Techdirt

For a few months now a rumor has been circulating that the FCC is intentionally planning to ban third-party custom router firmware. Wi-Fi hobbyists (and people who just like a little more control over devices they own) have long used custom, open source firmware like DD-WRT or Open-WRT to bring some additional functionality to their devices, with the added bonus of replacing clunky router GUIs. Custom firmware is also handy in an age when companies like to force firmware upgrades that either eliminate useful functionality, or add cloud-features and phone-home mechanisms a user may not be comfortable with.

Vehicle vanity plates are a form of expression -- albeit one often severely limited by the arbitrary decisions of state agencies. Last year, we covered a man's battle against New Hampshire's Dept. of Motor Vehicles for the right to be subjected to increased police harassment attach a "COPSLIE" license plate to his car. He won (but probably also lost), in part because his backup vanity plate application -- for a government-hugging "GR8GOVT" -- was approved by the agency.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Yes, we've all heard that maxim before, but rarely does it ring so true as it does regarding the trademark case between Nestle, the candy giant, and FortiFX, much smaller makers of Fit Crunch bars. Fit Crunch bars appear to be marketed as a healthier option compared with traditional candybars. Nestle took notice of the name of the Fit Crunch bars and has claimed the name and, more importantly and central to their claim, the packaging in which they're sold, is trademark and trade dress infringement.

Drones are becoming more common and more useful all the time, and at the same time, these devices are also getting to be more of a nuisance/threat for air traffic and important (sometimes life-saving) activities. Firefighters in helicopters are grounded when drones could potentially interfere with their work because it's a safety hazard to the helicopter and its passengers. The FAA hasn't yet come up with a complete set of drone-specific regulations, so for now, there's a bit of legal limbo and some strange rules to follow that don't always make sense.

Like so many industries, the telecom industry employs a literal army of paid "consultants," fauxcademics, fake consumer advocates, ex-politicians and other talking heads to parrot industry policy under the pretense of objective analysis. Usually this sockpuppet army is used to build a sound wall of illusory support for shitty policy. This practice has worked for decades, in large part, because very rarely can newspapers or websites be bothered to disclose the fact that these individuals are paid to spew total and absolute nonsense by anybody interested in hiring their services via a third party (usually a law firm or lobbying group).

Danny O'Brien, over at the EFF's Deeplinks blog, has the story of how it appears China is pressuring the developers of tools for circumventing the Great Firewall of China to shut down their repositories and no longer offer the code. Two separate, non-commercial, developers of circumvention tools have quietly gone dark recently:

Content Creator of the Month is a new project from the Copia Institute that we'll also be highlighting here. Each month, we'll profile a new content creator who is doing interesting and compelling things, often using the internet in innovative and powerful ways. Here is the very first installment...

Back in March, an absolutely crazy story came out about two members of the Baltimore-based law enforcement team that were trying to track down Dread Pirate Roberts who was behind the original Silk Road. An FBI team out of NY beat the Baltimore DEA/Secret Service team to finding Ross Ulbricht, leading to a weird situation in which, hours later, the Baltimore folks filed their own indictment with somewhat different charges, including a trumped up fake murder of a former Silk Road employee, that was supposedly "carried out" by an undercover agent, later revealed to be DEA agent Carl Force, who Ulbricht contacted for help. The story was crazy and cinematic, but apparently that wasn't even half of it, because the story in March revealed that two members of the Baltimore team, including Force, had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars from Silk Road. It also revealed that the "murder for hire" plot against the ex-employee only happened after the Secret Service agent, Sean Bridges, stole Bitcoin from Silk Road, leading Ulbricht to think that it was the former employee, Curtis Green.

For years now regulators have tried fruitlessly to bring a little more competition to the cable set top box market. While CableCARD was supposed to be a revolution on this front, regulatory enforcement was messy and inconsistent, and to protect set top box rental revenues and overall market control, cable companies rarely advertised the technology and made installations frequently nightmarish and expensive. When lackluster CableCARD stats then emerged annually, the cable industry just shrugged and apathetically declared that gosh -- nobody really wanted choice anyway.

If you are wary of storing your information in the cloud, the $80 Dubbler Dock Pro 2-Bay could be the answer to your storage problems. The Dubbler Dock acts as both a 1:1 HDD duplicator and as a dynamic docking station. It fits all 2.5” & 3.5” SATA hard drives, works with Windows 2000 and newer or Mac OS 10.3 and later and comes with a USB 3.0 cable. The dock also comes with software that allows you to resize your HDD to fit on a smaller SSD.

Meet Carl Crowell. Willamette Week recently ran a profile on his copyright trolling practice, based out of Oregon. Unlike copyright trolls like Malibu Media and Prenda Law, who focused on porn, Crowell has tried to cultivate a copyright trolling client list straight out of Hollywood -- which is how he ended up as the copyright trolling lawyer working for Voltage Pictures on the Dallas Buyers Club trolling efforts in Oregon. You may remember those, because he was the apparent mastermind behind the attempt to abuse trademark law to go after people in Oregon. As we noted at the time, the trademark claims were ridiculous, and clearly seemed to be an attempt to look for a more friendly state court, rather than having to go into federal court with the copyright claims.

If you thought US law enforcement's freakout about "going dark" due to encryption was insane, leave it to Turkey to take the insanity to new levels. Two journalists and a "fixer" working for Vice News in Turkey were arrested and charged with "engaging in terrorist activity" because they used the same encryption tools that ISIS uses. Really.

Last week we noted that while Windows 10 has generally seen good reviews in terms of spit and polish, there's growing concern that the OS is too nosy for its own good, and that the opt-out functionality in the OS doesn't really work. Even when you've disabled a number of the nosier features (like Windows 10's new digital assistant, Cortana), the OS ceaselessly and annoyingly opens an array of encrypted channels back to the Redmond mother ship that aren't entirely under the user's control.

Lo Barnechea is a commune of Chile located in Santiago Province, with a population of about 75,000. Its Mayor, Felipe Guevara, has decided what Lo Barnechea really needs is a massive surveillance system installed in aerostats tethered over the area, as explained by a post on the Derechos Digitales site (original in Spanish.) It's not clear from the article why he chose this unusual approach; perhaps it's because most of his district is mountainous, and that poses problems for conventional surveillance systems. Whatever the reasons, Guevara is smart enough to recognize that powerful mass surveillance systems of the kind he wants to install, which involves cameras able to pick out people from a distance of more than a kilometer away, have a serious problem:

The Wall Street Journal has obtained a nominal "win" in a Stingray-related legal action aimed at unsealing electronic surveillance orders, but the decision reads more like a loss. Jennifer Valentino-Devries reports:

Human genetic studies are pointing to more and more interesting information about how our bodies work and develop and ultimately fail. Optimists point to using this knowledge for the improvement of the human condition, but there are some obvious counter-arguments to this viewpoint. So far, though, the technology for genetic therapies or designer babies hasn't been anywhere near perfected, giving us some time to reflect on the possibilities and pitfalls. Unfortunately, our inherent biases in what we're looking at in our genome might prove to be our own undoing.

A few weeks ago we noted that it appeared that Facebook was building its own ContentID system to try to takedown videos copied from elsewhere... and voila, here it is. Facebook has now announced its new system, which is powered by AudibleMagic -- the same company that powers every other such system that is not Google's ContentID. Audible Magic is the "default." It's basically the "buying IBM" of content/copyright filtering. And it tends to be pretty bad. Facebook notes that its videos are already run through Audible Magic and that has basically done nothing. So they're "working with Audible Magic to enhance the way the system works."

Over the weekend, Spencer Ackerman published a fairly incredible story about a newly appointed West Point professor, William Bradford, who had written a paper, published in the National Security Law Journal, entitled Trahison Des Professeurs, in which he argues (among other things) that US academics who oppose current US anti-terror policy should themselves be targets for killing as a "fifth column."

Technological innovation is solving all sorts of problems, from major issues to minor inconveniences — but one criticism that often comes up is that Silicon Valley has a "by rich young white men, for rich young white men" culture, with most of its efforts focused on solving problems for a small, affluent minority. This week, Catherine Bracy returns as we try to understand this common complaint, how valid it is, and what can be done about it. 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.

Comcast has slowly but surely been expanding the company's usage cap trials since around 2012, largely focusing them on less competitive markets where annoyed users can't vote with their wallets. In these seventeen (and counting) trial markets, Comcast broadband customers face a monthly usage cap of 300 gigabytes. After that, users need to shell out $10 for each additional 50 gigabytes of data consumed. The trials have expanded slowly but surely in the hopes of minimizing user backlash. Basically, Comcast is the hot water slowly coming to a boil, and you're the frog.

Canada's law enforcement agencies are still enduring the growing pains of having to respect the privacy and civil rights of Canadian citizens. It's apparently killing them.

Learn how to code apps and games with the $29 Hot Java Android Coding Bundle on sale now. The bundle includes 5 courses with over 60 hours of training, and has promised updates coming once Android Marshmallow is publicly released. You will learn about a variety of topics, including an introduction to Java programming, the essentials of working in the Lollipop platform, how to write apps for Android, the web and desktops, how to reskin games for a variety of app stores, and the essentials of Play Framework. The courses are suitable for all experience levels, so if you're just starting out or looking to brush up on your skills, there should be something there for everyone.

Techdirt has been following for a while the Canadian government's unabashed attempts to muzzle scientists and librarians who work for the state, as it tries to deny them the right to express their views if those happen to disagree with the Prime Minister Stephen Harper's political agenda. That battle over freedom of speech is not only continuing, but escalating according to this story in The Globe and Mail:

For years now we've noted how some people are absolutely positive that Wi-Fi is making them sick, despite a lack of any substantive evidence on that front. Still, schools have repeatedly found themselves on the receiving end of lawsuits for simply installing and using Wi-Fi, and in some cases have been forced to remove the technology for the supposed benefit of the "electromagnetically sensitive." The majority of double-blind studies conducted indicate that, contrary to claims of the afflicted, these individuals cannot accurately state when they're in the presence of stronger electromagnetic fields.

While the FBI and NSA continue their campaign to fight against allowing encryption for devices, it's clear that not everyone in the government agrees. It does appear that there's a bit of a fight going on within the administration over where to come down (as President Obama himself admitted), and in a recent blog post, it seems pretty clear where the FTC comes down in this debate. The FTC's CTO, Ashkan Soltani, who has long been a strong user-privacy advocate (and before joining the FTC helped in some of the reporting on the Snowden documents), wrote the blog post celebrating the virtues of full disk encryption and other "end user device controls." It starts out by noting that when he recently lost his own laptop, he wasn't that worried, thanks to the fact that it was encrypted.

For more than a decade now wireless carriers have struggled with this rather simple definition:

Recently, Techdirt has written dozens of stories about the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP). That's largely because it seemed to be coming to a conclusion, after many years of negotiations, and so it was important to capture the last-minute twists and turns -- and the dirty deals -- as they happened. But as we reported a few weeks ago, that final breakthrough and completion never happened. Instead, we had the "Maui meltdown", when a whole bunch of old and new problems raised their heads, with the result that TPP may have missed a key deadline that means it won't be happening soon, if ever. That may have seemed an extravagant claim, but it is a sentiment that is gradually beginning to spread among commentators in Asia. Here, for example, is The Diplomat, a specialist title covering that part of the world:

Imagine if the inventor of the Segway claimed to own "any thing that moves in response to human commands." Or if the inventor of the telegraph applied for a patent covering any use of electric current for communication. Absurdly overbroad claims like these would not be allowed, right? Unfortunately, the Patent Office does not do a good job of policing overly broad claims. August's Stupid Patent of the Month, U.S. Patent No. 8,788,090, is a stark example of how these claims promote patent trolling. A patent troll called Rothschild Connected Devices Innovations, LLC ("RCDI") owns a family of patents on a system of customizing products. Each of these patents stems from the same 2006 application. The idea is simple: connect some kind of product mixer to the Internet and allow users to make custom orders. The application suggests using the system to make beverages or shampoo. Here's how the application describes the invention:

Schools in the US vary quite a bit by location. A school in one neighborhood could be vastly better than another school just on the other side of town. There are obvious factors that play into this situation, and unsurprisingly, some political campaigns can cloud the progress towards solutions that might improve lagging schools. Clearly, not all schools can be created equal, but there could be some ways to close the "achievement gap" without simply knocking down the higher-performing schools.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the federal government stepped up to assure the nation that as horrifically damaging as the storm was, we would all come out of it OK.*

Earlier this year, European antitrust authorities went after Google (hours after EU officials announced plans to harm American internet companies to "help" local internet companies). Google just last week responded to the initial claims, saying that "improving quality isn't anti-competitive." Of course, the more detailed response is still private, so we don't know the full extent of what's being discussed. And, now, it appears that India is going after Google based on similar charges, claiming that it somehow leverages its own position in rigging either search results or putting its own services ahead of competitors above the search results.

It is funny to see how some people react to technology changes, almost always assuming that "new" is somehow bad, because it's different. Looking back through historical examples, they often look pretty funny. Last year, we wrote about an old moral panic in the NY Times from 1878 about two Thomas Edison inventions, the phonograph and the aerophone (basically a broadcasting system for the phonograph). It's somewhat hilarious to read these days:

TorrentFreak's Andy reports that Amazon recently published the MPAA-required "best practices" for handling physical goods as well as content stored or hosted by its cloud services. This doesn't just cover the obvious storage of movies for streaming services, but also works-in-progress by studios utilizing Amazon's web services.

DRM, or digital rights management, can be said to have been effective in practice at accomplishing many different things. It makes products less useful, for instance. It also serves as chaff to distract the technically proficient into disabling it instead of doing any number of actually useful things. DRM is also actually quite good at making our lives just a bit less safe. What's interesting is that none of those things are the stated reason companies use DRM. Instead, DRM is explained by companies as the only way they can protect themselves from damned dirty pirates and, without it, these companies would simply not be able to make enough money to sustain themselves.

Here were our top 3 most popular deals from August.

In the wake of the Sony Pictures hack, the company went somewhat ballistic in trying to describe just how "harmful" the hack was. It brought on famed lawyer David Boies to threaten anyone who published any information from the hack, claiming that it was a violation of the First Amendment (yes, it told the media that publishing news was a violation of the First Amendment). The company also (ridiculously) threatened to sue Twitter, claiming that Twitter would be held "responsible for any damage or loss arising from such use or dissemination by Twitter." Thoughout it all, Sony kept arguing that this hack was a complete disaster and incredibly harmful.

The previous pope, Benedict XVI a few years ago made some waves by suggesting that intellectual property had gone too far, saying:

For years, New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and the NYPD waged a small-scale war in Times Square to turn it into a family-friendly tourist attraction on par with Las Vegas. It succeeded... mostly. Porn shops were replaced with toy stores and chain restaurants.

The FISA Court has approved another three-month extension of the NSA's phone metadata collection, allowing the agency to run out the clock on the USA Freedom Act-triggered "transition period" with no additional stipulations attached. The transition will apparently be "business as usual" right up to the expiration date (Nov. 29, 2015), at which point everything will suddenly be compliant with the new law.

It seems there are no lows to which the recording industry won't sink, reaffirmed this week by a series of anti-piracy ads that exploit the tragic stories of dead (and highly successful) musicians. Violynne won most insightful comment of the week for an open letter to those who might be misled by this campaign:

Five Years Ago There were a lot of branding battles breaking out this week in 2010. LucasFilm targeted a company called Jedi Mind with claims of trademark infringement, false designation of origin, trademark dilution, breach of contract and unfair competition; Madonna got sued for selling clothes under the name Material Girl by a company that had already been doing that since 1997; Warner Bros. called in the lawyers over "Harry Popper" condoms being made in Switzerland; Facebook kicked off a trademark fight with Teachbook; Take-Two Interactive discovered that it couldn't snag the bioshock.com domain because it was registered before the Bioshock trademark; and yet another player jumped into the trademark fight over the Mafia Wars Facebook game. Meanwhile, in a town up here in Ontario, some guy managed to trademark the phrase "Welcome to Parry Sound" and started demanding money from local businesses. Copyright collection societies around the world were up to their usual tricks, with a Czech proposal that would require artists to get collection society permission to use Creative Commons, a South African society fighting to prevent music from entering the public domain, and BMI trying hard to reverse a court ruling that let venues route around it. Also this week in 2010, Techdirt received one of the most incredible legal threats we've ever been hit with, demanding we take down the entire site over some unidentified comments. Ten Years Ago In 2005, China's internet censorship regime was in full-swing, and we got to see some rare quotes from the state defending the system. Meanwhile, the Chinese government was also turning its attention on video games, with the introduction of a three-hour limit on online gaming sessions. Anti-spam laws focused on children were beginning to backfire while an unsurprising study showed that college kids are too smart to fall for spam. The popular fear that texting was ruining children's language skills was shown to be unlikely, not that anyone noticed, many being more focused on using phones to track kids' whereabouts. At least in Japan it appeared that mobile phones had the unexpected effect of reducing teen smoking. Fifteen Years Ago Technology was changing plenty of things in 2000. This week, we saw the first car designed almost entirely on a computer — but the more exciting advancements were in new polymers, which promised all sorts of automobile performance improvements (not to mention new achievements in the field of medicine). Some scientists were working on genetically modified goats that produce spider's web protein in their milk, while others had figured out how to make skin temporarily transparent. Meanwhile, a new protest group was building robots to spraypaint sidewalks and hand out pamphlets. The dot-com world was still uncertain, and for some reason a lot of people seemed to love gloating about that fact. The Economist took the time to look at a list of things the internet can't do, and while it focused on loftier goals, the potential list did get a bit shorter with the first forays into online pizza delivery. Eight-Hundred Years Ago The Magna Carta is famous as one of the foundational documents in the history of modern law, and the fact that it was signed in 1215 is one of those popular pieces of trivia that float around with minimal context. Many can name that year, but fewer know that it would be another eight decades before the Magna Carta truly held any sway. Initially, it was the centerpiece of an English civil war, drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury and signed by King John and a bunch of rebellious Barons — all of whom on both sides promptly ignored it pretty much entirely. The King then did an end run to Pope Innocent III, who sent a letter dated August 24th, 1215 in which he declared the Magna Carta "null, and void of all validity for ever" and threatened excommunication of anyone who observed it. It would later be reintroduced at the end of the war, then again a few years later, by John's son, and then another seventy years after that by his son, at which point it finally became England's statute law.

Ever since Star Trek: The Next Generation, who among us hasn't thought it would be cool to have an omnipresent voice interface with a starship or, failing that, our own house? Sure, PADDs iPhones have Siri now, but it's just not the same. Our focus for this week's Awesome Stuff isn't the first attempt to create a voice-operated computer assistant for the home, and it probably won't be the last, but the Mycroft is certainly worthy of note. The Good One of my first Kickstarter purchases was the Ubi, an earlier attempt at this idea by a startup that now appears to have given up on device manufacturing and focused entirely on operating a cloud service. Nevertheless, it was a nice little piece of hardware and fun to play with — but it's always fallen a little short of the smooth, perfect functioning that would be necessary to make it a seamless part of everyday life. Whether or not the Mycroft will hit a higher mark is impossible to know for sure without trying one out in person, but there are a couple aspects that make it notable. First is the fact that it's built with a commitment to open software and hardware. It's built on a Raspberry Pi (with all the tweakability and extendibility that implies) and Linux, and is completely open source, with a special backer tier on Kickstarter that gets developers early access to the software which they can run on their own Pis before Mycroft is released. As for the AI processing that happens in the cloud, it's all done using various open, public APIs for things like voice recognition and natural language processing, rather than relying on a single proprietary service like most such devices. Second is the price: thanks to all that open software and hardware, the Mycroft on Kickstarter clocks in at only $150 for the fully extendable model and $130 for the more basic version (including global shipping, and with some additional early bird discounts still kicking around too). This is considerably lower than several voice systems with fewer features. The Bad Devices like this are very hard to evaluate without trying them out, or at least reading some hands-on reviews — so these pre-production Kickstarter sales are for those who have faith, spare cash, or a really insatiable desire to achieve that Star Trek dream. It's also important to keep in mind that the Mycroft isn't especially useful as a standalone unit: its capabilities come from integration with other smart-home devices and the internet of things — or at least other Mycroft units. For people whose homes are already equipped with smart thermometers, wireless door locks, networked sound systems and the like, a centralized voice control system is a powerful tool, but for everyone else it's just a fun toy/exceptionally fancy alarm clock. "Here I am, brain the size of a planet..." The Okay-Free This is an odd detail, but one that stands out if you've used multiple voice-activated devices before: you don't need to say "Okay, Mycroft" to wake the unit up — just its name by itself will do. This is nice, since a lot of devices use the "okay" phrase (I've got "okay Google" for Google Now searches on smartphones, "okay OnePlus" to wake my OnePlus One, and "okay Ubi" for the aforementioned similar device), and while this does make that Radiohead album seem prophetic, these "okays" have a tendency to cross-pollinate and wake up the wrong device. Mycroft, I suppose, is a unique enough sound that the device can listen for it without the need for an additional trigger — though it remains to be seen whether it will be accidentally awoken by episodes of the BBC's Sherlock.

A month ago, we wrote about actor James Woods bizarrely suing a trollish Twitter user who had been mocking Woods on the site. The whole lawsuit seemed ridiculous. The specific tweet that sent Woods over the edge was this anonymous user (who went by the name "Abe List") saying "cocaine addict James Woods still sniffing and spouting." Soon after our post on the subject, Ken "Popehat" White posted an even better takedown entitled James Woods Punches the Muppet. That post has now been updated with a brief note that White has now been retained to defend the anonymous Twitter user. And, if that gets you excited for what to expect in the legal filings, well, you don't have wait. As first reported by Eriq Gardner at the Hollywood Reporter, White has filed the John Doe's opposition to Woods' attempt to unmask the guy. And it's worth reading.

I guess at this point that most people already know that Pokemon Company guards its intellectual property with the same dedication that a dog guards its food bowl after it's been filled with a rare-cooked bone-in ribeye (am I the only one that enjoys giving dogs good food?). Between going after a woman who made some planters inspired by Pokemon and suing someone for making a phone app for collecting Pokemon cards, the message is clear: don't use our stuff! Even though, as is almost inevitably the case, this kind of strict control prevents uses that actually do more to promote the Pokemon brand than anything else, and even when these cases are against true fans of Pokemon, it doesn't matter. Control is what they are interested in. Control for the sake of control.

Some people really like eating at Chipotle. It's supposed to be healthy (although it really depends on what you order). The ingredients are often (but not always) from sustainable sources, and customers enjoy their meals. A few really fanatical eaters have devised some bizarre eating games with Chipotle food. Almost every fast food restaurant has a "secret menu" of some kind nowadays, but if you really like Chipotle, here are some extreme eaters who have documented their Chipotle purchases.

Earlier today Techdirt writer Tim Geigner pointed me to a YouTube video that used Twitter user names to create a punnish version of the 80s hit "Tainted Love" retitled Tweeted Love. It's pretty amusing: In checking out the YouTube account of the guy who created it, Jim Mortleman, a more recent video posted just a few days ago popped up, entitled Nerdpunna - Smells Like Tweet Spirit. This was the same style video, using Twitter usernames to create an absolutely hilarious version of the famous Nirvana song. It was so well done (perhaps because Kurt Cobain's lyrics are so unintelligible) that I couldn't believe it had only around 2,000 views. So I tweeted it, joking that people should check it out before it got taken down.

Earlier this summer, the DOJ proudly announced that a Virginia teenager, Ali Shukri Amin, had taken a plea deal for "providing material support to ISIL" (the terrorist organization that everyone outside of the US government calls ISIS). This is back in the news now that Amin has been sentenced to 11 years in prison. Let's get this out of the way: ISIS is clearly a horrific and dangerous organization. But does what Amin did really deserve 11 years in prison? The details of the case against him also seem to raise some serious First Amendment questions about what counts as "material support."

The very existence of copyright collection societies, those organizations that try to find any way to squeeze any amount of money of any businesses that in any way do anything with any music, is predicated on one excuse: they do all of this for the artists. Yes, throughout the world, benevolent money-changers are digging through the pockets of mostly small business owners, just trying to get some coin for song-writers and musicians. Nevermind that they'll occasionally jack up the fees they collect when they find they actually have to do the job of protecting artists. Nevermind that the disease of corruption appears to find these collection societies to be particularly good hosts. It's for the artists, maaaan.

It was really only a matter of time. As cord-cutting continues as a trend and the cable TV market as we know it today struggles to stay relevant by grasping at major pro and college sports broadcast deals, the injection of a tech-industry giant into the sports ownership arena meant that the chance of streaming for sports could only increase. Truthfully, When Steve Ballmer bought the Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion, he wasn't the first tech celebrity to own an NBA team. Mark Cuban, after all, has owned the Dallas Mavericks for some time now. But Ballmer has been quite progressive in a traditionally conservative league in pushing the Clippers forward into modernity. Given the state of the team's business practices when he made his purchase, there was always going to be a lot of heavy lifting to do. Still, it seems that Ballmer isn't going to let that keep him from considering some very big ideas.

Back in December of 2013, judge Richard Leon of the DC district court, ruled that the NSA's bulk metadata collection under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act was unconstitutional and issued an injunction against it (though, recognizing the inevitable appeal, Judge Leon stayed the injunction). This was in the case brought by Larry Klayman and FreedomWorks.