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Taking pictures with a smartphone is convenient and easy, and now you can take those photos to the next level with this Smartphone Lens Trio for 56% off. The kit comes with 1 fisheye lens, 1 wide angle lens that also converts to a macro lens, and magnetic rings that work with iPhones, Android and other camera phones. You place the magnetic ring around your phone's lens, and then you can simply stick on the lens of your choice and snap away. The lenses and rings will work with some phone cases as long as they are tight to the phone, and the magnetic rings are easy to remove.

There have been rumors for months that various elements of the legacy recording industry were gearing up to sue SoundCloud, the super popular and useful audio hosting site (we use it to host the Techdirt Podcast). In the last year or so, SoundCloud has been ramping up its efforts to appear super responsive to takedown requests, leading to ridiculous situations including the takedowns of public domain material, or of officially uploaded material. The company has also been completely ridiculous about fair use, telling users that it doesn't recognize it, since it's only a US concept.

North Dakota state representative Rick Becker had a good idea with his House Bill 1328, which would forbid the use of drones by law enforcement in the state without a warrant. A few other states have been looking at similar proposals, after there have been growing concerns about police using drones for surveillance activities. Virginia, for example, recently passed a law that requires a warrant for police drone use. So, good idea, Rep. Becker.

Intercept reporter Jenna McLaughlin alerts us to a rather stunning security mistake by a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agent, as outlined in some DHS released "incident reports" concerning "cloud data breaches." The very first one involves the CBP agent forwarding all of his email to a personal account, but messing up the configuration, so that it actually forwarded to someone else's Gmail account (someone with a similar name) -- and this mistake was only noticed when this "civilian" responded to an email he had received via this forwarding, and the response was sent to a wider mailing list of Homeland Security employees: If you can't see that, here's what it says:

So, just last month, we wrote about United Airlines idiotic inflight video system that forces you to install DRM on your own devices to watch a movie. And, now, it appears that the company is filtering out all sorts of news sites. The EFF's Nate Cardozo was on a flight yesterday when he started noticing that he couldn't get to certain tech websites, including Ars Technica and The Verge -- instead receiving messages they were blocked due to United's "access policy." The same was true for political news site Daily Kos. Eventually he even realized that United also blocks the NY Times (via his phone after the laptop battery ran out).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has put out an alert noting that, as part of a larger spear phishing attack campaign, to try to gain control over computers, a group has created a fake EFF website, designed to trick people into thinking they're going to EFF's actual website, but really installing some pretty nasty malware.

There are more ways to get around than ever before. We have cars, buses, trains, planes, bikes, scooters, motorcycles, electric skateboards, electric unicycles, inline skates, roller shoes, and all kinds of wacky devices to move people along sidewalks and around cities. Each of these methods of transportation has its strengths and weaknesses, and it doesn't look like there's a one-size-fits-all solution on the horizon. If you're interested in rideables and other transportation innovations, check out a few of these links.

Because automatic license plate readers just aren't efficient enough -- what with their ability to capture hundreds, if not thousands, of plate scans per hour -- San Jose's city government is looking to deputize other businesses and their vehicles in its quest to achieve 100% coverage of the city.

Ripoff Report has always been targeted by some very creative legal efforts, thanks to its aggressive use of its Section 230 protections. Forced to find other ways to remove allegedly defamatory content, plaintiffs have tried everything from questionable copyright lawsuits to extortion allegations. Not much of it has stuck.

This is our second week of doing the Techdirt Reading List (don't miss last week's!). Once again, each week, we'll be discussing a book that we think our community might really enjoy. If you click on the Amazon link in this story and buy it that way, you'll also be supporting Techdirt in the process.

Last fall, we wrote about how the FBI had set up a fake AP news story in order to implant malware during an investigation. This came out deep in a document that had been released via a FOIA request by EFF, and first noticed by Chris Soghoian of the ACLU. The documents showed the FBI discussing how to install some malware, called a CIPAV (for Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier) by creating a fake news story:

As the government continues to play Whac-a-Mole with darknet drug bazaars, one of the Silk Road's leading darknet market replacements says it has temporarily suspended service over Tor vulnerability concerns. In an encrypted post to the site's buyers and dealers (copied over to PasteBin and over at the /r/darknetmarkets subReddit), Agora's administrators say the darknet market is nervous about law enforcement's ability to take advantage of recent Tor vulnerabilities, and as such are pulling the market offline for an undisclosed amount of time to protect the site:

Lighten your load while traveling abroad with the Twist World Charging Station, which will save you space in your bag and is available in the deals store for $35. You can twist your way through four plug options that work in over 150 countries, with built-in fuse protection. The 4A charger has four USB ports to charge your devices and features a universal AC power outlet.

Welcome to your dystopian future. Reports from yesterday say that a US drone strike in Syria has killed a British-born computer hacker who had joined ISIS and was involved in that group's online activities:

The folks at Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) sent a freedom of information request to the EU Commission, asking for details of meetings that trade officials held with the tobacco industry. This matters, because the tobacco industry is one of the major abusers of trade agreements, repeatedly making use of the "corporate sovereignty" ISDS provisions to effectively sue any country passing anti-smoking health laws -- as was covered a few months back by John Oliver: So, as new trade agreements are being negotiated -- especially since the powers that be tell us these agreements are designed to protect the health and well being of the public -- it seems that Big Tobacco's efforts in these negotiations is pretty relevant. After numerous delays and confusing responses, CEO finally received a response. And it's [redacted]. Well, not entirely, but basically anything useful is blacked out. Such as this lovely document, which is oh so revealing: Democracy in action!

If anyone needed the perfect example of the giant waste, fraud, and abuse a government emboldened by fear and ineptitude can achieve, that example absolutely has to be the TSA's body scanners. These glorious devices that didn't work in catching weapons or explosives but did let TSA agents see you naked, and which are administered by the TSA, an agency so perfectly unable to do its job properly that all us Techdirt writers now have carpel tunnel syndrome from writing up posts on its exploits, now have a detailed price tag associated with them. So, what did the public pay for all of this fail?

Earlier this year AT&T and Verizon were caught modifying wireless user traffic to inject unique identifier headers (UIDH). This allowed the carriers to ignore a user's privacy preferences on the browser level and track all online behavior. In Verizon's case, the practice wasn't discovered for two years after implementation, and the carrier only integrated a working opt out mechanism only after another six months of public criticism. Verizon and AT&T of course denied that these headers could be abused by third parties. Shortly thereafter it was illustrated that it was relatively easy for these headers to be abused by third parties.

Normally, when we find two breweries involved in a trademark dispute, as has become common these past few years, the dispute tends to be over the extravagant artwork on the label or the equally extravagant names of specific beers. Is this Zombie-Death Murder-Gasm IPA too close in name to Vampire-Orgy Bloodpool Belgium Wheat? Who can tell?

Transportation has evolved from simply walking to riding to flying to sailing and orbiting and all kinds of modes of travel. We've grown accustomed to speeds of 100-600 mph or so, but it's possible to go a lot faster. A Concorde jet could go over 1,000 mph, but those planes aren't in service anymore. Traveling to space might not appeal to that many people, but getting from NYC to LA in an hour might. Check out a few concept vehicles that could accomplish supersonic (or hypersonic) travel.

An integral aspect of the dark art of patent trolling is knowing an exploitable patent inside and out. Patent 6,233,682 (the '682 patent, as it's referred to in lawsuits [which is pretty much the only place it's being referred to]) is titled "Distribution of musical products by a web site vendor over the internet." It was originally granted to its creator, New York businessman Bernard Fritsch, in 2001 and was actually used in the creation and delivery of a music service.

While Windows 8 annoyed many users for its attempt to duct-tape two disparate computing styles (traditional Windows and a touch interface) together while demanding you stand impressed by the genius of such a move, Windows 10 initially appeared to be seeing some positive responses (at least among those who use Windows). That was, at least until people started to realize how nosy the operating system is, how frequently it feels the need to phone home to Redmond, and some of the more obnoxious language buried in the terms of service.

There aren't too many user-generated-content-reliant sites that defend their Section 230 turf more viciously than Ripoff Report. This has earned it a thuggish reputation, something its pay-for-play quasi-reputation management offerings do little to dispel. For better or worse (and it's definitely some of each), Section 230 is the Ripoff Report's load-bearing center.

The story of this morning's live "on air" shooting of a local TV news reporter in Virginia is horrifying on many, many levels. Like with many senseless killings, there are all sorts of "big questions" being raised, most of which aren't really appropriate Techdirt fodder, though I'm sure those of you interested in those things can find other outlets for them. However, one tangential story fits right into Techdirt's core areas of focus: apparently two BBC reporters who were covering the police pursuit of the apparent shooter (who then shot himself) were forced by police to delete their own camera footage. This is illegal. I don't know how many times it needs to be repeated. Even the DOJ has somewhat forcefully reminded police that they have no right to stop anyone from photographing or videotaping things, so long as they're not interfering with an investigation. And yet...

If you want an understanding of my general philosophy on business and economics, it's that companies should focus on serving their customers better. That's it. It's a very customer-centric view of capitalism. I think companies that screw over their customers and users will have it come back to bite them, and thus it's a better strategy for everyone if companies focus on providing good products and services to consumers, without screwing them over. And, I'm super supportive of organizations that focus on holding companies' feet to the fire when they fail to live up to that promise. Consumerist (owned by Consumer Reports) is really fantastic at this kind of thing, for example. Consumer Watchdog, on the other hand, despite its name, appears to have very little to do with actually protecting consumers' interests. Instead, it seems like some crazy people who absolutely hate Google, and pretend that they're "protecting" consumers from Google by attacking the company at every opportunity. If Consumer Watchdog actually had relevant points, that might be useful, but nearly every attack on Google is so ridiculous that all it does is make Consumer Watchdog look like a complete joke and undermine whatever credibility the organization might have.

With everything we do online, it's important to take steps to protect yourself as best as you can. The Deals store is offering 45% off of a 2-year subscription for 2 PCs for Lavasoft Ad-Aware Pro Security. Lavasoft has added a complete antivirus suite to their anti-spyware and anti-adware capabilities. You'll get protection from viruses, rootkits, Trojans, bot networks, spyware, keyloggers and many other online security threats.

Hopefully you know who singer Dan Bull is by now. We've written about him many times. He's written and performed a bunch of songs about topics that we're interested in (and recently composed the awesome new theme song for the Techdirt Podcast (which you do listen to, right?). Dan has been able to build a career around giving away his music, and letting others do stuff with it. But he keeps running into ridiculous issues with YouTube's ContentID system. There was the time his video got silenced after another singer used the same sample he did, and then claimed the original work as his own. Or the time he got his video taken down because another rapper, Lord Finesse, was pissed off that Bull was criticizing Finesse's lawsuit against yet another rapper, Mac Miller. While YouTube has been a key place where Bull has built his audience, his run-in's with bogus claims and other problems even led him to write an entire diss track about ContentID.

Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists directs us to a recently-released document issued by James Clapper (DNI) that formalizes something that the US has long held in principle, but had yet to commit to paper.

Last year, we wrote about a big fair use win by TV monitoring company TVEyes -- a service used by governments, news companies and more to record, index and store TV broadcasts and make them searchable. Fox, a company that sometimes relies on fair use itself, sued TVEyes, alleging infringement and a violation of the infamous hot news doctrine. The court ruled pretty unambiguously in favor of fair use (yes, even as TVEyes is storing everything) for most of TVEyes basic operation (searching and indexing), and completely rejected the hot news claim. However, it did leave aside one area for further investigation: the features provided by TVEyes that allows users to save, archive, download, email and share clips as well as the feature for doing a "date-time search" (allowing users to retrieve video from a specific network based on the date and time of the broadcast. For those, the court wanted more evidence before deciding.

All the cool kids are suing the NSA these days. The EFF and ACLU led the way, suing the NSA before suing the NSA was cool. Others followed as a series Snowden/Greenwald split releases gained popularity (culimating in Greenwald leaving The Guardian to start his own label website). Most recently, those abused by the NSA for their whistleblowing efforts enlisted the help of the frequently more-entertaining-than-effective Larry Klayman to sue the NSA (and many others) for the retaliatory actions that followed their whistleblowing efforts.

Did you know you can occasionally find people discussing narcotics on the Internet? Russian Internet regulator Roskomnadzor (the Kremlin's "Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom Information Technologies and Mass Communications") is pretending to have only recently figured this out, and is working tirelessly to purge this naughty behavior from the Internet. Of course, they're ingeniously doing so in a way that breaks the Internet for everybody else, often taking entire websites offline simply because of one yahoo's heady pontifications on dope.

Here on Techdirt, nationwide tracking schemes tend to raise a red flag. In Malaysia, by contrast, there seem to be no such worries, as ambitious plans to introduce RFID tagging for all vehicles, reported by The Sun Daily, indicate:

Space travel isn't exactly a routine thing just yet. In the 70s, some people thought we'd have shuttles going up to space on a regular schedule, but that didn't exactly happen. Rockets haven't gotten all that much cheaper or more reliable, but presumably they will someday if we continue to build them and improve upon them. Or maybe we'll figure out a completely different way to escape Earth's gravity with a space elevator or rail-gun system to launch vehicles at extremely high speeds. Check out a few of the links below if you think human space exploration isn't a complete waste of time.

You may recall that several months back we wrote about Major League Baseball getting into a trademark dispute with Evolution Finance, who operates a website called WalletHub. The reason for the dispute was that WalletHub's logo was a white "W" on a green background, which MLB thought was too similar to symbols used by the Washington Nationals and Chicago Cubs teams. That Evolution Finance wasn't in even remotely the same industry as two major league baseball teams is a fact that appeared to escape MLB, as the league actually had the stones to claim that customers might be confused between the "W" symbols. Adding to the silliness of it all was the simple nature of the logos.

Everybody wants a piece of the Internet advertising pie, and many are willing to sink to the very bottom of the well of stupidity to get what they believe is owed them. For years now ISPs, hardware vendors and even hotels simply haven't been able to help themselves, and have repeatedly been caught trying to inject their own ads over the top of user browsers and data streams. This is a terrible idea for a number of reasons, ranging from the fact that ad injection is effectively an attack on user traffic, to the obvious and inherent problem with defacing other people and organizations' websites and content with your own advertising prattle.

Late last year, we covered a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision pertaining to a high school student who was suspended from school because he uploaded a "disruptive" rap song to his Facebook account. While the song was vulgar and hinted at violence towards a school employee (who was allegedly taking advantage of female students), it was recorded and uploaded off-campus during non-school hours.

From e-voting and online petitions to broad new avenues of communication between politicians and the public, technology is changing democracy, and has the potential to do so even more. This week we're joined by Catherine Bracy, the Technology Field Officer for Obama For America in 2012, to discuss the current and future impact of rapidly changing technology on the democratic process and whether these impacts have been "good" or "bad." 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.

This century has produced a new lexicon that didn't exist a generation ago: Broadband. Apps. Connectivity. Streaming video. Social networks. The on-demand economy.

There's a famous line about grand juries and their willingness to indict anything prosecutors put in from of them, that they will "indict a ham sandwich" (coined by a judge who was later indicted himself in an effort to prove the point). But, someone apparently asked, can you copyright a chicken sandwich? This apparently serious legal question was recently taken up by the First Circuit appeals court to review a dispute about who owns the idea for a chicken sandwich.

With the MOTA 4-Port USB 3.0 Hub, you get 4 downstream ports for your laptop or computer. This compact hub allows you to plug in multiple accessories, charge them and transfer data quickly. It can easily fit in a laptop bag, gives you the convenience of extra ports, and has built-in surge protection. It is on sale for only $18 in the Techdirt Deals store. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

We've written a few times now about how the parent company of Ashley Madison, Avid Life Media, has been committing perjury and issuing completely bogus copyright demands to try to hide the information that was leaked after its servers got hacked. Last month, that tactic (despite not complying with the law) apparently worked briefly, until the full data dump happened last week. But that hasn't stopped the company from continuing to try. EFF wrote a long blog post detailing how this was a clear abuse of the law, but Avid Life Media doesn't seem to care.

Well, well. Just a few days ago, we wrote about the fact that Google was being asked to "forget" articles about the right to be forgotten, under new right to be forgotten requests... and suddenly we've been notified that a Techdirt article about the right to be forgotten has been similarly stuffed down the memory hole*. The article in question, is our story from last fall about the NY Times writing about the right to be forgotten requests that resulted in NY Times articles disappearing from some searches. The NYT detailed what each story was about and it wasn't too difficult to figure out who was likely trying to make sure the articles were no longer linked to their names.

Way back in 2004, we noted that the FTC went after Tower Records for getting hacked and leaking customer records. At the time, we wondered if this was appropriate. Companies get hacked all the time, even those with good security practices. So, at what point can it be determined if the company is being negligent, or if it's just that those looking to crack their systems are just that good. Well, the FTC had decided that it can draw the line, and for companies that do a particularly egregious job in not protecting user data, it's made it clear that it's going to go after them. A few years back, the FTC went after Wyndham Hotels for failing to secure user data, and Wyndham tried to argue that the FTC had no authority to do so. Last year, a district court sided with the FTC and now the Third Circuit appeals court has upheld that ruling, giving the FTC much more power to crack down on companies who fail to protect user data from leaking.

This should be fun. A bunch of whistleblowers that were hounded, surveilled and prosecuted/persecuted by the US government are banding together to sue all the big names in domestic surveillance.

The sometimes blisteringly-inane hype surrounding the "Internet of Things" appears to be on a collision course with the sophomoric security standards being employed in the field. As we've seen time and time again, companies were so bedazzled by the idea of connecting everything and anything to the Internet (your hat! your pants! your toilet!) they left device and network security as an afterthought -- if they could be bothered to think about it at all. The result has been smart TVs that share your personal conversations, vehicles that can easily be used to kill you, and a home full of devices leaking your daily habits.

Techdirt has written numerous articles about an important move in academic publishing towards open access. By shifting the funding of production costs from the readers to the researchers' institutions it is possible to provide free online access to everyone while ensuring that high academic standards are maintained. An important aspect of that, both for open access and traditional publishing, is peer review, which is designed to ensure that the most important papers are brought forward, and that they are checked and improved as they pass through the publication process. Given that pivotal role, the following story in The Washington Post is both shocking and troubling:

Chemists haven't quite mastered manipulating atoms and molecules, but physicists are making some progress in making/discovering all kinds of new particles -- and not just sub-atomic scale particles. We've mentioned "super heavy hydrogen" before, but there are a few other unnatural bits of matter brewing in labs, too. Check out a few of them below.

While Google is still seen as (and proclaims to be) a net neutrality advocate, evidence continues to mount that this is simply no longer the case. Back in 2010 you might recall that Google helped co-write the FCC's original, flimsy net neutrality rules with the help of folks like AT&T and Verizon -- ensuring ample loopholes and making sure the rules didn't cover wireless at all. When the FCC moved to finally enact notably-tougher neutrality rules for wired and wireless networks earlier this year, Google was publicly mute but privately active in making sure the FCC didn't seriously address the problems with usage caps and zero-rated (cap exempt) content.

Over the last few years, we've published a ton of stories about the growing police reliance on Stingray cell site simulator devices (also known as IMSI catchers), that mimic a real cell phone tower and help provide the location of a certain mobile phone. As we've written, these devices have been super popular with police departments, who often receive them from the federal government with strict non-disclosure agreements, which means law enforcement has been known to lie to courts or simply drop cases where the usage is at risk of coming out in court.

We write frequently about those who abuse the DMCA either directly for the sake of censorship or, more commonly, because some are in such a rush to take down anything and everything that they don't bother (or care) to check to see if what they're taking down is actually infringing. The latter, while common, could potentially expose those issuing the takedowns to serious legal liability, though the courts are still figuring out to what extent.

A couple months ago, we wrote about Twitter shutting down Politwoops, a service from the Sunlight Foundation that highlighted tweets that politicians had posted... and then deleted. This was a useful tool for transparency, showing what kinds of tweets politicians delete. Frequently it was silly things like typos, but sometimes it caught and highlighted really ridiculous statements by politicians that they should have thought more about first. Twitters reasoning behind this made no sense at all at the time, claiming that it was about "honoring the expectation of user privacy." That's wrong. If you tweet publicly, there is no "expectation of privacy." You have done something publicly.