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Reddit of course has been trying to balance advertising with the website's uncontrollable, valuable, but occasionally ugly democratic side for some time with decidedly mixed results. The company's recent new content moderation policy raised all manner of eyebrows for its attempt to keep what makes Reddit great in place, while applying often arbitrary and inconsistent restrictions on subjectively-defined objectionable content. It's a debate that of course will likely continue long through the point where Reddit is ultimately supplanted by some other, better method of organic Internet interaction.

A couple of weeks ago we wrote about the fact that it appeared that the EU Court of Justice was likely to throw out the EU-US data protection safe harbor as invalid, following a case brought over the NSA's snooping on US tech companies -- and now it has happened. The "the EU-US data protection safe harbor" may sound boring, but it's actually been fairly important in making sure that US internet companies can operate in Europe. It's been under attack for some time from those who feel that these American companies don't take European privacy interests seriously enough, but it's really the NSA and its idiotic "collect it all" mentality that has brought the whole structure crashing down. Many will celebrate this, but probably for the wrong reasons. As it stands right now, this result is undoubtedly bad for the internet. What happens next is key. If you want to blame anyone... blame the NSA. And if the US wants to fix this mess, it needs to stop mass surveillance.

We've long noted how it's now Verizon's modus operandi to take millions in subsidies and tax cuts from state or local governments in exchange for delivering fiber optic broadband upgrades. Except time and time and time again those fiber upgrades never actually arrive, and just as often the impacted states or cities let Verizon get away with it. Now that Verizon's focused solely on more profitable (read: capped with overages) wireless service, the telco has not only frozen FiOS fiber upgrades, but it's actively disconnecting many unwanted DSL customers completely.

The NYPD's Inspector General has just released a report on the department's use of force and there's nothing in it that's good news. It finds that the problem begins at the top and only gets worse from there.

We only occasionally talk about video game DLC, or downloadable content, here at Techdirt. When digital distribution became a thing some years back, game makers came up with DLC as a way to achieve several goals: extend the shelf-life of games, make games more saleable through the promise of extra content, and, of course, make more money. I remember when the wave of DLC started and the general negative reaction brought by the gaming public to it. Most concerns centered around game makers charging for features that once were included in the games for the original asking price. Some makers legitimized these concerns through their actions, but others did wonderful things with DLC that gamers would not wish to be without. But, as Hunter S. Thompson once imagined he could see the crest of hippie culture along the Rocky Mountains before its eventual recession, I too can see the crest of DLC greed in our time in the insanity of Train Simulator 2016's laughable DLC offerings.

"Lots of copies keeps stuff safe" is an archivist mantra for preserving data for a long, long time. It certainly looks like there's no end to the development of data storage. We have magnetic tape (multiple varieties), CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray, HD-DVDs, hard drives, solid state drives and the list goes on and on. Certain industries seem to make money every time there's a shift from, say, LPs to cassettes to CDs (to streaming?), but what happens when everyone can store every song ever recorded in the palm of their hand? Technology isn't there yet, but it might be soon.

Add Motherboard to the quickly growing list of news websites killing their comment section because they're so breathlessly in love with reader interaction and visitor conversation. Like The Verge, Recode, Popular Science, The Daily Beast and numerous other websites before it, Motherboard has decided that there's simply no value whatsoever to having a healthy, on-site local community. As such the website is shoving any and all reader interaction over to less transparent and noisier discourse avenues like Facebook, Twitter and e-mail because comments as a "medium" are inherently somehow unhealthy:

Another bullshit lawsuit seeking to suppress critical speech has resulted in a loss for the plaintiff.

Patent trolls are a tax on innovation. The classic troll model doesn't include transferring technology to create new products. Rather, trolls identify operating companies and demand payment for what companies are already doing. Data from Unified Patents shows that, for the first half of this year, patent trolls filed 90% of the patent cases against companies in the high-tech sector. Core Wireless Licensing S.A.R.L. is one of the patent trolls attacking the high-tech sector. Core Wireless is incorporated in Luxemburg, and is a subsidiary of an even larger troll, Canada-based Conversant. It owns a number of patents that were originally filed by Nokia. It has been asserting some of these patents in the Eastern District of Texas. In one case, a jury recently found that Apple did not infringe five of Core Wireless's patents. In another case, it is asserting eighteen patents against LG. One of its arguments in the LG case came to our attention as an example of what patent trolls think they can get away with. In patent litigation, patent owners and alleged infringers often disagree about the meaning of words in patent claims and ask the court to resolve the differences (a process known as "claim construction"). In Core Wireless' case against LG, the majority of the disputes seem like usual ones in terms of patent litigation. Except for the dispute about "integer." You may have learned what an "integer" was in high school. It's a common concept many teenagers learn about when they take algebra. In Ontario, Canada, for example (where Conversant is based), teachers discuss integers in the 9th and 10th grades. As defined in the Ontario Curriculum, an integer is: "Any one of the numbers . . . , –4, –3, –2, –1, 0, +1, +2, +3, +4, . . . " Here's a PBSMathClub video with a helpful explanation: It's pretty clear what an "integer" is. Here are a few more definitions from various sources, all confirming the same thing: "integers" are all of the whole numbers, whether positive or negative, including 0. But Core Wireless, the patent owner, told the court that an "integer" is "a whole number greater than 1." Core Wireless is saying that not only are negative numbers not integers, neither are 0 or 1. This is preposterous. As one mathematician told us:

Craig Mod has a fascinating article for Aeon, talking about the unfortunate stagnation in digital books. He spent years reading books almost exclusively in ebook form, but has gradually moved back to physical books, and the article is a long and detailed exploration into the limits of ebooks today -- nearly all of which are not due to actual limitations of the medium, but deliberate choices by the platform providers (mainly Amazon, obviously) to create closed, limited, DRM-laden platforms for ebooks.

Bloomberg has a weird story about Unwired Planet's patent trolling. As we've discussed, Unwired Planet is a company that's gone through many forms over the years, from Phone.com to Openwave and then Unwired Planet. It's true that the company was something of a pioneer in early WAP browsers, but WAP browsers were a joke that never caught on. The mobile internet didn't really catch on until the rise of smartphones and higher bandwidth wireless data connections -- which Unwired Planet had nothing to do with. So like many failed tech companies, it decided to go full on patent troll. A few years ago, we wrote about it buying more than 2,000 patents from Ericsson that it was then using to shake down companies that didn't fail in the same space that Unwired Planet did fail in.

Before and after the FCC imposed new net neutrality rules, you'll recall there was no limit of hand-wringing from major ISPs and net neutrality opponents about how these "draconian regulations from a bygone era" would utterly decimate the Internet. We were told investment would freeze, innovation would dry up like dehydrated jerky, and in no time at all net neutrality would have us all collectively crying over our busted, congested, tubes.

For just $25.99, you can brush up your security skills with this CompTIA Advanced Security Practitioner (CASP) training course. Obviously, you won't get the certification with just the deal, but you'll be better prepared to take the CASP certification exam. You will get access to courses on risk mitigation, security-privacy policies and 15 other courses that follow CompTIA authorized objectives. Keep your IT skills up to date and get this deal while it lasts.

We've obviously written a few times now about the big OPM hack that was revealed a few months ago, in which it appears that hackers (everyone's blaming China for this) were able to get in and access tons of very, very private records of current and former government employees -- apparently including tons of SF-86 forms. Those forms are required to be filled out for anyone in a national security job in the government, and it basically requires you to 'fess up to anything you've ever done that might, at some point, reflect badly on you. The basic idea behind it is that if you've already admitted to everything, then it makes it much harder for anyone to somehow blackmail you into revealing US national security secrets. But, of course, that also makes those documents pretty damn sensitive. And, by now of course you've heard that the Office of Personnel Management was woefully unprepared to properly protect such sensitive data.

After negotiators failed to complete negotiations on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement a few months ago in Maui, there was some concern as to whether or not they'd ever be able to finish the agreement. They called a special negotiating session in Atlanta that began last week, and was supposed to last just a few days to "iron out the details." Except that got extended. And then extended again. And after promises of an announcement last night, they apparently brought in boxes of pizza and told reporters they were going to pull an all nighter to complete the agreement.

As you may remember, Viacom once sued YouTube for $1 billion dollars over video clips on the site. Right before the case was set to start, Viacom had to scramble and remove some of the alleged infringements from the complaints, because the company realized that Viacom employees had uploaded the clips as part of their marketing campaign. Suing YouTube over clips that you yourself uploaded is not a good look, and it's a big part of the reason why Viacom's arguments fell flat in court. Viacom owns Paramount Pictures, and it would appear that the "level of care" that the company takes in sending DMCA notices has not improved much over the years.

After years of not giving a damn and letting the public do its job for it, the FBI is apparently ready to get serious about collecting stats on "police-involved shootings." In a statement released along with the FBI's 2014 Crime Report (tl;dr: most crime down again), FBI director James Comey says the agency will be doing… something… to ensure more comprehensive reporting of citizens killed by police.

This week, there was lots of chatter about Arthur Chu's wrongheaded attack on Section 230 safe harbors, and one defender of his position made the argument that anonymity and lack of responsibility on the internet is a new and problematic thing. Gwiz won most insightful comment of the week by pushing back against this notion:

Five Years Ago This week in 2010, we saw lots of action around COICA, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act. Firstly, we took a look at all the past technologies that would have been blocked by the bill and what it might censor in the future, while Tim Berners-Lee himself came out against it. Of course, the RIAA was claiming that failure to pass COICA would put Americans at risk. Just in case the bill didn't pass, the White House was working on a backup internet censorship plan — and then, finally, the bill was shelved. Some people turned their attention to smarter ways of thinking about copyright law, but that's not always easy in a world where the press could barely tell the difference between copyright and patents. Plenty of others were sticking with stupidity, from the garden-variety claim that "copyleft" supporters think music should only be a hobby to the more fiery assertion that file-sharers are going to hell. We tried our best to note that embracing 'free' doesn't mean making no money, and asked whether even uncompensated commercial use of an artist's work is really all that bad. Certainly it's not as bad as a British city council abusing copyright to stop meetings from going up on YouTube. Ten Years Ago Five years earlier in 2005, not much was different. We pointed out how stupid most attempts at making new IP laws were, and that the real way to combat piracy is with innovation, not legislation. But one California senator was convinced that laws could put an end to file sharing, while the Canadian recording industry was trying to convince people that file sharing is a gateway to a life of crime. Much better to piss off customers with copy protection then pretend it was a mistake, or attack the developers making your device better, or attempt to wow the world by making flash storage less useful with copy protections). We did see one great idea, though: Ed Felten proposed the "pizzaright" principle, wherein you evaluate arguments for stronger IP protections by imagining them as a monopoly on delivering pizza in certain market. Fifteen Years Ago Let's head back five years earlier still, where everything was... pretty similar. Last week, we noted that The Offspring was planning to release its album online in 2000 — and this week, Sony put an end to their innovation. Capital Records tried to pass itself off as embracing file sharing, but the details were disappointing and mostly meaningless. Meanwhile, it was becoming clear that it's not just kids who wanted downloadable music and that respect for intellectual property actually correlated with poor education. Also this week in 2000: Volvo launched a car that was only advertised online and Fosters (the beer company) was going digital with care and forethought; the convergence of phones and PDAs was still messy but clearly on the horizon, even though mobile internet still had very limited appeal; companies were realizing the dangers of using a phone while driving, it was discovered that (gasp!) some people use public internet kiosks for crime, and Shanghai decided to just start shutting down internet cafes entirely. Thirty-Two Years Ago The GNU project remains controversial in some circles, and even here at Techdirt we've often pushed back against some of its more extreme proponents, but I don't think there's any denying that it has had a huge and overall very positive impact on the world of computing. It was on September 27th, 1983 that Richard Stallman first announced the GNU Project on the net.unix-wizards and net.usoft newsgroups. A few months later, Stallman quit his job at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (so they couldn't claim any sort of ownership) and began developing free software.

We've talked before about the buzz around the possibly-coming modular phones of the future, but this week we're looking at an entirely different animal: RePhone, an open-source modular phone kit for makers and tinkerers. The Good The basic idea of RePhone is that you can build your own mobile phone. At its heart is a core GSM module, to which you can attach a mini touchscreen, basic sensors, an NFC antenna, and other combinations of the various tiny attachment modules. They can be connected easily with FPC cables, attached to a breadboard, or soldered. Then you can take the assembled guts and build them into any kind of case you like, from a fold-up kraft paper shell made using special templates to something fancier like a custom 3D-printed casing. Once it's built, the RePhone can integrate with IFTTT (as many things do these days) and also has software libraries that hook into Arduino IDE, Lua and Javascript, and a high-level SDK for developing apps for the RePhone itself — all designed with a focus on learning, so novice coders can try their hand as readily as expert developers. The Bad While RePhone seems like an absolute treat for makers and hackers, I'm more dubious about the attempts to make it look appealing to average users who want a unique phone. Apart from the ability to print custom designs on the kraft paper casing template, which is neat but hardly a game-changer, I don't think there's much to attract regular people to the RePhone, and it won't be replacing anyone's iPhones or Galaxies anytime soon, nor should that be the expectation. But for those who want to get inside the guts of a smartphone and tinker around, it's perfect. The Things But perhaps the most exciting aspect of RePhone is that it by no means has to be all about phones. The tiny, modular kit makes it really easy to give anything else cellular capabilities, and start building your own additions to the internet of things. That's exciting, because as we see the internet of things grow, it's vital that we keep enabling people to build things for it — otherwise it will evolve into nothing more than a network of locked-down, proprietary products from various gadget-makers. The interoperability with Arduino (and also Pebble watches) makes RePhone right at home in the new world of mobile makers, who will help define what the internet looks like as it continues to break free from traditional devices.

Anthony Silva, the mayor of Stockton, California, recently went to China for a mayor's conference. On his return to San Francisco airport he was detained by Homeland Security, and then had his two laptops and his mobile phone confiscated. They refused to show him any sort of warrant (of course) and then refused to let him leave until he agreed to hand over his password:

Back at the end of August, we wrote about a ridiculous situation in which the Pokemon Company decided to sue two fans in Seattle who had set up a Pokemon-themed party leading into the big PAX conference. As soon as the threats came down, these guys shut down the party entirely, but the Pokemon Company would not be stopped in its determination to totally bankrupt and destroy such a big fan who was out there promoting Pokemon and Pokemon culture. The company, represented by big copyright maximalist law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, went forward with the ridiculous lawsuit anyway. While they dismissed one guy from the lawsuit, the other, Ramar Larking Jones, didn't hire a lawyer, saying he had no money for it.

We've been following diet fads for a while now -- and seeing how sugar (in various forms) has been blamed for health problems. Artificial sweeteners are supposed to help us avoid consuming too much sugar (and be more healthy in the balance), but it's probably not surprising that studies are starting to show that these alternatives to sugar also have their own side effects.

Jason Koebel of Vice reports the FAA has missed its deadline to deliver a coherent policy on drone usage.

I'll give the entertainment and the copyright troll industry this: they sure know how to talk a big game. After the settlement prospecting done by copyright trolls in the UK died down somewhat these past few years, it appears the war is back on. TorrentFreak has the story of one German copyright troll, Maverick Eye, announcing that it is going to step up its efforts in the UK in the coming months.

Earlier this year, we noted that patent trolls had struck back, filing a ton of new cases this year. The leading patent troll was a firm called eDekka: Like many patent trolls, not much is known about eDekka, but it's represented by Austin Hansley, who just happens to represent all three of the top patent troll lawsuit filers in that graphic above: eDekka, Data Carriers and Wetro Lan (you may recall Wetro Lan, for using an expired bogus patent on a basic firewall to troll lots of companies -- and also for its name (say it out loud)). eDekka, though, topped the list with a ton of lawsuits over US Patent 6,266,674, for "random access information retrieval utilizing user-defined labels."

While we have our issues with Verizon in other areas, the giant telco does have a strong history of protecting its users against crazy copyright trolling and other forms of attacks. Verizon led the way in fighting back against the RIAA when it started demanding Verizon hand over information on tons of customers before any lawsuits were filed. Verizon won. Without this big victory, the copyright trolling situation today would be much, much worse. Verizon has also been known to be on the side of good when the RIAA and MPAA push for extreme changes to copyright laws as well. So it's no surprise that it's now entering a key case in the US's biggest copyright troll, Malibu Media.

As you know doubt have heard by now, and as we already tangentially discussed earlier, there has been yet another mass shooting in America. This time, it came to Oregon, where a single gunmen made his way into a community college and managed to murder nine innocent people, injure others, before his own life was extinguished, either by his own hand or by those of law enforcement. And, as we wake up the next morning, anyone with any interest in civil society and culture grapples with the story. President Obama remarked that these stories have become routine, seeming to suggest that everyone has become numb to these events, accepting them as part of the American life. He's wrong about that. Desperately and importantly wrong. Instead, the truth is that the public is the opposite of numb. The public is angry. Unfortunately, because of the way that a fragmented and ideologically aligned media landscape has emerged in the past two decades or so, we all end up angry about different things, with our outrage stoked and guided in avenues that put us at odds with those that have had their outrage stoked and guided in entirely different avenues.

We've written a lot about two efforts to suppress certain kinds of content online through legal regimes: revenge porn and the right to be forgotten. In both cases (especially revenge porn), it's quite reasonable to be sympathetic to the person whose embarrassing information is just out there for anyone to see. But we're always concerned at the possibility that these new regulations or legal regimes could be misused to simply suppress information that people don't like, without any legitimate basis. We've seen a number of cases recently where we wonder about how newsworthy items could meet the definitions required to be silenced under both of these legal regimes. Whether or not anyone is actually seeking to suppress that information now, it still should lead to some concerns about cases where it could happen.

Okay, if you used Microsoft Office like an actual boss, you might not be able to navigate many advanced features at all. But don't wallow in ignorance, get a bunch of courses with today's deal on a Microsoft Office Productivity Bundle -- and pay whatever you want to pay for it. If you pay more than the average of what everyone else is paying, you get all 12 courses, covering Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, OneNote and Outlook. And for your generosity, 10% of the profits from this deal goes to Project HOPE to deliver essential medicines and supplies, health expertise and medical training to respond to disasters, prevent disease, promote wellness and save lives around the globe. Also, if you make it to the Leaderboard, you'll get a chance to win a new iPhone 6s. So help us out, learn some stuff you should probably know, and help out Project HOPE, too.

Here's a tip if you're looking to move or building a new house: get your ISP to write you a letter confirming that they service your new address. While you're at it, get three copies of it from three different executives, have it notarized, and force the ISP to swear a blood oath, because even then you may find yourself without service at your new address. As we've noted a few times, users often assume ISPs actually know what neighborhoods they service, only to later have a Kafka-esque introduction to the U.S. broadband industry's blistering incompetence and dismal customer service.

As Techdirt has pointed out, copyright extensions are bad enough, but retroactive ones are even worse, since the creation of the work has already occurred, so providing additional incentives makes no sense, even accepting the dubious idea that artists think about copyright terms before setting to work. Moreover, copyright extensions are a real kind of copyright theft -- specifically, stealing from the public domain. If you think that is just rhetoric, it's worth looking at what is happening in Argentina. As a post on the Wikimedia Argentina blog explains (original in Spanish), a proposed law would extend the copyright in photos from 25 years after an image was taken (or 20 years from first publication) to life plus 70 years -- a vast extension that would mean that most photos taken in the 20th century would still be in copyright. That's a big problem for Wikipedia in Argentina, since it is using photographs that have passed into the public domain under existing legislation. If the new law is passed in its current form, large numbers of photos would have to be removed:

As you may have heard, yesterday there was another mass shooting in the US. I know the topic of mass shootings and gun control and all that raise all sorts of emotions and opinions on all sides of the issue, but this is not the place to discuss them. I'm posting this for a reason that actually does fit into Techdirt's discussion area, and I hope that the conversation stays more closely aligned to the topic of copyright. What's copyright got to do with all of this? Well, after reading some of the news about what happened, I went in search of comedian Jim Jeffries' routine about guns. I'm a big fan of Jeffries, who is damn funny, and I recalled seeing that he did a great routine about guns and gun control in the past. And it seemed timely. So I did a search... and discovered that the video had been taken down. At first, I figured that it must be because someone ripped it and therefore, okay, I can understand it being taken down. But, no, this is the "official" clip uploaded by Jeffries himself. And apparently Netflix did the takedown (probably via ContentID, rather than a DMCA notice): Yes. It is entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that Jeffries has a deal with Netflix that grants Netflix the exclusive rights to this clip. And I'm sure that some of you feel that this is perfectly reasonable, because Jeffries entered into an agreement with Netflix and this is the tradeoff. But something feels wrong about an artist having his own work being taken off his own YouTube account -- never mind the fact that the content might be relevant and timely right now. And it's not like seeing one relatively short clip of a much longer performance somehow hurt Netflix in anyway. If anything, it would seem to encourage people to go to Netflix to watch the whole thing. So here's a chance for Netflix to get some possibly-viral attention, and yet, it's not happening, because copyright law.

This week's big data leak comes from mobile phone provider T-Mobile, who has admitted that someone hacked into credit giant Experian and got a bunch of T-Mobile customer data. The good news? The personal data was encrypted. The bad news? Experian fucked up the encryption and so it doesn't matter:

As part of President Obama's BuySecure initiative, US merchants and the public are being encouraged to adopt the Chip and PIN technology for credit, debit, and other payment cards. As the announcement in October last year noted, these Chip and PIN cards have been used for some years in other parts of the world, notably Europe and Canada. For all the technology's vaunted security, there are inevitably still weaknesses that can be exploited, as with any system. That was true five years ago, and it's still true now, as shown by this story on the BBC Web site about one company's idea for reducing Chip and PIN fraud:

We've seen plenty of advances in game algorithms that make us humans look pretty weak compared to the best chess (and checkers and poker and RPS and air hockey and Flappy bird and...) playing computers. Computers aren't having any fun beating us at all these games, but they do it nonetheless. As always, let's just hope they figure out quickly that no one wins at thermonuclear war.

The Freedom of Information Act does open up the government to closer examination by taxpayers. The ideals of the law are rarely achieved, though. It requires agencies to respond in a reasonable amount of time, but far too often it takes a successful lawsuit to force an agency to give up the documents requested.

Towards the end of 2013, IP-Watch -- along with the Yale Media Freedom and Access Center -- filed a FOIA lawsuit against the USTR for its refusal to release its TPP draft documents. The USTR spent a year ignoring IP-Watch's William New's request before telling him the release of draft agreements would "harm national security."

Amazon has come up with a rather ingenious way to give its own Fire TV streaming video devices a leg up in the market place: stop selling major competing products. In a letter sent this week to the company's marketplace sellers, Amazon announced that it would no longer be allowing new listings for either the Chromecast or Apple TV starting today, and that existing retail stock of both products would be discontinued at the end of the month. Google of course just unveiled two new versions of the Chromecast, which has been historically outselling Amazon's own streaming devices.

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 help support Techdirt.

The latest batch of Hillary Clinton emails have been revealed, and Trevor Timm, the Executive Director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, points us to a particularly interesting one, in which then State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley tells Clinton that the State Department has successfully "planted" questions for the show, 60 Minutes, to ask Assange. Indeed, if you watch the interview, the reporter, Steve Kroft, regularly repeats State Department talking points -- often prefaced with the sort of weak journalistic hedging "there are people who believe..."

By now you're probably familiar with the narrative pushed by some ISPs that they are somehow owed a cut of advertising and content revenue simply because content company traffic touches their network. The idea that ISPs should be allowed to double dip in this fashion was an idea first floated by former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre, who truly set off the net neutrality fight in the States back in 2005 by proudly and stupidly declaring that Google shouldn't be able to "ride his pipes for free." The narrative is still often used here in the States by net neutrality opponents, usually with Netflix portrayed as the hungry, selfish bogeyman.

You want a VPN. Really, you do. We don't know what you've been waiting for (a personal visit from Ed Snowden or something), but here's a good deal -- a 2-year subscription for Private Internet Access VPN service for just $59.95 (that's 24% off the regular price). Private Internet Access has some good reviews and has publicly answered TorrentFreak's serious questions about its privacy policies and logging practices. PIA says, "We do not log, period. This includes, but is not limited to, any traffic data, DNS data or meta (session) data. Privacy IS our policy."

Like the boiling frog metaphor, Comcast continues to slowly deploy usage caps in a growing number of uncompetitive markets in the hopes that nobody will notice until it's too late. As noted previously, Comcast has started imposing a 300 GB monthly cap in more than seventeen "trial" markets, after which users have to pay $10 for each additional 50 GB of usage. In a most recent wrinkle, the cable operator has also started offering users the honor of paying $30 if they want to avoid these usage caps entirely. It's a glorified rate hike on what's already some of the most expensive broadband in the world.

They get to wear nice suits, wield guns and hang around the President. They're entrusted with protecting perhaps the most important person in the world. The US Secret Service should only be staffed with the best the nation has to offer. Instead, its recent protective efforts can be generously described as "almost adequate" and it's apparently staffed with an assortment of vindictive children who can't stand the thought of having their shortcomings questioned.

A few years back, we wrote about that ridiculous thing that clueless Facebook users were posting, in which they thought that by posting some idiotic and usually wrong text that sometimes referenced copyright law or random international criminal laws, it would mean that Facebook's terms of service no longer applied to them. Here's the version of this nonsense we wrote about then:

ExecSummits, aka Executive Summits, aka CFO Summit, aka HR Summit, aka [Insert Corporate Buzzwords Here] Summit, is suing a former employee/contractor for a number of things -- one of those being defamation.

In trademark disputes and their resolutions, it's not often that I see a pure headscratcher. That is to say, I rarely see a ruling on a trademark dispute and find myself at a loss for all explanation. This is, however, one of those cases. The dispute is between Black Forest Games, makers of a game entitled DieselStormersand Diesel the company, which makes clothing. The problem arose over a year ago, it seems, when Diesel reached out to Black Forest Games about the title of the game, expressing concern that it was a trademark violation of the Diesel brand.

Petroleum prices are relatively low right now, but there are no guarantees that the price of oil will remain low for very long. Progress on biofuels and fusion aren't great bets for the impatient, but there's an existing energy source with some serious growth potential: nuclear fission. Okay, we've been talking about advances in nuclear energy for a while, too, but the barriers are mostly economic/regulatory, not in the engineering or science.