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Back in 2009 when it looked like real net neutrality in the U.S. was all but dead, Canada implemented the country's first net neutrality rules. The rules were particularly necessary thanks to a laundry list of particularly ham-fisted neutrality abuses by Canadian ISPs, ranging from Telus blocking subscriber access to union blogs in 2005, to Rogers throttling access to all BitTorrent traffic (thereby crippling World of Warcraft) in 2011. Canadian ISPs have been legendary for implementing all manner of usage caps, overages, and other neutrality-eroding "creative" efforts, which the rules aimed to address.

The way the US treats prisoners is often barbaric. The UN has repeatedly highlighted how solitary confinement is a form of torture that should be stopped, but the US regularly uses it on its massive prison population (largest prison population in the world! Go USA!). And even if you don't think it's torture, you should at least recognize that people are thrown in solitary confinement for ridiculous reasons -- such as looking at Facebook. Or, apparently, having expired toothpaste in your cell.

It looks like Lenovo may not have learned much from February's Superfish shenanigans. If you recall, Lenovo was busted for stealthily installing adware on consumer laptops. Worse, the Superfish adware in question opened up all Lenovo customers to man-in-the-middle attacks by faking the encryption certificate for every HTTPS-protected site customers visited. When pressed, Lenovo idiotically denied there was any security threat introduced by faking encryption certs solely for the sake of pushing ads.

As anyone who pays attention to technology and social trends knows, selfies have been a thing for a while now, for some reason. These testaments to the massive inflation of our own egos have occasionally created pushback in a variety of forms, from the banning of selfie sticks from roughly all the places to, sigh, intrusions into intellectual property matters as they relate to damn dirty monkeys. And, in a bit of news that missed my radar for some reason, last year New Hampshire updated its laws prohibiting the photography of voting booths and records to include criminalizing individual voters taking so-called "ballot selfies", in which they proudly tweet out a picture of a completed ballot.

Earlier this year, Texas legislator Jason Villalba attempted to shortchange the First Amendment in the name of "officer safety" by making it illegal to film police officers from within a 25-foot, constantly-moving radius. His proposed law was greeted with criticism (and death threats, according to Villalba) and was consequently discarded because it was a terrible, arbitrary law that had only the briefest of flirtations with reality and logic.

I recently took my annual fishing trip into northern Wisconsin and, on the way, stopped for breakfast at the Paul Bunyan's Cook Shanty in the Dells. I didn't realize at the time that this wonderful establishment that hurled eggs and pancakes at me was embroiled in a strange trademark dispute. See, in addition to being an eatery, Paul Bunyan's also puts on a rather elaborate lumberjack show, complete with log rolling and cutting and all the rest. The problem, apparently, is that there is a traveling lumberjack show based out of Florida called the Paul Bunyan Lumberjack Show, and that company has filed a trademark suit in federal court against the Dells eatery.

The first laser was made in 1960, and since then, lasers have become increasingly useful -- by delivering information through fiber optic cables and in LASIK and other ablative cutting processes. What would we do without lasers? It's possible that lasers could solve all of our energy needs if inertial confinement fusion ever pans out. We're still discovering cool things to do with lasers, so check out a few of these links on coherent light sources.

You kind of had to know this was coming in some form or another. With the surprise announcement that Google was creating a holding company called Alphabet and effectively "breaking" off pieces of Google (all under the same holding company), there had to be trademark disputes coming. Alphabet is such a common word and used in lots of business names. A quick search of the US Patent and Trademark Office's word mark search shows 123 "live" trademarks that include "alphabet" in some manner or another. And so it should come as little surprise that Reuters is reporting that car giant BMW is already considering if Google's Alphabet infringes on its own Alphabet, which is a service company working with vehicle fleets for corporate customers.

Grand juries have proven capable of handing down nearly any indictment requested by prosecutors… if it's just a citizen on the receiving end. What's normally a rubber-stamping of charge recommendations tends to fall apart when a police officer is the potential defendant. With rare exceptions, actions that would have seen the average citizen charged with a crime are dismissed by grand juries -- whose only true consistency appears to be compliance. If a prosecutor doesn'twant someone charged, a grand jury can just as easily be led in that direction as well.

Anyone who has been reading here for any appreciable amount of time is likely already aware that the Tolkien Estate, representing the family of JRR Tolkien, watches over the world to seek out even the barest possibilities for intellectual property issues concerning the dead author, and then pounces on them with its horde of legal armies. The estate has even gone so far as to suggest that simply mentioning the author's name on a button constitutes infringement. The Tolkien Estate doesn't produce anything of public value, mind you. Nor does JRR Tolkien, who is a dead person. Instead, the estate simply nixes out any unauthorized references to the author or his famous Lord of the Rings works, for reasons I can't really comprehend.

Last month, I first read about popular Jewish dating website JDate suing a Jewish Tinder clone JSwipe via an an article by Greg Ferenstein describing the outline of the lawsuit -- though, unfortunately suggesting that the lawsuit itself was legitimate. I got a copy of the complaint and have been meaning to write up a more detailed analysis of the lawsuit, but in the past few days, the Observer got a lot of attention for discussing the patent aspect of the lawsuit and Vice's Motherboard published an article explaining how the patent in question is absurd. Actually, it's worse than that. The whole lawsuit is absurd, and it starts with the trademark claims that come before the patent ones.

Well, this is a completely expected turn of events. Rightscorp, which has been unable to turn baseless threats and robocall harassment into a profitable revenue stream, will now be serving up some of its threats and harassment in lawsuit form.

If you've ever wanted to build your own robot, this group of deals will have you realizing that dream in no time. To sweeten the deal a bit more, buy any one of these deals from us, and use the coupon DIY10 and receive an additional 10% off of your purchase. You'll only be limited by your ingenuity once you get going.

After the FBI's James Comey, it seems that the biggest proponent of backdooring encryption for law enforcement has been Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, who has now penned a ridiculous fear-mongering opinion piece for the NY Times (along with City of London Police Commissioner Adrian Leppard, Paris Chief Prosecutor Francois Molins and Spanish chief prosecutor Javier Zaragoza). Vance has been whining about encryption for a while. And Leppard, you may recall, is the guy who recently claimed "the tor" is 90% of the internet and a "risk to society." He's not exactly credible on technology or encryption issues. But, still... he gets to team up on a NYT op-ed about encryption.

It appears convicted mortgage fraudster Sean Gjerde is going to follow glass-tongued poet Shaun Shane (and his print-on-demand "publishing company," On Press Inc.) into the annals of DMCA abuse.

Eric Goldman brings the news that another misguided defamation lawsuit brought against search engines (plaintiff sued Google and Yahoo separately). The problem isn't that Google or Yahoo failed to comply with takedown requests. (There weren't any involved.) It was that the plaintiff -- Keyonna Ferrell -- deleted stuff she had posted to Pinterest and it kept showing up in search results for a few months after she vanished away the… well, I will now quote the complaint directly because anything otherwise wouldn't do it justice.

We've noted a few times how Verizon has a rich history of taking taxpayer money, subsidies and tax breaks, then promising fiber deployment that never occurs. When it then comes time for local municipalities to hold the telco's feet to the fire, campaign contributions ensure any investigation is short lived. It happened in Pennsylvania, it happened in New York City, and it recently happened in New Jersey, when state officials let Verizon off the hook for a 1993 promise to evenly deploy fiber across the state in exchange for billions in benefits.

Russian regulators in charge of the company's absurdly aggressive Internet filters have threatened to ban Reddit if the website doesn't remove a single, unspecified thread from the website. In an announcement posted to Russian social networking website VKontakte, Russian regulator Roskomnadzor (the Kremlin's "Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom Information Technologies and Mass Communications") proclaims that they've tried to reach Reddit administrators about the thread, but found them unresponsive to complaints during the "relaxed" summer months.

Back in May, we wrote about the European Commission's attempt to put lipstick on the corporate sovereignty pig. Its attempt to "reform" the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system was largely driven by the massive rejection of the whole approach by respondents to the Commission's consultation on the subject last year. Of the 150,000 people who took the trouble to respond, 145,000 said they did not want corporate sovereignty provisions of any kind. Even the European Commission could not spin that as a mandate for business as usual, and so it came up with what it called a "path for reform" (pdf). By promising to solve the all-too evident "problems" of corporate sovereignty by coming up with something it claimed was better, its evident plan was to include this re-branded ISDS as part of the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations with the US. The "path for reform" starts from some tinkering with a few elements of the basic ISDS approach that leaves the basic idea untouched, and moves towards something slightly more radical -- a permanent court for settling investor-state disputes:

The past year has been pretty rough for security -- with Heartbleed, Superfish, remotely hacked cars and all sorts of personal information getting into the wrong hands. Encryption and security are quickly becoming mainstream topics, as it's harder and harder to keep your head in the sand about technology risks. However, perfect security doesn't really exist, but I'm sure we'll have some folks demanding it soon.

Last month, we wrote about how German officials were investigating the German news site Netzpolitik (which covers a lot of the same things that Techdirt covers) for treason. That was because of a few stories on Netzpolitik that published whistleblowing documents on plans to expand Germany's internet surveillance powers. The investigation resulted in widespread protests by people concerned about the chilling effects created by investigating reporters for possible treason for merely reporting on the news.

It appears that the courts are now just piling on when it comes to Prenda Law. In the case of Lightspeed v. Anthony Smith, the court that was one of the first to call out team Prenda for "flat-out lies" and then blasted their weak attempt to plead poverty -- leading, instead, to holding Team Prenda in contempt -- has struck again. Having lost badly on appeal, the district court slammed the lawyers again, arguing that Team Prenda lied to the court and obstructed the discovery process concerning where they hid their money. It ordered sanctions of $65,263 and asked Smith's lawyers at Booth Sweet to submit their costs to be added on to the total. Those costs came out to $94,343.51 -- and Prenda lawyers John Steele and Paul Duffy complained that the number was unfair.

A bunch of folks I know who are focused on the problems of the patent system and who are pushing for patent reform have been eagerly sharing a recent Economist article discussing the problems of the patent system and how they're hindering innovation and doing real harm. No doubt, it's a good article that gets to the heart of many of the problems with the system. Some snippets:

When people talk about today's most innovative technology and media companies, the discussion tends to orbit the usual suspects: Apple, Google, Facebook et al. But there's one small company that we've long believed deserves far, far more attention for its multitude of smart innovations: Humble Bundle. This week, we discuss the many subtle but extremely meaningful choices that have grown the Humble Bundle from a simple experiment into a revolutionary form of distribution, and wonder why the company doesn't get more credit as an innovator. This week we're also unveiling our brand new podcast theme song written, produced and recorded by long-time Techdirt friend Dan Bull. 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.

Molly Redden and Mother Jones have acquired a stash of armored vehicle request documents from police departments all over the nation. The requests are tied to the Department of Defense's 1033 program, in which military hand-me-downs are given to basically any law enforcement agency that asks for them, whether or not these agencies actually needthem.

Donald Sterling, the disgraced former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team, became the former owner last year after a tape of him scolding his girlfriend about appearing in public with "black people" became public. The controversy over his racist statements eventually resulted in him being fined and banned by the NBA, and forced to sell the team (which resulted in another dispute with his wife). Last week, Sterling and his wife finally filed for divorce, but Sterling has also now sued TMZ for originally publishing the audio of his conversation. He has also sued the girlfriend who recorded the tape, V. Stiviano. The lawsuit against Stiviano may actually have some basis in reality, given that California is (quite ridiculously) a "two party consent" state, whereby if you record audio of someone, they need to be aware that you're doing so. This is problematic for all sorts of reasons, and it would be great if that law were struck down or changed, but at the very least it gives some basis for the lawsuit.

It's back to school season. Why not join the others and finally learn how to code. For $49, the Coding 101 Bundle gets you access to 8 courses and over 30 hours of instruction. You'll learn JQuery, HTML5, C Programming, Python and more from the comfort of your couch.

Last year, Larry Lessig got plenty of attention for his MAYDAY PAC, which was an attempt to raise a bunch of money to back candidates who promised to reform campaign finance laws. The 2014 campaign was supposed to be a "test" to raise around $12 million to see what could be done, with an eventual goal of raising a lot more for the 2016 campaign. Even the 2014 campaign was somewhat audacious (and somewhat misunderstood). And after the 2014 election, many argued that MAYDAY was a failure in that it really failed to have much, if any, impact in the campaigns that it took part in. To me, it seemed a bit premature to make that argument, as the whole point of experimenting and testing is to learn, but in politics everything is a horse race, and there is little in the way of long term thinking or strategy.

Update: After writing this, but before I had a chance to publish, it appears that someone at Oracle realized how terrible this looked and deleted the original post, though you can see an archived copy here.

Just about a month ago, we noted that prosecutors in St. Louis County were, somewhat ridiculously, still considering charging two reporters, Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post and Ryan Reilly of the Huffington Post, with "trespassing" charges for their coverage of the Ferguson protests. As you may recall, we also wrote about when they were first arrested, as they were gathering up their things in the local McDonald's after the police ordered them to leave. Here were their tweets at the time -- along with the tweets of a few other reporters on the scene, including one in which police admitted the arrest was a mistake: Another reporter, Matt Pearce from the LA Times, reached out to the police, who seemed to indicate that the arrests had been a mistake (and from the descriptions offered by Reilly and Lowery, that sounds about right). Lowery and Reilly were then released and told that no charges would be filed against reporters. And yet... prosecutors have decided to move forward with the lawsuit, charging at least Lowery with trespassing (Reilly has not officially yet been informed that he's been sued too, but he expects to be shortly -- and a reporter has confirmed from the county that Reilly faces similar charges).

Most of the cable and broadcast industry's cord cutting denial is aimed at investors, who -- if you've yet to realize -- may not always have the firmest understanding of the technology they're investing in. While many investors have been buying the cable industry's argument that cord cutting either doesn't exist or is only something done by losers and nobodies, the recent sharp decline in ESPN viewership appears to have finally woken the investment community from its adorable slumber.

Last week, we wrote that among the final obstacles to completing the TPP agreement was the issue of enhanced protection for drugs. More specifically, the fight is over an important new class of medicines called "biologics," which are produced from living organisms, and tend to be more complex and expensive to devise. The Conversation has a good feature looking at this issue in more detail. The central problem with biologics in TPP is "data exclusivity," which the article explains as follows:

Some people are astonishingly lucky, but it depends on your point of view whether that luck is good or bad. Surviving after falling out of a plane without a parachute has happened to a surprising number of people, but not all of them have fully recovered. Some folks win extraordinary jackpots from the lottery, and then file for bankruptcy shortly afterwards. Maybe it's easier to survive an asteroid field if you don't know the odds.

For years, there have been efforts by various competitors and governments to try to break up Google. But now the company appears to have done it itself. Sort of. Taking basically everyone by surprise, Google announced that it has formed a new "holding company" called Alphabet, and made Google a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet, while at the same time carving out other businesses from Google and making them separate from Google, but still under the purview of Alphabet. The whole thing is... weird. There's lots of speculation going on as to why, and no one seems to agree. Larry Page's letter suggests it's to allow the overall company to be more innovative -- which actually is a legitimate possibility. Just this morning we noted that Google's failure with Google+ shows how the company can sometimes lumber around things while startups are much more nimble. Splitting the company into totally separate entities (even if owned by the same holding company) at the very least has the possibility of forcing the separate units to focus on executing on their own businesses, without worrying about stepping on the toes of other businesses. But... it also loses the ability to cross-subsidize parts of the business.

The NYPD's long-resisted body camera program has been instituted on a limited basis. The NYPD's Office of the Inspector General has released a report detailing the first several months of a voluntary pilot program by the NYPD, which went into effect ahead of the camera program ordered by Judge Scheindlin after declaring portions of the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program unconstitutional.

FBI. DEA. NSA. CIA. DHS. TSA. All these acronyms (and more) participate in activities that can (and do) have negative effects on Americans' civil liberties. But that's OK, says the government, because we have oversight. This assertion just simply isn't true. The Snowden leaks proved what oversight existed was beholden to the NSA and frequently put itself between the agency and legislators on the outside of the inner circle in order to keep its secrets protected.

In our recent podcast on copying, we talked about the usual story that people tell about the need for patents: that they protect up and coming startups from being wiped out by "big companies with lots of money" that are simply copying their good ideas. During the podcast, we try to come up with a single example of that actually happening, and we even search the internet looking for examples -- and find it very difficult to come up with a legitimate example. It almost never happens. As we've discussed, in the rare cases when "copying" succeeds, it's because the second company doesn't really copy, but actually comes up with a better product, which is something we should celebrate. When they just copy, they tend to only be able to copy the superficial aspects of what they see, rather than all the underlying tacit thinking that makes a product good. We've referred to it as cargo cult copying after the infamous cargo cults of World War II, who built fake airports, hoping that if they had those fake airports, all of the stuff that came with American soldiers would return.

I was going to start off this post by noting that, over the weekend, Andy at TorrentFreak had the story of how Columbia Pictures appears to have hired the "worst anti-piracy group" around to issue DMCA takedowns, but that's wrong. This kind of thing is all too common. Columbia Pictures appears to have hired basically your standard clueless "anti-piracy" group, and it's resulted in a DMCA takedown letter that took down basically every video on Vimeo with the word "Pixels" in the title, all because of Columbia's mega flop Pixels, an Adam Sandler film that is being called "one of the worst movies of the year."

Be one of the first to get your hands on the SKEYE Mini Drone by pre-ordering it in the Techdirt Deals store for only $65 (34% off of retail). This palm-sized drone comes with a 6-axis gyro for enhanced stability and an HD camera (2 GB microSD card included) to record your exploits. Beginner and advanced flight modes are pre-programmed so you can start mastering the basics out of the box before graduating to more difficult flips, banks and barrel rolls.

As we've covered at length, the United States' 2010 National Broadband Plan was a bit of a dud. It paid a lot of lip service to improving broadband competition but was hollow to its core, using politically-safe rhetoric and easily-obtainable goals to help pretend the government had a plan to fix the nation's uncompetitive broadband duopoly. But while the NBP was a show pony, the companion plan to use $7.5 billion of the Recovery Act stimulus fund to shore up last and middle mile networks was supposed to have been notably more productive.

The US hasn't officially adopted its proposed rewrite of the Wassenaar Arrangement, but it looks as though its plan to regulate certain software like guns and bombs is already pushing some businesses to start treating potential users like enemies of national security.

Back in February, we brought you the delightful news that the Chicago police department was rather broadly known to be operating what was essentially a CIA-style black site within the neighborhood of Homan Square. This facility, located in a rough West Side neighborhood of the city, featured such practices as off-the-books detention, lawyer-less interrogations, and the occasional fatality. This place, where detainees would disappear for hours or days, seemed to be a vacuum of civil liberties and instead operated under the theory that Chicago police were rulers over all, and were owed whatever they demanded. The original Guardian link detailed a number of witness stories from those who had been detained at Homan Square, but very little information was available about exactly how widely the facility was being used.

This week, we saw yet another example of police trying to get away with flagrant abuse as the deputy who left an unresisting suspect with broken bones and torn ligaments sought immunity, claiming he didn't use excessive force. That One Guy won most insightful comment of the week by pointing out how insane and disturbing this is on every level:

Five Years Ago This week in 2010, we called attention to the Campbell Soup Company's positive 1964 reaction to Andy Warhol's art, and wondered how that same situation might play out today (with the smart bet being "cease and desist"). As it happened, we got plenty of examples of aggressive takedowns and legal attacks that very same week: NAMCO demanded the takedown of a kid's project recreating Pacman in a simple learning language, Pilsbury sent its lawyers after the "My Dough Girl" bakery for its mild similarity to the famous Dough Boy, the FBI claimed Wikipedia can't display its agency logo, the RIAA was going after people for sharing Radiohead's free In Rainbows album, the Beach Boys were making a ridiculous copyright claim over Katy Perry's California Gurls... The list goes on and on. At least one ridiculous threat was squashed by public reaction: George Lucas backed down from his threats against Wicked Lasers for daring to be compared by others to lightsabers. The blocking game was being played at the highest levels around the world, too: while the UAE and Saudi Arabia were moving to ban Blackberries, Australia was grappling with attempts to make ISPs responsible for stopping piracy, and Indonesia was just going ahead and ordering all ISPs to block all porn within two weeks. Ten Years Ago Five years before that, some US Senators were more interested in taxing online porn than banning it — though the bill was clearly, undeniably unconstitutional. Meanwhile, in what's become a long-running tradition, America was using a trade agreement (this time the CAFTA) to export the worst parts of copyright law. The Sprint-Nextel merger was approved, while Mozilla was in the process of building its corporate subsidiary; newspapers were still figuring out how to do online news and not always building great websites, while Rupert Murdoch was buying up online media companies. Perhaps the most notable of those purchases was MySpace, a site that was already showing cracks in its popularity and usefulness. Also this week in 2005: the ringtone bubble was bursting, people were getting stung by phishing schemes and bad bank security (while the fear of identity theft was great news for the document destruction business), Cisco was learning a tough lesson about attempting security through obscurity, and apparently the astrophysics community was learning a security lesson of its own. Fifteen Years Ago The big topic this week in 2000 was e-commerce. Some were questioning whether or not it had any kind of future at all, though others were saying it's doing just fine. The people getting in on the conversation ranged from a small-town mayor who decided e-commerce is evil all the way to the presidential candidates. Mobile devices were causing all the usual upsets in places people hadn't previously considered them, whether that's bugging people on camping sites or causing mistrials in murder cases. Internet-enabled cellphones were selling well, though it wasn't clear if this had much to do with the under-utilized internet capabilities, and some wondered if PC-dominance in the US was holding back adoption of truly revolutionary mobile devices. But hey, these were the days when a 6-gigabyte MP3 player was news. Thirty-Eight Years Ago A couple months ago, we pointed to the release of the Apple II in 1977. Now, hot on its heels, we've got the August 3rd release that same year of the competing TRS-80 Micro Computer System, another major milestone in the history of personal computing.

Remember the early days of wireless routers, when every city street-corner was home to a dozen unsecured WiFi connections? That was hardly an ideal (or safe) state of affairs, but it did feel rather nice and neighbourly at times, and there was a certain sadness in watching all the open networks get locked down over the years. Today we're looking at Meta Mesh, a project that aims to help communities recapture the good parts of those glory days in a fair, secure and superior manner by building their own distributed bandwidth-sharing networks with ease. The Good Mesh networking is a powerful idea, and one that embodies the spirit of distributed design and open interconnection that underpins the internet. The basic idea is that by uniting a community on a shared network with no central access point, you can share the huge amounts of unused and inefficiently allocated bandwidth that gets paid for and wasted every day. ISPs, after all, are not doing a good job (or any kind of job) at this allocation: power users pay exorbitant fees and are viewed by ISPs as a problem, low-income users have few if any options for affordable service, and the average person pays for far more bandwidth than they ever use. Few cities can or will offer municipal wi-fi, and those that try often do a pretty poor job of it. A mesh network lets a community fix all that on its own. The average home or business now has a bunch of powerful wireless networking equipment sitting in a corner to serve a handful of computers and devices — but what if those homes and businesses used that equipment to connect to each other, to turn all their little networks into one big one and extend it throughout the city? The possibilities are huge. If there's one key reason this isn't already happening in most major cities, it's that it isn't necessarily easy to do. That's what Meta Mesh aims to change by offering a complete guide to setting up mesh networks without a lot of technical expertise, and a web store where people can purchase preconfigured equipment. The necessary gear isn't expensive, and hasn't been for a long time — removing the technical barriers to finding and setting up that gear changes mesh networks from complex projects into simple solutions. The Bad Bandwidth sharing is a critical function of mesh networks, and might be their "killer app" as it were — but the possibilities actually extend far beyond that, which is something I wish Meta Mesh was discussing more. Think of all the other things a community could do with its own ad-hoc network: local versions of geographically-linked services from Craigslist to Uber to Tinder; neighbourhood cryptocurrencies and other tools built on a local blockchain ledger; peer-to-peer sharing that never touches the wider internet. Imagine the possibilities when these networks are extendable and bridgeable. Mesh networks won't just revolutionize how we connect to the internet — they are poised to become a powerful and vibrant part of the the global information network in their own right. Meta Mesh is a great first step, but I worry that the pitch's focus on bandwidth-sharing makes this sound exclusively like a charitable endeavour, when in fact it's so much more. The Obstacles Of course, there's little doubt that ISPs will react badly to this. The aforementioned shift from mostly open to mostly locked-down home WiFi networks — though ultimately a good thing for security's sake — didn't happen so rapidly because people started learning about security: it happened because ISPs gave up on their short-lived crusade to stop customers using wireless routers entirely, and started supplying pre-secured ones themselves. You can expect them to be just as crafty in attempting to prevent this kind of bandwidth-sharing too: first by enforcing their anti-sharing terms of service, then if that fails by attempting to take control of the mesh networking world and milk it for every penny (destroying its purpose in the process). It will be a frustrating battle, but one that ISPs are no longer in a position to easily win as more and more people are waking up to the fact that broadband service in this part of the world sucks.

There's been more good news than bad concerning the Fourth Amendment recently. In addition to the Supreme Court's ruling that searches of cellphones incident to arrest now require a warrant, various circuit court decisions on cell site location info and the surreptitious use of GPS tracking devices may see the nation's top court addressing these contentious issues in the near future. (The latter still needs to be addressed more fully than the Supreme Court's 2012 punt on the issue.)

A massive (1300+ pages) collection of US Army Entertainment Liaison documents pertaining to the military branch's relationship with movies, TV shows and videogames has been liberated by SpyCulture. Within its pages are the military's assessments of various pop culture works, as well as official non-responses to more controversial works.

Getting a shot isn't the worst thing in the world, but it's not exactly enjoyable, either. Early phlebotomists used leeches to draw blood from patients, but doctors don't generally recommend that anymore -- and sterile hypodermic needles are far more commonly used. However, if you've ever had one of your veins pierced (sometimes multiple times due to human error), you may have wondered why needles can't be as painless as a mosquito bite. Well, maybe they can in the near future -- it might cost a little more, though.

Earlier this year, we covered the story of Louise Milan, a 68-year-old grandmother whose house was raided by a SWAT team (accompanied by a news crew) searching for someone who had made alleged threats against police officers over the internet. Part of the probable cause submitted for the warrant was Milan's IP address. But the police made no attempt to verify whether any resident of Milan's house made the threats and ignored the fact that the IP address was linked to an open WiFi connection.

The Supreme Court's Rileydecision said law enforcement officers must obtain warrants to search cell phones incident to an arrest. A recent Maryland Appeals Court decision prevented the suppression of evidence obtained via a warrantless search of a smartphone. Why? Well, for a few reasons, most of which seem convoluted and almost inexplicable considering the context. (via John Wesley Hall of FourthAmendment.com)