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When I was very little, my father drove a 1972 Ford Pinto (yes, one of the exploding versions) that had a faded bumper sticker reading "My other car is a Porsche." I remember this very clearly because I remember, at a very young age, asking my father to explain the "joke" and still not really getting it. Of course, that "my other car is a..." joke has been around for a long time. It may not be a good joke, but it's a pretty well-known joke. Except, apparently, for the overly serious trademark lawyers at Louis Vuitton.

If you're looking to learn about IT security principles or want to brush up on your skills, the $59 IT Security and Management Bundle is a useful place to start. The four courses cover the subjects you need to know to take the ITIL, CISA, CompTIA, and CISSP certification exams, by focusing on the underlying principles and how to put them into everyday use. You have 2 years of access to the bundle so you can learn at your own pace about cryptography, system and infrastructure life cycle management, risk mitigation strategies and much more.

The big story of last week was T-Mobile CEO John Legere's meltdown over people calling out the bullshit claims about BingeOn "optimizing" mobile video when the truth is that it was simply throttling all video traffic (partners and non partners alike). Things got even worse when Legere decided to attack EFF and suggest that it was being paid to discredit BingeOn. The simple fact remains, however, that T-Mobile is throttling video streams (and downloads).

People are quite reasonably upset by the news of David Bowie's passing, with lots of reminiscing and certainly tons of listening to his music. I certainly re-listened to a bunch of his music on Sunday night after hearing about Bowie's death. And, some, such as comedian Eddie Izzard, suggested that "every radio station" should just play David Bowie music for the day as a tribute:

The FCC's recent broadband progress report (pdf) highlighted the telecom industry's continued failure with not only getting any broadband to rural areas, but with getting next-generation speeds to existing broadband customers. The FCC has noted that 34 million Americans still lack access to fixed broadband at the FCC’s benchmark speed of 25 Mbps for downloads, 3 Mbps for uploads. The agency also notes that two-thirds of homes lack access to more than one provider capable of delivering these speeds. If you recall, the FCC bumped its definition of broadband to 25 Mbps from a measly 4 Mbps about a year ago.

Software patents are contentious, and nowhere more so than in Europe. Patenting there is governed by the European Patent Convention (EPC). Article 52 of the EPC reads as follows:

We have talked quite a bit about Major League Baseball for a technology site, in no small part due to many of the forward-thinking things the league has done regarding operating its business in the digital age. In the realm of sports streaming, I've typically referred to MLB.TV and the league's Advanced Media products as the gold standard and I think I'm on pretty solid ground in saying so. Beyond that, the league seems poised to embrace expanded streaming options and the dropping of some of its more intrusive blackout rules, positioning the league well in the midst of the cord-cutting epidemic winding its way through the cable television industry.

The universe is just incredibly vast and full of stuff we're only scratching the surface of detecting. Every so often, though, there are some folks who think we've learned it all -- or that there's not much more left to figure out. But there's always more. The pace of technology might not advance fast enough for us to be able to continue to discover new things at the rate we've been doing so, but the "peak science" event probably hasn't happened yet (or may not happen at all).

Spend any reasonable amount of time looking through all the posts we've done here on DRM -- digital rights management -- and one theme becomes abundantly clear: the whole thing is an exercise in futility. Far from a blanket solution to video game piracy, DRM instead can be best explained as an arms race between game publishers and the hacking groups that best them at speeds nothing short of remarkable. All, mind you, while mostly annoying legitimate customers of the games the DRM is meant to protect from the pirates that crack them.

We're formally now bearing witness to the "synergistic" fruit of AT&T's $69 billion recent acquisition of DirecTV. When the deal was first proposed, even Wall Street wondered why AT&T would spend that kind of money on a satellite TV provider on the eve of the cord cutting revolution. But AT&T has a very clear plan of attack, and as we recently noted, its first move post merger was to raise the rates of DirecTV and AT&T U-Verse TV customers in perfect unison. Now AT&T has added a new wrinkle to its post-merger plans, bringing back unlimited wireless broadband data -- but only if you sign up for the company's television services.

We seem to end up posting stories like this every year, but it just keeps on happening. Hollywood whines and whines and whines about how piracy is killing the movie business... and then announces yet another record year at the box office.

As I'm sure you've heard by now, famed musician David Bowie passed away yesterday at age 69 due to cancer. As someone who influenced so many people in so many different ways, it's great to see basically everyone celebrating his life and his music. But, given that this is Techdirt, I also thought that Bowie deserved a shoutout on topics that we discuss around here as well: Bowie wasn't just an amazing music visionary, but he was similarly visionary about the music business and the internet as well.

Get your gaming on with the $37 NES30 Pro Bluetooth Game Controller. The controller's looks are inspired by the old school NES controllers, and it lets you play games on a variety of platforms (iOS, Android, PC, etc.). You can also add expansions as they become available with firmware upgrades. Slip this sleek controller in your pocket and be ready to play whenever the mood strikes you.

Hook a "smart" TV up to a "dumb" pipe and this is the inevitable result.

As you may have heard, on Friday, a group of top White House officials, including Homeland Security director Jeh Johnson, FBI Director James Comey and NSA boss Admiral Michael Rogers, all came out to Silicon Valley to meet with tech execs to talk about how to "disrupt" groups like ISIS. On the tech side, a bunch of top execs came, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince. The White House released a basic agenda publicly, though there was also apparently a more thorough briefing document that ran about 7 pages.

The FCC is required by Congress to annually "determine whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion," something the FCC's latest broadband status report (pdf) suggests we're still doing a relatively crappy job at.

The NYPD considers itself to be the finest police force in the nation, if not the world. But its track record says otherwise. It lost a lawsuit over its "stop and frisk" program, thanks to its unconstitutionality and appearance of racial bias. It is currently in the middle of a lawsuit related to illegal summons quotas -- one in which it destroyed documents it was ordered to preserve. And now, it has just lost anotherlawsuit related to its biased policing.

We've got a double winner this week, with our top comment taking the first place spots for both insightful and funny. It came in response to the news that cryptography pioneer David Chaum is working on creating backdoors for law enforcement. A Non-Mouse perceived a devil in the details:

Five Years Ago Recently, Homeland Security returned a domain it seized all the way back in 2010. This week in 2011, we were still examining the fallout from the original seizures, as well as some similar seizures that were finally moving into the forfeiture phase. Some were claiming the technical and legal errors in the affidavit didn't matter, but we pushed back against that idea while marveling at how Homeland Security had clammed up about the seizures. They also appeared to have invented a non-existent form of criminal contributory liability in their justification. In the world of Wikileaks, the new congressional leadership was prioritizing an investigation even while paying lip service to transparency. A Spanish newspaper explained its decision to publish the leaked cables, while a USAF Intelligence veteran explained why he supports Wikileaks and we debunked the idea that the leaks put lives in danger in Zimbabwe. Also notable: this week in 2011 we took our first look at the TPP, and the now-infamous "study" linking vaccines to autism, which had already been known to be mistaken, was beginning to be exposed as outright fraud. Ten Years Ago The RIAA was up to its antics this week in 2006, using scare tactics to implicitly threaten anyone visiting the Grokster site and subpoenaing a bunch of John Does over file sharing. The MPAA was celebrating a DVD bust that was basically fake as part of Hollywood's broader strategy of entirely missing the point. Some media companies were starting to experiment with device-independent content as though it was a shocking and difficult innovation (not an obvious and simple feature) while some TV networks were opening up a bit more to VOD. The New York Times was trying to get its head around the fact that bloggers were calling out inaccuracy in the press, while other major newspapers were failing to fact check stories they lifted from blogs. But the worst trend in online content by far was the separation of articles into multiple pages. Fifteen Years Ago After Y2K went off without a hitch, few expected that the real bugs would start coming a year later. This week in 2001, systems that had put in place hacky patches to avoid Y2K problems but not account for future years suddenly experienced the Y2K+1 bug, which brought down the trains in Norway and made 7-Eleven regret the $8 million it spent on a Y2K fix. Looking back on the year 2000, the total count was over 200 dot coms dead in the water. The still-profitable ones were those that didn't get venture capital and had to be scrappy from the start. The Blogger platform was begging for money and we saw an early call for getting rid of free content. Still, the overall effect of the internet appeared to be an increase in productivity. Sixty-Nine Years Ago Here's a historical tidbit from the intersection of two of our central topics: technology and government. It was on January 3rd, 1947 that the proceedings of the US House of Representatives were broadcast live on television for the first time. Three days later, Harry Truman would make the first televised State Of The Union address from the same chambers.

With CES wrapping up today, the internet is awash in rundowns of the greatest new gadgets, and these days it's barely newsworthy that this or that product was partially funded on Kickstarter or created by a team with a crowdfunding background. So instead of looking at the CES crop, most of which you've probably already seen, this week we're rounding up three simple and inexpensive geeky playthings. Luma Dice Usually, when it comes to things like dice and playing cards, I'm an advocate of keeping it simple. The fetishization of "lucky" dice is just superstition and magical thinking. But maybe I should lighten up, because some of the specialty dice showing up on Kickstarter are admittedly pretty cool, with the most noteworthy being the Luma. It's a solid aluminum die with powered LEDs embedded as pips, and contains an accelerometer to activate them automatically when it's picked up or rolled. You'd think that with the accelerometer already present, they'd have a mode to light up only the up-facing side when a roll is complete — but sadly they don't. Though, that may be part of why the price is surprisingly reasonable at only $21 (approximately, as the original prices are in Australian dollars) for a pair. The Sound Reactive Mask While we're on the subject of lighting up things that don't normally light up, this product might emerge from the Montreal electronic music scene but it's tech-geeky through and through. Sound-reactive clothing and costuming is nothing new, but this might be the first time I've seen anyone with a good design sense use it in a way that's actually fun to look at, unlike the terrible t-shirts marketed to "ravers". The stylized jaguar design on the foam mask appears to respond quickly and accurately to music by deconstructing and reconstructing itself piece by piece, to pretty impressive and mesmerizing effect. And once again, the price is lower than you might expect for this kind of Kickstarter project: again about $21, thanks this time in part to the exchange rate with Canadian dollars. The Key Armory Several years ago, for reasons I still don't fully understand, a friend bought me a gag birthday gift in the form of a giant sword — one of those ridiculous fantasy ones with all sorts of curlicues that I assume would render any real sword useless. It's neat, but it's weird, and I have no idea what to do with it — so it's lived in its box under my bed ever since. Somehow I doubt I'm the only person with a display sword in that situation. Well, the Key Armory offers a slightly more workable alternative: lovingly crafted key blanks with handles hilts inspired by various famous fictional swords. They are available in two common key types, though if you don't use one of those, you're out of luck for now. And in keeping with this week's low-price theme, they are only $10 a pop with discounts if you buy more than one.

Once again, it appears the only way to make our nation's intelligence oversight committees care about surveillance is to include them in the "fun."

Michael Morisy -- founder of FOIA clearinghouse MuckRock -- has been waiting since February of 2012 for the FBI to hand over information on its GPS tracking devices. Specifically, Morisy was looking for information on any devices it deactivated/recollected after the Supreme Court (US v. Jones) declared the warrantless, long-term tracking of individuals couldamount to a Fourth Amendment violation.

Maybe you've heard that the word 'salary' comes from Roman soldiers being paid in salt. That's seems like a fuzzy bit of history, and no one actually knows with certainty how early Roman soldiers were paid, but at some point, they were paid with coinage -- or perhaps with some other kind of allowance to purchase salt. Luckily, most people don't get paid in spices anymore, but there are a few food items that are expensive enough that they could be used as currency. (And if you want to really get off the grid, you might want to know about how much it'll cost to really make everything yourself from scratch.)

Just recently, we discussed the revelation that former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly's emails were deleted right as he was exiting office -- despite being ordered by a federal court to preserve all communications relevant to a summons quota lawsuit.

There's plenty to complain about when discussing the federal court's document filing system known as PACER. Lots.

One of the stranger stories from last year was the demise of Politwoops, the wonderful project designed to not let public figures tweet out brain-vomit and then disappear it all once the backlash ensues. This useful service, designed to let the public see what politicians really thought after their two-martini breakfasts, was eighty-sixed by Twitter over a ham-fisted claim that it was protecting users' expression, which is how it referred to deleting users' previous expressions. If you can twist your brain into a pretzel enough that any of that makes sense to you, you're a better brain-gymnast than I.

Several weeks back, the FTC posted some guidelines on how it expects disclosures to be used in native advertising campaigns. The short of it is that advertising campaigns should come with some kind of prominent disclosure, one easily read and understood by the public. Specifically regarding online content, the FTC guide states:

One of the big stories coming out of CES this week is the bizarre situation in which US Marshals showed up here at the event yesterday and completely shut down the booth of a Chinese company, named Changzhou First International Trade Co. This happened after a judge granted a motion for a temporary restraining order, filed by US company Future Motion, following a seven minute hearing about the matter, in which Changzhou was not present and had no say.

Well, this has really turned into quite a week for T-Mobile CEO John Legere, huh? First, his lies about BingeOn throttling were exposed. Then he doubled down on the lie insisting that BingeOn wasn't throttling despite clear evidence that it is. Then, he attacked EFF for exposing his lie. All the meanwhile, T-Mobile spokespeople were confirming that the company is, absolutely, slowing down all video traffic.

It's cold outside! These Super Soft Texting Gloves will keep your hands toasty and still let you text, swipe and tap to your heart's content. They're available in black and gray so they coordinate with any outfit. At $6.75, they'd make a great little gift.

The T-Mobile throttling saga is getting worse. Their PR people have totally stopped responding to me after I pointed out how they were lying about their claims to be "optimizing" video when they were really throttling. And then the company's CEO, John Legere insisted that claims that T-Mobile was "throttling" were bullshit (and then, bizarrely attacked EFF).

So, you've sued a major studio for copyright infringement and lost. How bad could it be? Here are the possible outcomes, rated from least to most painful.

AT&T this week is running its Developer Summit alongside of CES, and the telco's biggest announcement is that it's working closely with Chicago, Atlanta and Dallas to be their preferred partner in their quest to become the "smart cities" of tomorrow. In pretty typical "Internet of Things" parlance there's more flourish than substance to the announcement, but AT&T claims they're working on solutions that will integrate nearly ever part of a city with AT&T's network -- from utility meters and city maintenance systems to transportation computers and even law-enforcement gunshot detection systems:

Baltimore law enforcement officers love their cell tower spoofers. They have deployed them over 4,300 times since 2007, in most cases without a warrant. Instead, the Baltimore PD uses pen register orders, which both hide the technology being used and allow the department to abuse a lower suspicion standard.

There's some wonderful news from the NY Public Library, which has released over 180,000 high resolution digital images of public domain works that it found in its collection. We've seen too many organizations, mainly museums, try to claim copyright over public domain works, or otherwise limit access. The NY Public Library, on the other hand, is going the other direction. Not only are they releasing these works and making it clear that the works are in the public domain, but they're releasing them as high resolution images and actively encouraging people to make use of them.

Toys have really become much more advanced than the yo-yos and etch-a-sketches of the past. Sure, kids will always like to play with the big cardboard boxes instead of the toys that came in them, but older kids have amazing remote-controlled drones and paper planes (that they might need to register with the FAA someday). If you've been looking for some cool RC cars that can climb walls and drive on the ceiling, there are a bunch of toys to choose from.

Over the last few years, there's been a big controversy over the Keystone XL pipeline project, a massive planned project to build an oil pipeline from Canada to the US that many folks had been protesting, and which (after years and years of debate), President Obama finally rejected a few months back. That's not a topic that we've really covered here, other than a single mention when we questioned why the FBI had spied on activists protesting the potential pipeline.

I kinda feel bad for the PR people at T-Mobile. This morning, CEO John Legere put out a completely bullshit statement pretending to respond to the accusations that its BingeOn program is throttling online video. It didn't address the actual issues, made statements that were clearly false, and then accused people questioning the program of being "jerks." That seemed weird, considering the widespread concerns about all of this combined with T-Mobile's attempt to brand itself as the only consumer friendly mobile service provider.

Oh boy. Remember VG Media? That's the consortium of German news publishers who were so damn angry that Google News sends them all sorts of traffic without also paying them. A year and a half ago, they demanded money from Google. That failed, so they went crying to German regulators who laughed off the request. After there were some concerns that a new "ancillary copyright" right regime in Germany might require payment for posting such snippets, Google properly responded by removing the snippets for those publishers, who totally freaked out and called it blackmail.

We're back again with another in our weekly reading list posts of books we think our community will find interesting and thought provoking. Once again, buying the book via the Amazon links in this story also helps support Techdirt. This week we have a brand new book, but one I'm disappointed needs to be a book. It's the collected writings of Aaron Swartz, called The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz. As I've noted in the past, I knew Aaron as we worked in similar circles and interacted on a bunch of occasions, though I didn't know him well. But, more importantly, I'd actually been following Aaron's writings on his personal blog and elsewhere from a very early age (I particularly remember following his writings about his experience as a freshman at Stanford). As you probably know by now, Aaron committed suicide almost three years ago, while dealing with a ridiculous federal prosecution for downloading too many academic papers from a computer system at MIT, where the license was clear anyone could download as much as they wanted.

With an apparent minimum of judicial oversight, the FBI is engaging in large-scale hacking campaigns, Vice's Joseph Cox reports.

On Monday we wrote about T-Mobile flat out lying about the nature of its BingeOn mobile video service -- and after a couple of days of silence, the company has come out swinging -- by lying some more and weirdly attacking the people who have accurately portrayed the problems of the service. As a quick reminder, the company launched this service a few months ago, where the company claimed two things (though didn't make it entirely clear how separate these two things were): (1) that the company would not count data for streaming video for certain "partner" companies and (2) that it would be "optimizing" video for all users (though through a convoluted process, you could opt-out).

If you're looking to stream your favorite shows while traveling, for $60, ibDNS SmartDNS offers you unrestricted streaming around the world. Use this to unblock geo-restricted websites so that you can watch content from anywhere in the world. You can connect unlimited ibDNS-compatible devices simultaneously under one IP address. Binge watch to your heart's content.

As you know, we've been covering PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)'s absolutely insane lawsuit claiming to represent the monkey who took this selfie: We'd been covering the story of that selfie for years, since first noting that it was almost certainly in the public domain, as copyright law only recognizes human authors. This discussion spurred not one, but two, separate legal threats made against us by representatives of David Slater, the guy whose camera the monkey used. It's also gotten Wikipedia involved (after Slater asked the site to not allow the image to be used, while Wikipedia agreed with us that the image is public domain).

Shortly after the first Snowden documents were leaked, Techdirt wrote about former NSA whistleblower Bill Binney providing some context and history to the newly-revealed information. The central point he made was that trying to collect "haystacks" of data -- mass surveillance -- doesn't work, because intelligence agencies have insufficient resources to search through vast digital stores for the "needles" hidden there. It's a theme Techdirt has returned to a number of times, as has Binney. This week, he was trying to convince a committee of MPs and peers who are scrutinizing the UK's Snooper's Charter Bill that too much data leads to "analysis paralysis," and that targeted surveillance was the way to go. The Guardian reported:

For a while Comcast tried to pretend that its slowly-expanding usage cap "trials" were about managing network congestion. At least until leaked Comcast documents, the company's top engineer, and the cable industry's top lobbyist all confirmed that justification was bullshit (caps don't really help manage congestion anyway). Since then, Comcast has veered away from any hard technical explanation for the glorified price hike, instead focusing on the ambiguous claim that these new "flexible" pricing models bring "fairness" to the broadband industry.

Another would-be terrorist is in the hands of law enforcement, thanks to a joint effort by the FBI and the St. Clair (Alabama) Sheriff's Department. (h/t The Free Thought Project)

Biometric scanners are hardly a novelty these days, but how the data they generate can be used is still controversial. Here's a good example from Venezuela of how function creep there has turned fingerprint readers into instruments of pervasive surveillance:

We'll know things are really going wrong when government authorities are trying to innovate their way around math. (And maybe we're already headed that way with backdoors to encryption.) Hopefully, though, we'll be able to trust in math for the foreseeable future, and nevermind about the Banach-Tarski paradox. Math is hard.

A ruling on fair use, the right of first sale and the limits of trademark protection has been handed down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel. Normally, I'd proceed the word "ruling" with an adjective like "important," or "terrible," or "wonderful." But this ruling is none of those. It's a ruling, and I suppose it does set some sort of precedent, but thanks mainly to Adobe's inept handling of the case, it does very little to clarify any of the above issues.