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The thing about transparency is that it's not just about what you reveal. It's also about what you choose to keep hidden. In the ongoing docket for the government's 2015 bulk records requests, there appears to be a missing document.

One story in particular captured the readers' imagination when it comes to insight this week. As European taxi drivers went crazy over Uber, our readers chimed in, with JustShutUpAndObey taking first place with a simple recounting of personal experience:

Five Years Ago These were the early days of the Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning affair, but apart from that, this week in 2010 was mostly like the last: jam-packed with activity on the copyright front. BPI was sending takedowns to Google in what appeared to be part of a broader plan, while the IFPI was trying to get the search giant to stop linking to The Pirate Bay entirely. German newspaper publishers were seeking copyright on headlines, while up in Canada the Heritage Minister called those who oppose stricter copyright law radical extremists (and then denied it, only to find out it was caught on video). The major labels were busy astroturfing in favor of three-strikes while trying to avoid paying songwriters, and ASCAP was demonizing Creative Commons. We got one very bad ruling this week in 2010, when an appeals court said it's okay to take stuff out of the public domain and put it back under copyright. We also got a very good one when the court ruled in favor of YouTube in the Viacom lawsuit. Of course, that battle was far from over, but for the time being Viacom was in denial about the result while we wondered what its true implications were. The White House released its strategic plan for intellectual property and it wasn't as bad as we expected, but were disappointed to learn that the administration had pivoted from supporting copyright exceptions for the blind to fighting against them. Meanwhile, lots of researchers and other people were trying to tell the true story: how weaker copyright benefits culture and society, how the lack of fair use coverage for satire stifles free speech, how the recording industry made file-sharing much worse for itself, how there's no evidence that kicking people offline for file-sharing is in any way necessary, and how things like the Digital Economy Act and ACTA will stifle creativity. Ten Years Ago Much that was happening in 2005 this week mirrors what was happening in 2010. Canada was grappling with an earlier round of copyright reform, America's Copyright Czar was proposing major changes that were potentially good and potentially bad, and lines were being clearly drawn between the camps for sharing and owning culture. The recording industry was trying out a too-little-too-late plan to compete with unauthorized file-sharing, but it was the MPAA that was really up to no good: it tried to sneak broadcast flag legislation into the law, and then made some grandiose claims about its anti-piracy successes (then, when called on the numbers, tried to explain them away as hypothetical future piracy). Even the FTC was starting to see through Hollywood's anti-file-sharing claims (and so were the kids), while we revisited the ways the fashion industry thrives without copyright. Also this week in 2005, the EU was moving forwards on software patents despite the fact that the politicians voting for it didn't understand the difference between patents and copyright. We got one great example of the ridiculousness of such patents too, when Apple was sued over the iTunes interface. Fifteen Years Ago In 2000, the file-sharing debate was just as heated but far more streamlined, with almost everything focused on the still-prominent Napster, which had just hired the government's lead attorney in the Microsoft case. One independent band, meanwhile, launched StopNapster.com — though on the other hand, the Economist was rightly pointing out that Napster is a wake-up call and proof that online distribution is feasible. Some companies were trying more "creative" offerings, like gas pumps that let you download music while you fill up, and the world drew closer and closer to the iPod with the advent of the first 1GB portable media player hard drive. NASA announced that it had, for some reason, perfected porn-blocking software. It hadn't, and neither had anybody else who tried. The Librarian of Congress displayed his cluelessness about the internet, while Microsoft was airing a bizarre media campaign starring Bill Gates. The EU was setting up to probe the AOL/Time Warner merger, Sony was getting ready to storm the mobile phone market, and Kmart was making yet another attempt at getting online. Forty & Eighteen Years Ago This week, we look at two interesting milestones in the history of free speech in the US, and more specifically one of its most complex and storied wrinkles: obscenity and indecency. First, it was on June 26th, 1975 that the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Miller v. California, establishing the three-prong "Miller Test" for obscene (and thus unprotected) speech. It requires that all three conditions be satisfied:

The failure of Google Glass was an interesting thing. Somewhat-overblown privacy issues aside, the device may have just been ahead of its time, or ahead of the technology powering it — or it might have simply been way too expensive. Whatever the case, wearable computers and head-mounted displays aren't dead, and in fact we'll probably be seeing a lot of them in the future. Today, we look at one such offering: Vufine, a wearable display that does less than Google Glass, which might be its biggest strength. The Good As the video reveals, the creator of the Vufine has tried just about every wearable display product around, and concluded that they are "unfocused, overpriced, impractical and overcomplicated." That's a pretty solid diagnosis, and the Vufine attempts to solve it. Firstly, it's just a wearable display, not a full computer like Google Glass: it clips onto your glasses or sunglasses, connects to any device with an HD video output, and then projects a small HUD-like display box in your field of vision. This enables lots of integrations, with two immediately obvious ones: hook it to a smartphone for heads-up maps and communication and media, or hook it to a GoPro camera to serve as a viewfinder when shooting your own action footage. Turn the camera around, and it can serve as a rear-view mirror. By limiting the device to this single, simple, useful function, they skirt around all sorts of issues that are raised by more robust products like Google Glass, including the aforementioned privacy freakouts about head-mounted cameras and microphones. The most immediately noticeable difference is the price: the Vufine aims to retail for only $150, an order of magnitude less than Glass. The Bad Of course, simplifying the device also means giving up a lot of functionality. Things like voice control, gesture control, and streaming video from one person to another won't be possible unless the Vufine is hooked up to hardware and software that provides those abilities. This is less a "revolutionary new device" and more an innovative display for existing devices — not that there's anything wrong with that, but it may not generate the hype of something like Glass (though at the same time, probably won't generate the ire, either). And there's one feature that will likely irritate some, especially those who pursue wirelessness in all things: the Vufine attaches to your smartphone, camera or other device via a Micro HDMI cable. There are surely a lot of engineering and performance advantages to going the wired route, but the sight of a cable hanging from your face and disappearing into your pocket might be enough to put some people off the device altogether. The Quantifiable We've already looked at one of the Vufine's very attractive numbers — the price. Now let's consider a few others. Display-wise, it uses a 4x3mm micro-display that appears as a 4" display positioned 11" from your eye, at a resolution of 960x540 (a higher definition than Glass). It also weighs only 22 grams — about half of Glass and a quarter of the Recon Jet glasses. There's one slightly less attractive number though: the battery life, which clocks in at 90 minutes (compare that to 4 hours for the Jet, and a full day for Glass, though the latter can be drastically shortened depending on what features you are using). It can be attached to a USB charging pack for additional lifespan, but running a second cable from the Vufine to a pack somewhere on your person could be pretty cumbersome.

Since I run Techdirt, book publishers frequently push random books on me. Sometimes they just send the books. More frequently they send me announcements about books to see if I might be interested. Most go directly in the recycle bin. But one that came in just recently caught my eye -- and not because of the subject matter. Usually the books are about the tech industry or politics or something. But this was a James Bond story. I almost tossed it out immediately, assuming someone mail merged the wrong press list -- but then I realized why we were on the list. James Bond recently went into the public domain in Canada, raising some interesting questions over what that meant -- since 007 is still protected by copyright in the US and some other countries. So, now it appears that some guy named Curtis Cook has decided to write himself his own Bond book, and the press release touts the fact that it's because Bond is in the public domain in Canada.

There's been quite a lot of excitement in the press about the latest leaks that the NSA has been spying on not just one French President, but (at least) three of them. As Mike pointed out, this isn't such a big deal, because it is precisely the kind of thing that you would expect the NSA to do -- as opposed to spying on the entire US public, which isn't. There is, though, an aspect that most people have overlooked: the fact that these NSA leaks don't appear to originate from Snowden's stash. Of course, Mr Crypto himself, Bruce Schneier, did spot it, and pointed out it could be one of his "other" US intelligence community leakers, listed a couple of months ago, or even a completely new one. As that post shows, there are now a few people around that are leaking secret documents, and that's a pretty significant trend, since you might expect enhanced security measures taken in the wake of Snowden's leaks would have discouraged or caught anyone who attempted to follow suit. That's not the only thing that's interesting about the French documents. As Fabio Chiusi points out in a blog post (original in Italian), they are the latest in a recent series of very rich leaks that include the Sony archives; the Saudi cables; the TPP transparency chapter; and -- not mentioned by Chiusi -- 17 chapters from TISA. What all those collections have in common is the fact that they came from WikiLeaks. As Chiusi rightly emphasizes, after a period when WikiLeaks seemed to have lost its ability to release important material -- and thus its relevance -- the organization is beginning to hit its stride again. Coupled with the fact that there are half-a-dozen or so people who are leaking intelligence materials, that development offers hope that things are really beginning to look up on the transparency front. Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Summer is here, and maybe you've already fired up the grill and cooked some burgers in the backyard. But why settle for plain old regular burgers when you could cook your own kinda disgusting-looking ones that are novelties in Asia? (You might need a little squid ink and bamboo charcoal.) Or you could visit Japan and just buy a strangely colored burger from Burger King or McDonald's. Too bad Heinz doesn't make goofy-colored ketchup anymore.

We've written plenty about the mess around pre-1972 sound recordings and online streaming services. Technically, federal copyright law does not apply to sound recordings from before 1972. And while that might make you think they're in the public domain, that's not true at all. First, the compositions are still under copyright and much more importantly, a jumble of state laws did protect some aspects of those sound recordings -- and that's made a huge mess, including locking up some recordings for way, way longer than would be possible under today's federal copyright. On the flip side, however, it meant that certain aspects of federal copyright law that were not covered by state copyright law were fair game -- or so people thought.

Over the last few years, Russia has really been ramping up its efforts to censor the internet to hide content it doesn't like. As is often the case when the government gets the power to censor, that censorship starts spreading farther and farther.

The Intercept has just released an interesting document from its Snowden stash: an unredacted damage assessment of the New York Times' 2005 exposure of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program -- a program that saw the agency monitoring the emails and phone calls of US citizens.

Yesterday, we wrote about taxi drivers in France going absolutely insane in protesting the fact that they don't like competition from Uber. They took drivers hostage, set fires and flipped cars over -- basically reminding everyone that "hey, Uber drivers aren't nearly as fucking crazy as taxi drivers." But here's the amazing thing: the French government apparently has decided to appease these modern day luddites:

We just got done talking about how, after logging 1,011,338 autonomous miles since 2009, Google's automated cars have had just thirteen accidents -- none of which were the fault of the Google vehicles. By and large the technology appears to be working incredibly well, with most of the accidents the fault of inattentive human drivers rear-ending Google's specially-equipped Lexus SUVs at stop lights. But apparently, the fact that this technology is working well isn't quite interesting enough for the nation's technology press.

The UK's short-lived, awkward relationship with its Freedom of Information law appears to winding its way towards an acrimonious divorce. Not fully implemented until 2005 and disowned by its co-creator (former PM Tony Blair) in his memoirs only five years later, it has apparently now reached the point of irreconcilable differences: those being the public's interest in what their representatives are doing and their representatives' extreme disinterest in sharing their feelings emails and documents.

For the globe trotters out there, you know how frustrating it can be keeping track of all of the special adapters you need for charging your different devices. The Twist Plus World Charging Station aims to solve that issue in one compact device. You simply twist through your 4 choices of plug types and you're set to charge in over 150 countries. There is built-in fuse protection to protect your devices and you no longer have to look for multiple outlets to charge all of your devices as this one plug will charge a Macbook and 4 USB devices. It's available for 33% off in the store with free shipping. Happy travels!

We've written a few times about Theresa May, the UK's Home Secretary, who seems to have scarily authoritarian, anti-democratic and anti-free speech views. While she insists that the UK isn't a surveillance state, she can't tell you why, because revealing the secrets of the UK surveillance state might put the public at risk. Since late last year, she's been pushing strongly for outlawing thought crimes, which would allow her to prevent people from sharing their views on the internet or at events, if she deems them to be too extreme. After the recent election, the plan to move this forward has gone into effect, with David Cameron gleefully announcing that just obeying the law will no longer stop the UK government from harassing you. Now, if it doesn't like you or what you believe, you will be silenced.

For a few years now, we've been covering the proliferation of the FBI's own plots, in which they basically set up a fake terrorist plot, and use their own undercover agents or (preferably) informants (generally former criminals who get paid and/or favors such as reduced sentences) to go out seeking young and gullible individuals to convince to "join" the plot (a plot that has no connection to reality). Then they stage a big arrest and an even bigger press conference about how they "stopped" a terrorist threat. We've written about examples of this over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Apparently, a huge chunk of the FBI's resources goes toward manufacturing these kinds of fake plots, which help generate scary headlines, but rarely seem to do much other than putting young, gullible folks in jail.

There's apparently something of a chocolate war going on in Europe, where rival confectioneries all go around trying to trademark silly aspects of their products while everyone else blocks them. Cadbury reportedly kicked all this off some years back, attempting to trademark the color purple (seriously), before Nestle came in and objected, getting the trademark overturned. The most recent edition of this sweet-war is Nestle's consternation over not being able to trademark the Kit Kat bar's four-bar shape.

Jurassic World raked in over a billion bucks in less than 2 weeks by digitally re-creating some enormous (and sometimes fictional) dinosaurs. A few folks are actually working on re-animating prehistoric animals and other ancient organisms, but do we really need to bring these species back? Perhaps we should work on preventing an artificially-created extinction event of our own before we try to reverse the effects of the last one?

Somewhat surprisingly to me, the tale of the now infamous eBook, "A Gronking To Remember" continues to develop. Yes, this whole thing started when a book purportedly written by a woman named Lacey Noonan, which details one housewife's sexual liberation at the sight of Patriots tight-end (heh) spiking a football, was taken down off of Amazon. The speculation at the time was that the cover of the book was the cause of the takedown, with the NFL being the likely complainer, as the cover features Gronkowski in full uniform.

A modest attempt at patent reform (mainly targeting egregious patent trolling practices) is making its way through Congress these days at the usual glacial pace. However, even if it does eventually make it through, there is still a tremendous amount left to do on patent reform. Derek Khanna, who famously wrote the wonderful House Republican Study Committee report urging major copyright reform -- which so upset Hollywood that favors were called in to get the entire report retracted and cost Khanna his job, has now tried to write a similar report on patent reform. This one is for Lincoln Labs -- a think tank trying to present more free market/libertarian ideas into the technology policy arena.

By and large, the mega-ISP version of net neutrality has unsurprisingly been a far cry from the consumer and small business definition of net neutrality. At the moment, most ISPs argue that net neutrality only means they won't throttle or outright block competing content. It's this vague, incomplete definition (in that it doesn't cover issues like usage caps, interconnection or zero rating) the incumbent carriers have used when they've told regulators they "promise to adhere to net neutrality" if the latest merger-du-jour is allowed to go through. That's why, when Comcast promised it would adhere to "net neutrality" if it was allowed to buy NBC (and more recently Time Warner Cable), it meant -- to use a highly-scientific term -- jack shit.

The recording is old news. Last century. Dead. The Access versus Ownership debate should have finished 10 years ago, but we're still bickering. Access models (eg. streaming) are not supposed to replace Ownership models. They're supposed to power a new reality, a new age for the Music business, in which the record industry possibly has no place.

It's been mere days since Dylann Roof forced his name into our lives by walking into an historic African American church in Charleston, South Carolina, praying with several black members of the church, and then brutally shooting most of them to death. As you can imagine, whenever a tragedy such as this occurs, the country enters into a rare moment of somber seriousness, finally choosing to discuss difficult topics that we've been otherwise avoiding and coming together united to build a better life for our collective futures.

Okay, there are some legitimate gripes one can have about driver-on-demand services like Uber even if I think many are overstated. You can complain that you don't like the way the company runs its business. You can question the company's commitment to privacy. You can question the company's hardball tactics with politicians and journalists. You can even question the impact that the company has had on the market. These are all legitimate areas to explore, though the deeper you go, the more you're likely to realize that most of the complaints are exaggerated. However, the really crazy kneejerk anti-Uber sentiment tends to be ridiculous, and frequently driven by cab companies that just don't like the competition. For those who use Uber, the service is almost always significantly better, more convenient (and these days, often cheaper) than traditional cab service. That's what happens when you're enabling competition in a previously limited market.

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While propaganda is everywhere, we've been exploring lately how Putin's Russia has been taking Internet disinformation to an entirely new level. Numerous whistleblowers and media reports have spent the last year or so unearthing Russian Internet propaganda factories, where armies of sockpuppets get paid 40,000 to 50,000 rubles ($800 to $1,000) a month to create proxied, viable, fake personas -- specifically tasked with pumping the internet full of toxic disinformation twenty-four hours a day.

If you want to know how misguided this lawsuit it, just read the subheadline:

You just knew it was going to happen. Not long ago, Dylann Roof walked into a historic African American church in Charleston, South Carolina, prayed with several parishioners there for some time, and then proceed to shoot most of them dead. So many of these stories are horrific not only for the violence that gets perpetrated, but because we're typically left with the most vexing of questions: why? Why did two Colorado teenagers shoot up their school? Why would a young man walk into an East Coast elementary school and shoot children? Why?

Loads of politicians continue to skirt the requirements of open records laws by using personal email accounts to handle official business. Others simply implement voluntary/poorly defined data retention policies that ensure nothing of interest will be handed over to the public. Given a short enough retention period, any request can be stonewalled until the autodestruct has rendered responsive files unavailable.

No one seriously believed it was just US law enforcement agencies using repurposed war gear to track cellphone users, did they?

When Steam announced its new refund policy, the timing was, perhaps, unfortunate in terms of gauging the response to the new policy. See, the new refund program came on the heels of a similarly new attempt by Steam to offer a platform for modders to charge for mods, which caused a nearly universal backlash from the gamer customers. With that fresh in everyone's mind, it was disheartening to watch some game developers, particularly those on the indie side, criticize and worry over Steam having an actual refund policy for digital games. Not that every last bit of the concern was unwarranted, mind you, it's just that the idea of Steam having essentially zero refund policy was one of those things that sounded like it couldn't even be true, so any adoption of refunds was going to be a win for consumers. Still, the focus of gaming companies appeared to be on how horrible it all was for them, rather than understanding the legitimate reasons why a customer might seek a refund.

We've pointed out flying bikes and chainless bikes before, and there seems to be no end to the creativity of bike mechanics. Maybe no one ever forgets how to ride a bike, but bike technology seems to be getting a bit more complex than just balancing on two wheels. We don't quite have Star Wars speeder bikes yet, but perhaps we will soon.

Before the FCC's new net neutrality rules went into effect, Sprint surprised a few people by coming out in favor of Title II based net neutrality rules, making them the only one of the big four carriers to clearly and publicly support the shift. Now news reports also suggest that while T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon continue to throttle customers (unlimited or otherwise), Sprint has announced that just before the rules took effect the company decided to stop throttling its customers entirely, just to be on the safe side:

Pawn shops -- like scrap metal dealers and junkyards -- are "closely regulated" businesses. What this means is they are compelled to track acquisition information and make it available for law enforcement to view without a warrant. The nexus of these businesses to criminal activity is undeniable. But that doesn't necessarily mean everything law enforcement demands, it gets. Some demands exceed the diminished Fourth Amendment protections afforded to these businesses.

While filing a net neutrality complaint is now easier than ever, actually identifying violations may not be. In the new age of interconnection, usage caps, overages, and pay-to-play zero rating deals, less technical users simply may not understand when they're being screwed by their ISP, as these violations aren't nearly as ham-fistedly obvious as outright blocking or throttling of services. That's why the Open Technology Institute’s MLAB recently introduced the Internet health test, which runs user connections through a bevy of speed and performance tests to determine whether or not ISPs are engaged in any shenanigans.

National security apparently means "securing" the nation at the expense of citizens' security. New Snowden documents published by The Intercept show massive amounts of dicking around in the coding of popular anti-virus software by the NSA and GCHQ. The list of antivirus products notaffected would be much, much shorter than a list of those that have been.

We already wrote a long and detailed post about the DOJ gagging Google for over four years, preventing it from telling Jacob Appelbaum about the government's §2703(d) Order for his Gmail info (a §2703(d) order is like a subpoena, but with less privacy protections -- which is why the government is a fan). The gag was finally allowed to be lifted on April 1st of this year, despite most of the key moments happening in the early months of 2011. However, as part of the agreement to finally unseal this document, the DOJ apparently required parts of it to be redacted. Perhaps that's understandable, but some of the redactions are so ridiculous as to be laughable -- starting mainly with trying to make sure that every judge and every DOJ employee in the documents is hidden away. Throughout the document, you see examples like this: Of course, amusingly, sometimes they redact the phone numbers, and sometimes they don't. So I'm sure that's useful.

Reporter, activity and security guy Jacob Appelbaum has been harassed by the government for years for helping with Wikileaks. We've written before about how he gets detained at the border and is ordered to hand over all of his electronic equipment. A few years ago, we wrote about the ridiculous legal fight in which the Justice Department demanded that Twitter hand over Appelbaum's messages without telling anyone, as part of the still ridiculous grand jury investigation into Wikileaks (which still isn't over!).

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People keep telling me that most lawyers today understand things like the Streisand Effect and how trying to shut people up often draws that much more attention to things. It may not be true for small time lawyers, but the big law firms -- I'm told -- they all recognize this. Enter Dentons. Dentons is a pretty big law firm. American Lawyer magazine recently noted that, after merging with another firm, it was becoming the world's largest law firm. So you would think some of the lawyers there would know better than to throw an astoundingly childish temper tantrum over the way that very same American Lawyer magazine covered them. But, you'd be wrong.

If you follow internet governance issues at all, you know that ICANN is a total freaking mess. It's a dysfunctional organization that has always been dysfunctional, but remains in charge because of the lack of any reasonable alternatives. ICANN frequently seems to be driven by powerful interests that are just focused on squeezing as much money as possible out of the domain system, and appears to have little appetite for being what it should be: an independent body protecting the core of the internet. As if to put an exclamation point on that, it appears to now be going to war against basic privacy. Here are two separate, but somewhat related, examples.

Canada's civil liberties-trampling anti-terrorism law (C-51) only recently passed, but authorities have been nothing if not proactive in combating the threat posed by radicalized citizens. Co-opting US law enforcement's belief that supportive words = 'material support,' the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) raided the home of an "extremist," arresting him and seizing a bunch of his computer equipment.

More potential copyright insanity from the European Union. Some positive moves have been made, but they often seem to be offset by extremely awful ideas. Photographing public structures could soon become copyright infringement. At this point, there's no unified "freedom of panorama" across European countries. Some recognize this as a right inherent to citizens. Others feel any photographic reproductions of structures in public spaces are a violation of the creators' rights. (via Boing Boing)

We've written a couple of times about the use of publicly-available information, typically posted on social networks, to verify developing stories where traditional sources are scarce or unreliable. This new field doesn't seem to have a fixed name yet -- open journalism, social media journalism, open-source intelligence are all used -- but whatever it is, it's clearly going mainstream, as this announcement on the YouTube blog of The First Draft Coalition makes clear:

Wikileaks has released some new documents showing that the NSA spied on the communications of a bunch of French Presidents.

The movie Back To The Future II takes place in 2015... so now that we've already arrived in 'the future' -- how have we done? We don't have flying cars (DeLorean-styled or otherwise) unless you count one-off hobbyist replicas that just kinda hover a bit. We could be on the cusp of getting hoverboards that actually work (but not on water, nor on any other surfaces besides a non-ferrous metal). Fax machines are still around, but not quite as popular as Back To The Future might make them look. If you liked this classic 80s movie, check out a few of these links.

As noted last week, Congress played some games last week and was able to move forward on fast track authority (Trade Promotion Authority -- or TPA) in the House by decoupling it from Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA). Before that, everyone had said that TPA couldn't move forward in the Senate without TAA, but it did move forward with exactly 60 votes (the minimum it needed). That means fast track is going to the President's desk, and of course he'll sign it. Previously, the President had promised that he wouldn't sign TPA without TAA, so I'm still at a loss as to how that's happening, since the House hasn't approved TAA yet and theoretically could block Obama from signing TPA by rejecting TAA -- if (and it's a big if) President Obama actually stands by that promise. However, the way everyone's talking about this, it seems pretty clear that Congress is just going to cave, and will pass TAA as well.