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The DEA, like countless other law enforcement agencies across the nation, doesn't take employee misconduct too seriously. Perhaps upper management feels that drug warring is a tough, dangerous job and that any violations of policies/state/federal laws or other impropriety should be met with little more than a short, stern conversation and promises from agents that it won't happen again.

Last year, we discussed the silly defamation case brought by Andrew Rector, baseball fan(?), that ESPN's cameras showed to be sleeping(!) at a Red Sox v. Yankees game. The commentators on ESPN had some fun at Andrew's expense. Quite mild and tame fun, it should be noted. But several websites picked up where they left off, and some comments left on those websites were less than friendly to Rector. For this, Rector filed a $10 million defamation suit against ESPN and the commentators, John Kruk and Dan Shulman. It looked bad on the basis of both the law, as well as the ability of whoever filed the suit to use a spellchecker and basic logic.

There are many proper ways to file a lawsuit. Then there's this one. (h/t Eric Goldman)

After fifteen years in an apparent coma, earlier this year the FCC woke up to the fact that ISPs were effectively paying states to pass laws focused entirely on protecting uncompetitive, regional broadband duopolies. More specifically, they've been pushing legislation that prohibits towns and cities from improving their own broadband infrastructure -- or in some cases partnering with utilities or private companies -- even in areas local incumbents refused to upgrade. It's pure protectionism, and roughly twenty states have passed such ISP-written laws nationwide.

For a few years now, there's been talk about trying to somehow roll back or change the liability protections in Section 230. As we've discussed, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is probably the most important law on the internet. It not only protects free speech, but has enabled much of the internet we know and love to exist in the first place -- and has been especially important in creating places where otherwise marginalized people are free to express themselves. The crux of the law is this single sentence:

Just for our Mac users, today's under-$30 deal is a software productivity bundle of 15 applications, including photo editing software HDR Darkroom 3, password manager Sticky Password, plaintext editor FoldingText and a dozen more utilities. If you thought Google's Deepdream engine looked cool, the Deep Dreamer app turns any photo you have into an algorithmically-generated psychedelic nightmare. Um, and if you ever wanted to turn all your emails into PDFs, there's also an app for that.

It's becoming quite a period of time for the profane when it comes to interacting with law enforcement, apparently. We had just recently discussed one man's victory in federal court over a town that didn't appreciate him writing "Fuck your shitty town bitches" on a speeding ticket he'd mailed in. Well, back in 2012, another delightful human, Thomas Smith, was apparently arrested for being an ass on the Arena, Wisconsin, Facebook page.

Since launch, Windows 10 has seen no limit of criticism for violating user privacy. Some of these concerns have been legitimate -- such as the fact that the OS keeps communicating with Microsoft when core new search services like Cortana have been disabled, or that users don't seem to have complete, transparent control over what the operating system is doing. But other complaints seem to have been based on false rumors that Windows 10 is embedded with a nefarious "keylogger" that tracks everything you type and say or is reporting your BitTorrent activity to Hollywood middlemen.

The Turing Pharma case has received widespread coverage, but as Techdirt readers know, it's hardly a unique example of the pharmaceutical industry taking advantage of a flawed system. In fact, over in Canada, there's another interesting example of the industry's sense of entitlement, reported here by CBC News:

A brief review of the available record shows that Facebook and Germany have always had something of a contentious relationship. Past examples of this have included Germany trying to influence Facebook's really dumb "real name" policy, Germany trying to get Facebook to drop its facial recognition database, and even Germany attempting to outlaw the "Like" button. The context in most of these instances is a German government perhaps still rather touchy with a sordid, if decades-old, history and its overcorrection on matters of privacy and speech. The latest is no different.

We've written before about how limited the Fourth Amendment is when applied to drivers and their vehicles. A number of court decisions -- along with continually-reinforced exceptions -- have allowed police to pull over motorists for any reason imaginable. Once they have someone pulled over, it's just a matter of obtaining consent from the driver or, failing that, coming up with a reasonable approximation of probable cause. (Drug dogs are a favorite.) After that, no warrant is needed to search the vehicle, along with the contents of any container found within it.

For decades now, scientists have been looking for, and finding, evidence of water on Mars. Some might remember that Dan Quayle even said, "We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water." Quayle wasn't exactly right about the surface of Mars, but it does appear that liquid water exists on Mars during Martian summers. The liquid water on Mars wouldn't look familiar to most people, though, as it's only a liquid brine that flows when it's just above -23 °C. However, there could be more liquid water somewhere that we haven't seen yet -- and that might make Mars more hospitable to life as we know it.

Prosecutors hate losing -- so much so that they're willing to color outside the legal lines for a chance at a win. Plenty of prosecutorial misbehavior has been uncovered over the years, most of it tied to the withholding of exonerating evidence.

The US Postal Service has long been the Little Surveillance Agency That Time Forgot. For more than a decade, it has scanned every piece of mail it handles. Its "Mail Isolation and Tracking Control" program went into effect in response to post-9/11 anthrax mailings.

Roca Labs threatened to sue us here at Techdirt twice for publishing accurate articles about the company, its sketchy practices and legal threats -- and especially for its ridiculous "gag clause" that told customers they could never say disparaging things about the product online. Among other things, Roca Labs threatened others for claiming its products were "snake oil" and us for merely repeating statements that were in court filings. So we were certainly pleased last week when the FTC finally took Roca Labs to court, for both deceptive and misleading advertising and over the gag clause itself.

Last week, iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens joined us to discuss DMCA anti-circumvention exceptions, but that's just one specific facet of a broader issue: the freedom to repair, modify, reverse-engineer and generally tinker with the technology you own. This week Kyle is back to discuss why the freedom to tinker is a vitally important right — and one that is constantly under threat. 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.

If you haven't heard of Python as an incredibly useful programming language, then go ahead and ignore the rest of this. However, if you're interested in learning a bit more about Python, and you want to skip the tedious task of looking up how-to videos on your own -- check out our $29 deal for a Python programming course bundle. This deal includes six courses for Python, introducing Python to beginners and covering data visualization with Python and Matplotlib. One of the courses also walks you through how to create a Flappy Bird game clone (but obviously not how to create a viral hit game).

Russia's been nothing but busy since passing its 2013 LGBT propaganda law, designed to protect minors from the terrifying menace of "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships" while upholding "family values" through government-encouraged discrimination and hatred. The law has had two major benefits for the Russian government; allowing Putin and friends to use homophobia to encourage distrust of heathens in the West (at the cost of increased violence against the LGBT community), while providing feeble justification for the country's heavy-handed censorship efforts.

We get it. Many of you really hate online advertising. And, indeed, there's often a good reason for that. The ads can be irrelevant, intrusive and annoying. And, in some cases, they can even be dangerous, as scammers or those with malicious intent slip bad code into ad networks in order to wreak havoc on visitors' computers. So here's a deal: if you don't want to see display/banner ads on Techdirt any more you don't need to. Just go to your preferences page (whether you have an account or are just browsing without a login) and click the button saying you want to disable ads. And, that's it. No more network display ads.

The UN's Broadband Commission has just released a report on "Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls." That this has been put together by the Broadband Commission rather than something more directly related to either law enforcement or human rights should be the first warning flag. This indicates the UN feels the responsibility for "cyber violence" should be borne by ISPs and social media platforms, rather than those actually committing the acts detailed in the report.

About a month ago, Microsoft's Boris Schneider-Johne explained that -- along with everything else Windows 10 was bringing to the party (privacy invasion, blocking of pirated software) -- it would also be bricking certain paid-for software. Two early -- and much-hated -- forms of DRM just simply didn't play nice with the new operating system: SecuROM and Safedisc.

As a growing number of Techdirt posts on the subject indicate, drones are fast entering the mainstream. But as they become more common, and as more mishaps involving them inevitably occur, so the calls for government regulation grow louder. Fortunately for the rest of us, Colombia has stepped forward to show us some of the things not to do, as a post on PetaPixel makes clear. The new drone regulations are written in Spanish, not unreasonably, but Pablo Castro has put together a useful summary, singling out four key aspects that give a feel for the general approach. The first is that drone operators are required to take a training course. Fair enough, you might think, but there are couple of problems with the idea:

It's a common refrain whenever we discuss trademark disputes that appear to be barely-necessary, if necessary at all: companies must protect their trademarks. That's not actually true, of course. What a company must do, actually, assuming it wants to be good at company-ing, is it must maximize its revenue, profits, and exposure and be as successful as it can be. If that means protecting its trademark interests in a valid way, so be it. But that isn't always necessarily the case.

There are all kinds of environmental disasters going on -- some quietly, while other stories will be in the headlines for the foreseeable future. Optimistically, all the predictions of environmental catastrophes will be avoided by technology, but it's also technological developments that can bring about various ecological quandaries. When products are new and improved, they're not always an improvement to the environment. If you live near the Great Lakes, check out some of these ecological threats in your neck of the woods.

At this point it has become a personal pastime of ours to track the idiotic reasons websites give for killing their local news comment sections. Instead of simply admitting nobody on their writing or editorial staff wants to deal with on-site conversation, or acknowledging they've never liked readers being able to point out story errors right below articles, lazy websites instead give a rotating crop of hilarious excuses. These usually range from claims they're killing comments because they really care about building relationships, to claims their muting all on site dialogue because they just so love conversation.

Customs and Border Patrol, like many government agencies involved with law enforcement and/or security, isn't all that thrilled that Joe Citizen can demand access to its records. When not dragging its feet on requests, the agency actively thwarts FOIA requests, albeit using more than the normal "so sue us" non-response.

We've written plenty about the infamous monkey selfie, and have even been threatened by two totally separate organizations for posting the photo here on Techdirt (which we're about to do again): Last week, the story got even weirder, where PETA, the animal rights organization, sued photographer David Slater on behalf of the monkey, who they claim is named Naruto. As we've explained in detail, the photos are almost certainly in the public domain based on all relevant copyright laws. Slater has repeatedly denied this, insisting the copyright is his (and he apparently also likes to regularly disparage Techdirt's coverage of this story). But, still, we're at least on Slater's side in this particular lawsuit. PETA has much less of a claim to the copyright than Slater does (and, as we've noted, Slater has none).

According to a YouGov/Huffington Post poll, 71% of Americans are opposed to civil asset forfeiture.

Facebook is trying its best to defuse worries that the company is trying to impose a bizarre, walled-garden vision of the Internet upon the developing world. As we've been discussing, Facebook's Internet.org initiative has been under fire of late in India, where the government has been trying to not only define net neutrality, but craft useful rules. Early policy guidelines have declared Internet.org to be little more than glorified collusion, since while it does offer limited access to some free services, it involves Facebook determining which services users will be able to access (and encrypted content wasn't on the Facebook approval list).

The Australian government is fighting back against the unrelenting terrorist threat that threatens to consume every Western nation. It, too, has noticed that youngsters and their SnapChats are particularly prone to radicalization from outside forces. As Richard Chirgwin of the Register points out, it has chosen to address this threat to Australian society in the way only a government agency can: with a blend of the bizarre and the tone deaf.

Quite a few of you readers have purchased this deal, to get Scrivener software to help manage your next writing project. Available for $19.50 -- for either Mac or PC Windows (select your preferred version in the drop down menu), this Scrivener household license allows you to access your work on multiple devices. Scrivener replaces bits of paper, index cards and sticky notes by allowing you to storyboard projects, to edit and work on different sections, either alone or in concert, and to post notes and access research. There's a script formatting function to help you write the next classic movie hit, a name generator, and the ability to freely edit and restore to older versions so you won't lose anything as you dive deep into the creative process.

We already wrote about the various filings in the Rightscorp-by-proxy lawsuit against Cox Communications. However, mixed in with all the filings are some interesting tidbits and exhibits. One that caught my eye was an exhibit revealing the "script" that Rightscorp gives its agents to use when people call in after receiving a notice. Cox Communications filed this in showing that the actual plaintiffs (BMG and Round Hill Music) "turned a blind eye" to Rightscorp's misconduct. The script is quite something, with a few ridiculous statements. The most ridiculous, however, is the following. If the caller says that they're innocent, here's how Rightscorp has its agents respond:

A recent opinion issued in a prosecution by the Securities and Exchange Commission seems to indicate the government can't force members of the public to hand over passwords without violating the Fifth Amendment. But the details suggest something else: that this is limited to a very specific set of circumstances and is not in any way precedential, at least not at this point.

There's a new narrative out there -- one that's being repeated by campaigning politicians and buttressed by fearful news reports. Apparently, the public has declared war on law enforcement. Each shooting of a police officer is presented as evidence that it's open season on cops. Officers aren't simply killed. They're "targeted." The problem is, the stats don't back this up.

One of the very first revelations from the Snowden leaks was a GCHQ program modestly entitled "Mastering the Internet." It was actually quite a good name, since it involved spying on vast swathes of the world's online activity by tapping into the many fiber optic cables carrying Internet traffic that entered and left the UK. The scale of the operation was colossal: the original Guardian article spoke of a theoretical intake of 21 petabytes every day. As the Guardian put it:

One of the very first revelations from the Snowden leaks was a GCHQ program modestly entitled "Mastering the Internet". It was actually quite a good name, since it involved spying on vast swathes of the world's online activity by tapping into the many fiber optic cables carrying Internet traffic that entered and left the UK. The scale of the operation was colossal: the original Guardian article spoke of a theoretical intake of 21 petabytes every day. As the Guardian put it:

Hollywood hates it when fans get creative. We were reminded of that this week when a popular re-edit of Mad Max Fury Road was taken down, and That One Guy won most insightful comment of the week with his lack of surprise:

Five Years Ago This week in 2010, we saw lots of people trying to manipulate existing laws to their advantage, and lots of others trying to get new laws in place. The ISP Suddenlink rolled out a homegrown three-strikes policy and claimed the DMCA required it, while Intel was threatening to weaponize the DMCA against anyone who used a readily-available HDCP crack. The MPAA was exploring the possibility of using ACTA to get broad censorship powers, while some senators were proposing a bill that would let the Justice Department censor "pirate sites" worldwide, even while one among them was aggressively opposing internet censorship by other countries and President Obama was speaking out against online censorship in general. Amidst this, we took a look at the serious due process concerns with such censorship. In an early prototype to the Aereo battle, Seattle company ivi was trying out its own broadcast-TV-online service, and facing opposition. Some creators were at least trying to embrace online distribution, with a group of Swedish filmmakers releasing their movie in theaters and on the Pirate Bay at the same time and Richard Dawkins pointing a fan to the Pirate Bay as a source for his new documentary. Ten Years Ago This week in 2005, people were asking the big perennial digital question: does technology make us smarter? (Short answer: not really.) On the flipside, some were looking at the effects of technology withdrawal. Google was being accused of "dumbing down" its search by making it smarter and easier to use (but was also busy being sued by the Author's Guild over its book scanning project). Grokster was pretty freaked out by the recent Supreme Court ruling against it and hoping to sell out to a "legit" file sharing service, while Hollywood was gearing up to waste millions of dollars trying to develop better copy protection — which felt a lot like Hollywood calling its own bluff. The IFPI released some malware that deletes file-sharing applications, while at least one judge smartly recognized that the RIAA can't sue parents for stuff their kids do online. But perhaps they could be blamed for buying their kids banned video games and demonstrating to the people of New Zealand how futile such bans are. Fifteen Years Ago Of course, by 2005 it should have been obvious that the anti-file-sharing crusade was futile: this same week in 2000 Bill Gurley was underlining how utterly impossible it is to stop sharing, while sharing gets easier and easier and Forrester was reporting on how all these lawsuits are a waste of time. The Rio was fresh off its copyright victory against the RIAA, but that victory was starting to look Pyrrhic. As for new and emerging technologies, we saw plenty of interesting things: glow-in-the-dark rabbits made with jellyfish DNA, the coming age of robots, and the earliest rumbles of in-flight WiFi. Ray Kurzweil was making some very optimistic predictions about the future, while some non-profit groups were running aggressive anti-technology media campaigns. Overall, we were trying to determine the internet's impact on all sorts of things, from mom and pop shops to economic theory as a whole. Three-Hundred And Twenty-Five Years Ago The history of American newspapers starts with single-page broadsheets, but it was on September 25th, 1690 that they took a step towards a major evolution with the release of the first multi-page newspaper published in the Americas. It came out of Boston and had a gloriously dated name: Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick. It was supposed to be published monthly "or, if any Glut of Occurrences happen, oftener" — but British colonial authorities shut it down only four days later. Or, in their words, they did "hereby manifest and declare their high Resentment and Disallowance of said Pamphlet, and Order that the same be Suppressed and called in; strickly forbidden any person or persons for the future to Set forth any thing in Print without License first obtained from those that are or shall be appointed by the Government to grant the same." (Yes, even censorship orders sound cooler in 17th-century English.)

It's an age-old symbol of tech dismay: a dozen interconnected devices, a dozen remote controls, all failing to work smoothly with each other. This week, we're looking at a device that aims to sort out some of the mess when it comes to video: Skreens, a robust HDMI input mixer aimed at streamers and heavy media users. The Good Juggling multiple video devices is no picnic. Even having multiple windows open on a desktop or laptop is less than ideal, and once you bring in external devices other than general purpose computers, things get even tougher, leaving you with little option but to split your attention between multiple displays. Skreems offers another option: it takes two or four HDMI inputs (depending on the model), and lets you arrange them as you see fit and send them all to a single output. Sports on the left, Twitter feed on the right? No problem. Want to watch a movie, play Xbox, and use Skype all at once? Just drag and drop the three separate screens into your desired configuration and fire it up. It all runs through one compact box and is controlled by a separate app, which can also serve as a universal remote control. Skreens has the potential to be a complete solution to most multiple-media-device woes. The Bad Skreens comes in four models: the two-input and the four-input version, each with both a regular and pro model. That makes perfect sense until you take a closer look at the specs, and notice that they've made one very unfriendly choice: the pro models, which come with an extra $100 on the price tag, don't actually include any superior hardware — they just have some extra unlocked capabilities. In other words, it appears the non-pro models are capable of letting you do absolutely everything the pros are, but some of those features are artificially restricted, such as advanced video quality settings and the aforementioned universal remote capabilities. This sort of artificial limitation benefits nobody, and it's just begging to be circumvented — though we'll have to wait and see if the people behind Skreens make an effort to stop people from doing so. It's a shame that half of the models of this otherwise-impressive device have been intentionally hamstrung in order to push people into spending more. The Performance-Friendly Of course, part of the reasoning behind this is clearly that the creators see their biggest potential market among online streamers, and are hoping those increasingly-professional ranks will be willing to spend the extra bucks. And it's true that Skreens looks like a pretty exciting tool for people who stream their gaming sessions online, since they are usually either stuck with the limited options provided by a gaming console or various PC apps that add an extra software burden to their gaming rig. Skreens opens up lots of new possibilities for streaming gamers, and I suspect we'll see it being used to widen the possibilities for just what you can stream to Twitch or the new YouTube Gaming, beyond the now-standard "webcam feed in the top corner" configuration. Livestreaming is a rapidly growing entertainment sector with an already-massive audience, and Skreens has a shot at becoming a standard piece of every streaming gamer's setup — even with the unfortunate premium price tag on the pro models.

The International Business Times has just published a useful set of crime stats -- the number of criminal offenses committed by UK police officers over the past five years. So far, regular criminal activity still outpaces criminal activity by police officers, but this fact is a little jarring.

So that didn't take long at all. Following the FTC officially taking Roca Labs to court over its deceptive marketing practices and its ridiculous gag clause barring anyone from complaining about Roca Labs, the company has already agreed to a temporary restraining order, saying that it will stop both things for now. Normally, if you have even half a case, you'd fight the temporary restraining order, but here it took basically a day for Roca Labs to say, "Okay, we'll stop all that stuff." That doesn't mean the company won't fight back going forward, but it certainly suggests that the company may realize how much trouble it's in.

The common cold is just annoying, and the annual flu season is even more so -- and can actually be deadly. The minor annoyances of allergies, headaches and stuffy noses seems like something we should be able to conquer. (Maybe if we just could all live in hermetically sealed bubbles until no one had a cold anymore?) If you're not looking forward to flu season (or kids sharing germs now that they're back in school), perhaps some of these links might lead to a remedy some day.

One of the issues with various "cybersecurity information sharing" bills like CISPA from last year and CISA from this year, is that some tech companies have been (quietly) supportive of these bills. The whole focus of these bills is to encourage "cybersecurity information sharing" between private companies and the government. And, in theory, that may sound like a good thing. In reality, all the bills really do is focus on protecting companies from liability should they share private information they shouldn't have shared. And, of course, there's the fact that people who understand these things recognize that there's a hidden meaning behind CISA, in that it's really designed to give the NSA more "signatures" to use in its surveillance dragnet.

Workplace rules: who can understand them, am I right? I mean, they give me a computer at work and I'm not supposed to use it to find the most hilarious NSFW pictures possible? They give me co-workers but I'm not allowed to question them about exactly where they fit into the Illuminati conspiracy that may or may not be going on and why are you running away? My workplace encourages me to use social media in a responsible way, but I'm not allowed to unfriend people I don't get along with?

Several years ago, we wrote about a fan game that had been shut down by Hasbro because it incorporated My Little Pony intellectual property. Yes, an expression of fandom was bullied out of existence by Hasbro. The argument trotted out by those in support of the company was the same argument that's always trotted out in these instances: the company had to shut the game down, or else risk losing its trademark protections through non-enforcement of its rights. That's not actually true, of course. There were many smart business routes to go for Hasbro, including offering a low-cost license to the gamemakers to allow the project to continue. Hell, we've actually seen instances in which Hasbro has chosen to enable fans to do some things with MLP characters, such as these 3D printing capabilities. But Hasbro chose to be the bully. And how'd that turn out?

What started as a quiet evening one recent Saturday ended with a multi-hour visit to my local emergency room.

Remember Rightscorp? This is the company that is trying to be sort of a "light" copyright trolling operation, sending threatening letters to individuals, but letting them "settle" for lower dollar amounts than the more traditional copyright trolls (in the $10s of dollars rather than in the $1000s). The scheme hasn't been working all that well. Late last year, Righstcorp, along with two music publishing clients, BMG and Round Hill Music, decided to sue broadband ISP Cox, to test the (nutty) theory that the DMCA already requires ISPs to kick users off the internet if they receive multiple takedown notices. The whole lawsuit, beyond the questionable legal theory, appeared to be an attempt to force Cox and others to hand over subscriber info.

For years players in the telecom sector have bickered over whether or not to call broadband an essential utility (water, electricity), or keep on acting as if it's simply a luxury. A semantic battle for sure, though ISPs have traditionally fought the former classification because it generally means regulators actually doing their jobs, like checking to make sure that ISP broadband usage meters are accurate (helpful tip: they often aren't and regulators couldn't care less). Also if you declare broadband a necessary utility, that means somebody has to do something about the fact that the lion's share of the country remains on sluggish, last-generation speeds thanks to limited to no real competition.

Learning how to properly analyze all of the raw data that your company collects can help you spot trends and correlations. The Ultimate Data & Analytics Bundle can help you master the ins and outs of data science. For just $39 (97% off of retail), you get access to more than 130 courses covering Oracle setups, the data-specific R programming language, and SAS database management. Many courses come with certificates of completion, and you can pace yourself with lifetime access to existing and future courses.

Ahmed Mohamed, age 14, arrived at school with a clock sitting inside a pencil box. It was obviously a hoax bomb, which is a Texas thing that allows people who don't possess bombs to be prosecuted as if they did. Fun stuff. I'm sure everyone involved wishes their day had gone another way -- with the exception of Ahmed Mohamed, who has now been invited to Facebook, the White House and MIT. Everyone on the other side of the equation has been invited to do other stuff -- most of it involving nearly-impossible sexual acts or perversely scatalogical feats.