likely" to cause damage, as opposed to the current "may" cause damage. And (you guess it, because you're good at this), it was also voted down by a 60 to 35 vote.

Well, the Library of Congress has now released its official exemptions to the DMCA's 1201 anti-circumvention rules, the ridiculous process known as the triennial review, and as was pretty much expected, it's a total mess. We'll have a more thorough look at it later, but after an initial read through of the document, it appears that the Library of Congress tried to please everyone and will likely end up pleasing no one. If you're unfamiliar with the process, under the DMCA, there's a part of the law, section 1201, which says that it's copyright infringement to bypass any kind of "technological protection method" (TPM) to access something, even if the reason you're circumventing the TPM is totally non-infringing. Basically, this says that if you put a digital lock on something, even if the lock is weak or stupid or for something totally unrelated to copyright law (such as blocking competition), you can use copyright law to stop anyone from getting around it. The concept is so stupid and so broad that even Congress realized it would be abused. But rather than fix it, it gave the Library of Congress this weird authorization to declare "exemptions" once every three years. So, basically, every three years people ask for exemptions (and each exemption granted in the past needs to be re-requested, and re-supported every three years). Then the Library of Congress climbs a mountain, thinks on it for a bit, and comes down the mountain declaring what is legal and what is not. It's an insane process.

Most folks have experienced the punched-in-the-gut feeling of losing their data, be it photos, music, term papers or work presentations. There are loads of options out there that rely on the cloud, but for those of us who'd like to keep things here on terra firma, the Monster Digital 128GB Solid-State Portable Hard Drive could be what we're looking for in backup storage. The sleekly designed drive weighs less than 8 ounces, packs easily and comes with an integrated USB 3.0 cable. The drive also comes with 256-bit AES Security encryption to give you a little protection from prying eyes should you leave the drive somewhere. It's on sale now for $44.99 (43% off).

After months of negotiations (read: ISP lawyer and lobbyist rewrites), the European Union has voted to approve new net neutrality rules (pdf) that for many nation states may be worse than having no net neutrality protections at all. As we've noted, the rules ignore zero rating, carve out massive loopholes for "specialized services," "class-based discrimination," and even include provisions allowing ISP throttling and discrimination provided it's addressing phantom congestion that hasn't even happened yet. In short, these rules effectively protect ISPs looking to creatively violate net neutrality, not European consumers.

A little more than a year ago you might recall that everybody's Netflix performance was in the toilet and the mega-ISPs were being blamed for it. In short, companies like Cogent, Level3 and Netflix all claimed large ISPs like Verizon had intentionally let their peering connections to some other networks saturate, contributing to sluggish Netflix streams. The goal, claimed Netflix and friends, was purportedly to make an extra buck by eliminating the long-standing practice of settlement-free peering, forcing Netflix to pay for direct interconnection to ISP networks if they wanted performance to return to normal.

Senator Ron Wyden -- who has been fighting back against secret laws expanding surveillance for years -- made it clear months ago that CISA was really "a surveillance bill by another name." Of course, if you just read the bill it might not appear that way, because you need to understand how it works with a variety of secret orders and surveillance authorities -- along with secret interpretations of the law. We've tried to piece together how CISA is filling in a big missing blank in what the intelligence community needs to conduct broad warrantless domestic surveillance on internet users (something that it has been restricted from doing in the past few years).

As far as trade agreements are concerned, the recent focus here on Techdirt and elsewhere has been on TPP as it finally achieved some kind of agreement -- what kind, we still don't know, despite promises that the text would be released as soon as it was finished. But during this time, TPP's sibling, TAFTA/TTIP, has been grinding away slowly in the background. It's already well behind schedule -- there were rather ridiculous initial plans to get it finished by the end of last year -- and there's now evidence of growing panic among the negotiators that they won't even get it finished by the end of President Obama's second term, which would pose huge problems in terms of ratification. One sign of that panic is that the original ambitions to include just about everything are being jettisoned, as it becomes clear that in some sectors -- cosmetics, for example -- the US and EU regulatory approaches are just too different to reconcile. Another indicator is an important leaked document obtained by the Guardian last week. It's the latest (29 September) draft proposal for the chapter on sustainable development. What emerges from every page of the document, embedded below, is that the European Commission is now so desperate for a deal -- any deal -- that it has gone back on just about every promise it made (pdf) to protect the environment and ensure that TTIP promoted sustainable development. Three environmental groups -- the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth Europe and PowerShift -- have taken advantage of this leak to offer an analysis of the European Commission's real intent in the environmental field. They see four key problems:

We talk so much here about silly trademark disputes, often times resulting in equally silly court rulings, that, every once in a while, it's probably worth the effort to point out when a court gets things exactly right. For this, we travel up to Canada, where a Federal Court judge presided over a trademark dispute between Pacific Western Brewing and Cerveceria del Pacifico over the branding of their brews. At issue was the labels on packaging for PWB's Pacific Pilsner and Cerveceria's Pacifico Clara. PWB argued at court that the branding and language was too similar and would confuse customers. Here are samples of each beer's branding.

The measurement of human intelligence is far from a settled science. IQ tests are very misleading, and unfortunately, some people assign far too much importance to IQ scores. There's plenty of room for improvement, but brain scans or a battery of cognitive skill tests probably shouldn't be used for employment or educational opportunities -- no matter how advanced we might think the tests might be. Still, there will probably be plenty of other misguided ideas for any data we have on people's intelligence.

Because there is almost no expectation of privacy in open areas -- which can include backyards and fenced-in land -- it's very difficult for a law enforcement agency to violate anyone's Fourth Amendment rights with aerial surveillance. Whether this is accomplished with a drone, plane or helicopter, the Supreme Court has held that any place that could theoretically be viewed by a member of the public can also be observed by a government agency. (From the Supreme Court's OTHER Riley decision -- this one from 1989.)

FBI director James Comey is now beclowning himself by endorsing the so-called "Ferguson Effect." Some major US cities are experiencing increases in violent crime, and law enforcement agencies are blaming this on the fallout from the Michael Brown shooting.

Last week, we noted that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (who has a bit of a history of really flubbing key tech issues), was downright angry that people were pushing back on his plans to expand the possible punishment under the widely abused Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Whitehouse pulled out the usual tropes, saying that the DOJ supports his amendment, and he couldn't understand why anyone could possibly be against ratcheting up punishment for "cyber criminals." Except, that shows an astounding level of ignorance on the part of Senator Whitehouse, because the CFAA is regularly used against people who most would not consider to be traditional "cyber criminals."

Did this sort of thing come about because someone at the nation's most hated agency whined that "everyone else was getting one?" Because there seems to be no logical explanation for this:

I've had a few conversations recently with people on Twitter who claim that CISA is "not a surveillance bill," claiming that they've read the bill and there's nothing about surveillance in it. It's true that the bill positions itself as nothing more than a "cybersecurity" bill that clarifies a few things and then provides some immunity for companies who "voluntarily" share information. However, as I've said in response, in order to understand why it's a surveillance bill, you have to look more closely at how CISA interacts with other laws and what the intelligence community is currently doing. Unfortunately, this isn't always easy, because part of what the intelligence community is doing and how they've interpreted other laws remains secret. But, as you've probably heard, some of that has been leaking out over the past few years.

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For almost a year now, a Wisconsin district attorney (now the state's Attorney General) has been trying to keep allegedly embarrassing footage of him from making its way into the hands/eyes of the public. Last October, while running for the State Attorney General's office, Brad Schimel first went to court to prevent his political opposition from doing this:

The DOJ has filed its response to Apple's claims that unlocking an iPhone 5 would be unduly burdensome. This ongoing dispute over an All Writs Act order (the act itself dates back to 1789) is also an ongoing dispute over the use of encryption-by-default on Apple phones running iOS 8 or higher.

For the past few years, much of the internet industry had been mostly silent on CISA, or vaguely for it, mainly because it would provide them immunity from liability if they share too much information with the government. However, as more details have come out about CISA, making it clear that it's a surveillance bill, rather than any sort of cybersecurity bill, the internet industry has finally, mostly come out against it. It started with Salesforce.com, after people started protesting a letter it had signed saying it favored "cybersecurity" legislation, but without naming CISA. In response, Salesforce came out directly and said that it did not support CISA. Soon after that, the BSA (the Business Software Alliance, which now prefers to just be called "The Software Alliance"), which had put together the letter Salesforce signed, said that it did not support CISA (or any of the other cybersecurity bills that have been introduced). Soon after that, CCIA, which represents a bunch of internet companies, came out directly against CISA, saying:

On Tuesday, the European Union is expected to vote on new net neutrality rules, the end result of months of debate between the European Commission, European Parliament, and the EU Council. Of course just like here in the States, heavy lobbying pressure by ISPs has the lion's share of politicians supporting loopholes that will let giant ISPs do pretty much everything they want. The rules at first glance look very similar to the flimsy, 2010 rules proposed in the U.S. back in 2010 -- allowing ISPs to engage in anti-competitive shenanigans -- provided the carrier vaguely insists it's for the safety and security of the network.

This week the UK went, as we put it, "full Orwell" with a plan to remove children from homes that it suspects might radicalize them. Plenty of people struggled to put their reaction to this into words, but That One Guy got there first and won the top spot for insightful with his response:

Five Years Ago This week in 2010, we saw lots of fights about various kinds of online behavior. The University of Calgary was told by a court that it can't sanction students for their Facebook comments, while the University of Kentucky's decision to ban a student newspaper from its sporting events was just begging for a legal challenge; Google was ordered to reveal the IP addresses of a bunch of mean YouTube commenters, while an infamous police officer from the G20 protests in Toronto was seeking to force them to do the same thing for him and a Broadway actor was starting the same crusade against Twitter; the owner of an anti-Ryanair website was forced to hand over his domain because he made a little bit of money, while the owner of a bedbug-tracking website was facing threats from angry hotel owners; one court rejected probation terms that banned a teenager from social networks, while another allowed criminal charges for violating Ticketmaster's terms of service to move forward (and a Supreme Court justice admitted he doesn't read EULAs and other fine print). Oh, and Gene Simmons decided it was time to somehow put Anonymous in jail. Ten Years Ago This week in 2005, we tried to figure out just what Rupert Murdoch's plan was for all the online media he was buying up, because it didn't really seem like he had one, though smarter online news businesses were realizing that the technology doesn't just change the medium, but the whole approach to reporting the news. Also in the list of things that needed (and still need) an entirely revamped approach: intellectual property. Also in 2005: India joined the list of countries objecting to Google Earth while a tragedy for its neighbor Pakistan demonstrated the good that satellite photos can do; anti-video-game-violence crusader Jack Thompson bailed on a challenge he issued to create a game for him while we wondered whether (serious, real) challenge competitions are the best way to jumpstart research; Netflix pretty much gave up on its plans to offer movie downloads because of licensing issues and, in other news that surprised nobody, it turned out tech companies in general are magnets for lawsuits. Fifteen Years Ago By this week in 2000, the dot-com bust was a reality nobody could shut up about, so everyone had to get in on saying wise (read: obvious) things about it. Some were listing out their reasons for the bubble and its bursting as though nobody knew, some were cataloguing the "lessons learned" as though they weren't entirely clear, and some were reiterating investment fundamentals as though they were new ideas. Cooler heads were pointing out that the markets as a whole weren't so bad; others were taking a look at the fallen VCs of the Valley; and some were showering dot-coms with sympathy in the form of free advertising. Did the bust mean the tech industry was out of ideas? For the answer to that, see the past fifteen years. Sixty-Nine Years Ago Today, we have a wealth of photos of the earth from space, in stunning high resolution and in almost every set of conditions imaginable. But it was all the way back on October 24th, 1946 that a V-2 rocket launched from New Mexico and returned bearing the very first photo of the earth from space that human beings would ever see:

The "one-man band" has come a long way. What used to require an elaborate (and heavy) suit of instruments can now be accomplished with central instrument and a handful of digital devices — but this we're looking at something that takes yet another step: the ACPAD, an "electronic orchestra" for your acoustic guitar. The Good The standard approach for a guitarist who wants to incorporate the endless world of digital music into a live performance involves either an elaborate setup of looping and effects pedals, an iPad, or both — but the ACPAD puts such capabilities right on the guitar itself. It's an extremely thin, adhesive control board that attaches to the face of the guitar so it's easy to rapidly trigger controls between strums. It connects to a computer either via USB or wirelessly, and communicates using the MIDI protocol so it works with all standard music software (Ableton being a popular choice) and all the buttons and controls can be assigned to custom functions. It's not cheap, but that speaks to the quality of its construction, especially the buttons that manage to be highly pressure-sensitive despite the device being so thin (it's easy to envision a much cheaper version of the ACPAD that is too clunky and unresponsive to be practical). The possibility for experimental guitarists, who are always pushing the envelope of sound and song construction, are huge. The Bad This isn't exactly a "bad" thing, but it's an important thing to keep in mind: as with all MIDI devices, the capabilities of the ACPAD come down to what you're plugging it into. With a fast computer and good music software, it's a powerhouse; without those things, it's a very thin brick. The digital music world commonly splits itself up into two camps: those who focus on using MIDI to run everything through a central computer, and those who prefer standalone digital devices like pedal-based looping stations. The ACPAD is definitively a tool for the former. The Complimentary Apart from a computer running Ableton or something similar, there's another piece of the puzzle that isn't required but unlocks far greater capabilities for the ACPAD: a MIDI pickup for the guitar (which converts your acoustic string vibrations into additional MIDI signals) or a separate microphone piping the guitar's sounds into the computer. With one of those things, the ACPAD does more than just bring additional sounds like drums and samples under your control — it becomes a fully-functional effects and looping station, letting you program the buttons to modify the guitar's sound on the fly, or capture and layer multiple recorded loops.

We first wrote about Nina Paley in 2009, upon hearing about the ridiculous copyright mess she found herself in concerning her wonderful movie Sita Sings the Blues. While she eventually was able to sort out that mess and release the film, she also discovered that the more she shared the film, the more money she made, and she began to question copyright entirely. She originally released the film under a ShareAlike license, promising to go after people who didn't uphold the ShareAlike parts, but then moved to a full public domain dedication and has become quite vocal in recent years about not supporting any kind of copyright and even raising some important concerns about many forms of Creative Commons licenses.

Back in March, we noted that Wikimedia was suing the NSA over its mass surveillance program under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. This is the part of the law that the NSA uses to justify its "upstream" collection -- which lets the NSA partner with backbone providers like AT&T and tap their fiber lines at entry/exit points from the country and sniff through all the traffic. The problem in many lawsuits concerning NSA surveillance is that it's been difficult for the plaintiff to satisfy the requirements necessary to get "standing." That is, can the plaintiff prove that he/she/it had rights violated by the program. Many earlier attempts failed, because they just presented stories of "well, the NSA is collecting everything, so..." and the courts have said that's not enough, since it needs to be shown that the plaintiff, in particular, was a target.

Medical science has advanced quite a bit with organ transplants, but there's still the problem of matching donors and the "availability" of organs. Obviously, there are some ethical issues with buying/selling human organs, but getting organs from non-human mammals has its own set of problems, too. The engineering challenges are slowly being solved, and we might be able to grow backup organs in a few years. Maybe.

It's something we probably all assume happens to some degree some of the time. A new video game comes out, it's put up on various consumer sites that allow for user reviews, and we assume at least some of the truly gushingly positive reviews are from people connected with the game trying to gin up positive feelings for their game. The problem, of course, is that if this is occurring, those perpetrating the mischief are smart enough to create new profiles and handles for their efforts, so as to hide their identities. Thus, we assume, but cannot verify.

This isn't a huge surprise, but following Sirius XM settling the lawsuit filed against it by the RIAA labels over playing pre-1972 sound recordings, Pandora has now done the same, agreeing to pay $90 million to have the lawsuit go away. In both cases, the companies recognized that, while the law was unclear and some lawsuits had gone both ways, it was probably a lot easier in the long run to just pay up than face the uncertainty and the possibility of much larger fees. Of course, both companies do still face some individual lawsuits, such as the ones by Flo & Eddie (the company behind The Turtles) who kicked off this lawsuit craze.

Lots of people like to compare the career status of husband-and-wife superstar musicians Jay-Z and Beyonce, looking at who has hit songs at what times, and who's doing better than the other. It appears that this past Wednesday the two also had something else in common to celebrate: they both won nutty copyright lawsuits. The Jay-Z victory in the lawsuit over samples in his hit song "Big Pimpin'" got most of the attention, but Beyonce was actually similarly victorious the same day in a case brought against her by Ahmad Javon Lane, who claimed that Beyonce's song "XO" infringed on his song "XOXO."

When Turing Pharmaceuticals jacked up the price of a toxoplasmosis-fighting drug (commonly used by AIDS and cancer patients) to $750/pill (a previous company sold it for $1/pill), CEO Martin Shkreli defended the move, saying the money would be dumped into research for a new and better drug. Of course, this is the usual defense offered by any pharmaceutical company that institutes a rate hike, but these claims are rarely followed through on. (And when they are, the R&D costs tend to be very overstated.)

For some time, Techdirt has been reporting on Russia's efforts to control every aspect of online activity in the country. But it seems that the authorities there are still worried that its citizens will find ways around these measures. As a result, The Telegraph reports, the Russian government carried out a rather interesting experiment recently:

Here comes another attack on free speech, using college campuses as the delivery vehicle.

Whether you are an expert or are just starting out in SQL, you can better set yourself apart in the workforce by getting SQL server certifications The Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate Bundle, available for $35.99, is a 3 course bundle designed to get you ready to take various MCSA certification tests. You'll learn how to write queries and manage data in SQL, how to install, maintain and configure databases, how to create Business Intelligence Solutions and much more. Each course covers what you need to know for a particular test (which must be taken at an independent testing center) to get you on your way to earning the certifications you need to land that promotion or new job.

Back in 2009, a company called Bluebeat showed up on the market offering all sorts of MP3s from musicians for $0.25 a pop -- without a license from the copyright holders. The company claimed that it didn't need to get a license because all of the songs were specially remastered, in a manner it called a "psycho-acoustic simulation." Via this, the company claimed, it was not infringing on the original artists' copyrights and, actually, held the copyright to the songs it was selling itself. This theory was, to put it mildly, completely loopy. It was a twisted attempt to reinterpret 17 USC 114(b) which said: