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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: