Techdirt

More government malfeasance is being alleged in the all-over-but-the-Genius-Bar-employment prosecution of whistleblower Thomas Drake. Documents directly related to his whistleblowing efforts -- ones that would possibly have helped him fight the administration's efforts to punish him for supposedly-protected activities -- were allegedly destroyed by the Department of Defense.

For much of the last year, transit ISPs like Level3 and Cogent have been complaining that the residential megaISPs have basically been trying to shake down Netflix and transit operators for additional money. To hear these companies tell it, ISPs like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, have been doing this by intentionally letting network interconnection points get congested, then using that congestion to justify an end to settlement-free peering, and for new direct Netflix interconnection payments.

The internet has changed the parameters for how people can interact. Today, all sorts of work and socialization can be done over distances that were previously impossible, and the rise of telecommuting has been no surprise. And yet there are still a lot of imperfections in the system, and a lot of ways that the internet doesn't quite seem to close the gap as much as we'd like it to. In this week's episode, we ask the question of how much face-to-face communication still matters in the digital age, and what the future holds for long-distance interactions. 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.

Another day, another big tech company doing things wrong. Matthew Lush is apparently a super popular YouTuber, who has been on the platform since 2005 (yes, a decade ago). His YouTube name was "Lush" which makes sense, given that's his name. But along comes Lush Cosmetics, and YouTube apparently just hands his channel over to the company. That's ridiculous enough, but it gets even more bizarre, when reporters asked Google to explain:

I'm going to do something crazy and generally not advised on the internet: I'm going to try to make a nuanced argument that cannot be summarized just in the title alone. I fully expect that some will not read through the details, but please, just ignore them in the comments and try to focus on the full argument presented here.

There is no need to fear a dead battery when you have a handy little charger with you. The Intocircuit 15000mAh Power Castle External Battery is lightweight, looks cool and is in the store at 73% off. The Power Castle comes with a micro USB cable, the ability to charge just about any mobile device and dual USB ports for charging two devices at once.

We see more than our fair share of bogus DMCA and intellectual property takedowns around these parts. Hell, there are so many that at one point a website was created strictly to keep a running tally of these things, though that site appear to no longer exist. That said, there are bogus takedowns, and then there are bogus takedowns, and this is the story of one example of the latter and the silliness of the take down first and ask questions later attitude sites take these days.

Like Silicon Valley, New York City purports to be a bastion for emerging technology, yet, just like Silicon Valley, it suffers from a pitiful lack of broadband options and competition. In New York, Time Warner Cable enjoys notable market dominance, with either spotty Verizon FiOS or DSL coverage providing the barest semblance of real market competition for the cable giant. It wasn't supposed to be this way: in 2008 Verizon struck a closed-door franchise agreement with then NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg, one which Verizon strongly implied would result in 100% FiOS coverage for all five boroughs of the city by the end of 2014.

As you may recall, last week it was revealed that Assistant US Attorney Niketh Velamoor had, in fact, obtained a gag order on Reason, blocking the publication from discussing the bogus subpoena it had issued concerning certain juvenile comments made by commenters on the site. The subpoena was ridiculous -- but the gag order was preposterous. And it deserves a lot more scrutiny.

As was widely expected after getting the greenlight to move forward with the bill, the Australian palirament has now approved its version of SOPA, allowing courts to issue censorship orders to block entire foreign websites outright, with no real recourse. The few Senators who pointed out how problematic this would be appear to have been totally ignored. Scott Ludlam pointed out that this approach was both lazy and dangerous while Senator David Leyonhjelm (from a different party than Ludlam) succinctly explained the problems with the bill: He notes that it's "vaguely drafted and unlikely to achieve its aims." Furthermore, he notes that it "aims to protect rightsholders at everyone else's expense." As he points out, that's not what Parliament is supposed to be doing. He further highlights how ridiculous it is that Australia has no fair use -- and to pass stronger enforcement without fixing the problems of Australian copyright law hinders free expression and public use is really ridiculous.

Last August, we wrote about the most egregious corporate sovereignty award (so far): $50 billion against Russia, under a treaty that it never even ratified, in favor of the major shareholders of the Yukos oil company. Of course, as everyone pointed out, being awarded $50 billion was one thing, collecting it, quite another. Most people probably assumed that it would be practically impossible to squeeze that money out of a recalcitrant Russia, but we now learn that some serious steps towards that goal have recently been taken, as reported by Der Spiegel (original in German). In Belgium, the bank accounts of the Russian embassy were frozen, as were those of Russia's EU and NATO missions, while in France, something similar happened, with Russian accounts blocked at 40 banks. Understandably, this did not go down well with the Russian government. The country's deputy foreign minister warned, "whoever dares to do that must understand that it will lead to reprisals," something his boss, Sergei Lavrov echoed. Meanwhile, Lavrov's own boss, Vladimir Putin, was also well aware of the situation, and was quoted as saying: "we will defend our interests using legal means." A story on France 24 reports that Russia has already threatened to retaliate against state-linked foreign firms operating in the country, so that's one way that things could escalate. But more seriously, the relations between Russia and EU nations are extremely strained over the conflict in eastern Ukraine; the last thing the situation needs is additional tension caused by arguments over a massive fine. Even if corporate sovereignty doesn't actually cause a war -- well, let's hope not -- the Yukos award may turn into a hindrance to resolving an existing conflict. That's yet another reason to get rid of the whole deeply-flawed system before it causes more serious damage. Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

The FISA Court has released its opinion on the interim Section 215 collection activities. The government argued that it was owed six months of uninterrupted, plain vanilla Patriot Act collections, as provided for in the USA Freedom Act. While the new law significantly alters the NSA's collection methods, it was given 180 days to transition to an off-site "collection," housed by telcos and responsive only to targeted searches.

The ability to sense magnetic fields and control electromagnetic radiation sounds like science fiction, but there are some animals in nature that already have limited magnetosensation. Okay, frogs can't levitate by themselves spontaneously, but it's still pretty cool that migratory animals seem to be able to find their way over vast distances. Check out a few of these links on animals interacting with electromagnetic waves.

While the FCC has been engaging in a slew of consumer-friendly moves of late (from tougher neutrality rules to fighting for municipal broadband), a few weeks ago the agency turned heads by fully prohibiting towns and cities from imposing price controls on TV service. According to the FCC's announcement on the matter (pdf), they're doing this because they believe the cable industry is so competitive, such local TV price restrictions are no longer necessary. The FCC voted 3-2 to approve the measure, with Wheeler uncharacteristically siding with the agency's two Republican Commissioners to support it.

Following on a ruling nearly two months ago, where the UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal -- for the very first time -- found that GCHQ had broken the law with its surveillance of client/attorney communications, now the IPT has ruled against GCHQ again. The IPT says that GCHQ held emails of human rights activists for too long -- but found that the initial collection of those emails was no problem at all.

Mississippi drug warriors had their eye on nearly $300,000 in "forfeited" funds but threw it all away by issuing one of the most deficient search warrants ever. It's not that it was loaded with errors or questionable probable cause assertions. It's that it omitted perhaps the single most important element of a search warrant -- the location being searched.

Concerns over pervasive surveillance are often shrugged off with "ends justify the means" rationalizing. If it's effective, it must be worth doing. But as more information on domestic surveillance programs surfaces, we're finding out that not only are they intrusive, but they're also mostly useless.

A smallish victory for Fourth Amendment protections comes today as the Supreme Court has struck down a Los Angeles ordinance that allowed police warrantless, on-demand access to hotel/motel guest records. This win is very limited, and the court's discussion of the issue at hand pertains solely to the Los Angeles statute and doesn't address the potential unconstitutionality of other, similar records sweeps granted by the Third Party Doctrine. Nor does it address the potential Fourth Amendment violations inherent to "pervasive regulation" of certain businesses -- like the records legally required to be collected and handed over on demand to law enforcement by entities like pawn shops, junk yards and firearms dealers.

Network engineers are the unsung heroes who keep the very foundations of our digital world intact while the rest of us build on top of them. They laugh at our frontend JavaScript and backend PHP, and dig beneath it all to the guts of the internet. Today's daily deal goes out to them, and to the next generation that will take up their mantle: it's the Network Engineer's Learning Bundle, a collection of seven online courses covering Python, Java, Vagrant, Linux, shell scripting and more, all with a focus on network engineering and architecture. At full price the package is worth $493, but you get lifetime access to all seven courses for only $59. If this piques your interest, please buy this bundle — the rest of us need you to keep our networks up and running! Note: We earn a portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Earlier this year, we noted that the Supreme Court was hearing an important case on the public domain in Kimble v. Marvel, concerning whether or not Marvel/Disney needed to keep paying royalties to the patent holder of an invention to make a Spider-Man toy that could shoot webs. Marvel had purchased the patent from the inventor, with an agreement to pay royalties back to him. After the patent expired, Marvel stopped paying. The inventor argued that the contract had no such stipulation. Marvel/Disney argued that you don't have to pay royalties for something that is in the public domain. Yes, this was a case where Disney was arguing in favor of a stronger public domain, odd as that may be.

It wasn't until late 2014 before the UK government finally (officially) allowed its citizens to make personal copies of their purchased music and movies. It was an uphill battle against copyright-reliant industries to bring the UK in line with exceptions available in other European countries. The recording industry threatened to fight this new exception in court, because of course it did.

Why is it that many efforts made "for the children" are so stupid most tweens could point out the obvious flaws? Back during the discussion of the UK's now-implemented ISP porn filtration system, Rhoda Grant of the Scottish Parliament wondered why the internet couldn't be handled the same way as television, where all the naughty "programming" isn't allowed to take to the airwaves until past the nationally-accepted bedtime.

You might think that after publishing a high profile story that was widely mocked and debunked, the Sunday Times and its reporter Tom Harper might write a more thoughtful followup. Instead, it appears that they have doubled down on the original story by writing a followup (text here) that focuses on the actions of fear mongerers who believed their original propaganda unquestionably.

In the previous instalment of the long-running saga involving alleged pirates of the Dallas Buyers Club film in Australia, the court agreed that Australian ISP iiNet should hand over information about its customers. But it added an important proviso: the letter and telephone script to be used to contact and negotiate with them had to be approved by the court first in an effort to prevent "speculative invoicing" of the kind all-too familiar elsewhere. Last week, more details emerged in another court hearing before the same judge. He was was concerned that the proposed letter from Dallas Buyers Club LLC (DBC) and Voltage Pictures LLC, the film's foreign sales agent -- which DBC is currently suing (pdf), in another twist in the plot -- would not quote a specific figure that those supposedly infringing would be asked to pay, as the Australian Financial Review reported:

The Sunday Times got hammered this week over its article that simply parroted the government's talking points, and its responses were less than stellar. After they attempted to shunt all the blame onto said government, rw won most insightful comment of the week by pointing out the other side of the complicity coin:

Five Years Ago If you're reading this from a Starbucks, take a moment to celebrate: it was this week in 2010 that the chain first announced its plan to offer free Wi-Fi (something we'd been saying since 2003). Once you're done celebrating, it's time to come back to the reality of all the stupid stuff that was happening that same week. In the midst of the campaign to sue people who shared The Hurt Locker, the producers defended their use of the true story it was based on as part of their free speech rights, though at least one independent director was pointing out that filesharing only hurts bad movies. Following the RIAA's victory over LimeWire, music publishers decided to pile on with their own lawsuit, while some people were starting to question the IsoHunt decision and Rapidshare was countersuing Perfect 10 for being a copyright troll. The government was getting ready to enact a law that made universities subsidize the entertainment industry, while a new anti-piracy campaign compared downloading to "killing" pop stars — while we noted that big labels and singers seem to copy from each other quite a lot. Who could blame them? Copying is often efficient and smart, copyright is barely workable when recording everything is standard, and (some) content creators were starting to come to terms with the fact that their work will be shared. Others, like the producers of Twilight, were suing fashion designers for simply mentioning Bella and holding official Twilight t-shirt design contests where no official Twilight material is allowed. Still others, like many modern jazz musicians, were being held back by the copyright regimeseeking special exemptions from said regime. The RIAA was busy up in Canada, astroturfing for a Canadian DMCA and doing a damn good job of it. Ten Years Ago Oh the formats, they are a'changin' — this week in 2005, the bell began to toll for many an old medium. Wal-Mart supposedly announced that it would no longer sell VHS movies, and though it later denied the report, the signs still couldn't be clearer, much like they were for cassette tapes, supposed death of the music industry. EMI jumped on the CD copy protection bandwagon, accelerating that format's path to obsolescence, while reports were urging the music industry to embrace file sharing. Libraries were introducing (but still struggling with) digital downloads, the number of mainly-online news readers hit 20%, and surveys were already showing that people much preferred watching movies at home. And when formats shift, industries panic. Some were calling for universal DRM or struggling to maintain their walled gardens, some were still pressuring congress to approve the broadcast flag, journalists were railing against Wikipedia and Warner Movies was threatening ISPs in the hunt for user data, while the MPAA was doubletalking about Grokster and Bob Geldof was calling eBay evil. Fifteen Years Ago Not much changes. This week in 2000, the RIAA was going crazy against Napster and seeking the removal of all major label songs, while the CEO was insisting the service is completely legal. Internet speeds were getting closer to making movie piracy a large-scale reality, while the MPAA's attack on illegal rebroadcasting signalled that it would surely behave much like the RIAA when faced with that reality. The web was already changing journalism and people were already going online for news... and journalists already weren't getting it. One person was surprisingly on-the-ball, though: Courtney Love, one of the first musicians to speak out with real insight on the music industry moving into the digital age. The UK's Royal Navy embarrassed itself by accidentally emailing lots of confidential info to a teenage girl, while the US Navy was touting its new ability to send emails from submarines. JP Morgan made its own embarrassing error when it failed to pay the $35 to renew jpmorgan.com. Meanwhile, it was still trendy to ask the big questions about the internet: what do people really think of it? Does it actually increase productivity? And how do you keep kids innocent online? 64 & 193 Years Ago June 14th marks two concurrent and related anniversaries in the history of computing. First, in 1822 it was the day Charles Babbage proposed his Difference Engine, the theoretical mechanical marvel that heralded the computing revolution way ahead of schedule. So it's fitting that it was also on June 14th, over a century later in 1951, that UNIVAC I, the first ever commercial computer produced in the US, was dedicated.

As we move ever deeper into the digital age, the question of data preservation as gotten bigger and bigger. Recently, people got a scare when it was suggested that SSDs have an even more dismal lifespan than presumed, though it turned out people were taking that study slightly out of context. Today, we look at an entirely different approach preservation: the Nanoform, an engraved sapphire disk that keeps your precious data around forever. The Good I imagine almost everyone feels a little attraction to the Nanoform. It's just a damn cool idea that plays on all sorts of curious, in-built human fascinations: precious minerals, miniaturization, and of course the desire for permanence. The engraved disks are beautiful, even just for the sheer amount of information that's packed in — one shot shows the entire text of War and Peace taking up only a fraction of a single disk. You could easily make one to include your entire life's memoirs, every letter you've ever written, a whole family history of photos, and then some. The engraved and sealed sapphire disks will likely live up to their promise of an essentially-infinite lifespan — we're not dealing with complex ways of storing bits and bytes, but a straightforward use of the world's third-hardest mineral. The whole concept puts me in mind of the Pioneer Plaques or the Voyager Golden Record (and indeed, the Nanoform might be a great choice for any future irresistible plans to attach a message to a spacecraft). The Bad Well, let's face it: this isn't exactly practical. The Nanoform gets its data permanence by trading in data usefulness: it's an analog medium, retaining things for curious posterity or just decoration rather than being a serious means of storage. Retrieving it doesn't require a card reader or a disk drive, just a magnifying glass or a microscope. Getting it back onto a computer requires a high-res scanner (and all the massive limitations that method entails). So I think it's safe to say that, outside some incredibly fringe cases that I can't quite think of, the Nanoform is for fun not function — and given its understandably hefty price tag, it's outside many people's "fun" budgets. The impact of the price is softened slightly, though, by the fact that a Nanoform really will last a lifetime — a very rare thing in the days when people regularly spend just as much money on devices that are either bricked or obsolete within a few years. The Giftable Once many years ago, I met someone carrying a huge binder of printed pages, and asked what it was. She explained that today was the birthday of her best friend, with whom she had almost-daily instant messaging conversations that dwindled late into the night covering every aspect of both their lives, and so as a gift she had printed off their entire chat history. Later I saw the gift being given, and it was clearly one of the most fun, interesting and genuinely moving presents the person had ever received. I thought about that story when I saw the Nanoform. If I were to make a guess, I'd say the number one place the Nanoform will catch on is the world of gifts. Weddings, anniversaries, birthdays — a permanent, decorative record of a lifetime is a fitting and excellent gift for all of them. And just like in that case, our online lives produce a huge amount of material that could make such a memento highly personal and meaningful. Of course, that abundance of data about our lives is something that makes a lot of people nervous, but few people are willing to truly let go of it precisely because it represents so many memories. Maybe transcribing some of that information to an indestructible sapphire disk and getting it the hell off the cloud is exactly the solution nostalgia needs.

Earlier today, Google announced on its website that it will now be letting the victims of revenge porn request removals from the Google search index:

A DOJ subpoena leaked to Ken "Popehat" White showed the government was more than willing to stomp all over free speech to "protect" unthreatened federal judges. The order targeted comments at Reason.com that -- while inflammatory and ugly -- were decidedly not "true threats." Even if one was inclined to believe Reason commenters were going to hunt down the judge who presided over the Dread Pirate Roberts trial and use bullets/woodchippers to make her "pay" for her heavy-handed sentence, there was no non-ridiculous way to perceive someone saying "there's a special place in hell" for Judge Katherine Forrest as somehow being a "true threat."

Americans eat about 4.5 billion pounds of seafood annually -- placing third behind China and Japan. The US ranks 15th in farmed seafood production, and America exports about a billion pounds of caught fish every year. The oceans might seem like an endless supply of fish, but we're actually starting to over-fish several species. Here are a few suggestions for what seafood to order and some technological alternatives to traditional fishing.

New Hampshire is continuing to lead the way in privacy. After becoming the first state to ban the use of automatic license plate readers, its legislators are now attempting to rein in warrantless tracking of cellphone users. A couple of false starts (dating back to last year) resulted in no changes (and complaints from app makers that the wording might make some of their offerings illegal).

I wasn't aware of this, but human-Knicks-mascot Spike Lee is reportedly making a film about violence in Chicago. This is annoying for a whole host of reasons, including how insanely relatively low the city's murder count is compared to historical averages. That said, it's not like there isn't a severe violence problem in tiny, tiny pockets of areas here in my home city, so if he wants to make a film about it, fine, go ahead, for all the good it will do. But the film is also reportedly going to feature the term "Chiraq", a silly comparison between the homicide counts in Chicago versus the death toll in Iraq, because that's apparently a valid comparison. Annoying as the term is, however, it's more annoying to see some money-grubbing preacher from Chicago try to force Spike to alter the title, claiming ownership of the word and spouting off all kinds of easily refutable nonsense about its origins.

You can't build a better police force if you can't get anybody to apply for the job. Perhaps this partially explains the hesitance of law enforcement agencies to rid themselves of badly-behaving officers. Without a healthy pool of potential hires to pull from, attrition can become a real problem.

As you may have heard, Leonard Nimoy's son Adam Nimoy is working on what sounds like an incredible and touching documentary called "For the Love of Spock" -- about both the Star Trek character of Spock and about Leonard Nimoy's career (for the none of you who don't already know this, Nimoy played the iconic Mr. Spock in the TV show and movies). It had begun as a documentary just about the character of Spock, but after Leonard Nimoy passed away earlier this year, the focus has expanded to cover his life as well. It sounds really great, but Adam is trying to raise $600,000 on Kickstarter to make it happen. There are a lot of reasonable expenses included in that $600k, but one stood out to me: the need to license images and footage of Nimoy:

Oh, the defamation threat letters we see. They are all too frequent. Thankfully, some people know how to respond to them well. This one was found via Popehat and involves NY lawyer Michael Popsis receiving a defamation threat letter written by Florida lawyer Casey Cummings on behalf of his client David Shavolian. Shavolian got some attention a few years back when a sexual harassment lawsuit was filed against him by a former employee. The allegations in the lawsuit were somewhat salacious, leading to news coverage, such as in the Daily News, which posted the headline: "Boss made her stand beside him while he urinated: harassment suit." The allegations in the lawsuit itself went even further, including the following (as laid out in the ruling in the case):

TGIF. It's time to get ready for the weekend! Whether you're crashing at home or heading out into the wide world, you want your devices charged and ready to go. Take a look at these deals designed to give your devices the juice they need so you can binge Netflix or take unlimited selfies. Get the Kinkoo 40W 6-Port High Speed Charger for 29% off and plug in up to 6 USB charged devices for high-speed charging. Everyone in the house can have a dedicated port and the Kinkoo can detect what type of device you've plugged in and select the optimum charging speed to get you back up to 100% faster. The Smart Charge Kit can help you figure out how efficiently your charges are working. The device plugs into your lightning or microUSB cable and has an LED display to let you know how quickly your device is being charged. It's available for $21 in the store -- just remember to pick the right option in the drop down menu when you order. For you Apple folks out there, the braided MFi-Certified Lightning Cable gives you 10 feet of tangle free cable to charge you lightning compatible devices. Get it now for 33% off and worry no more about short charging cables forcing you into uncomfortable positions while you browse Techdirt in bed or on the couch. We haven't forgotten about the Android users! For 50% off, the ZeroLemon 18W 'Quick Charge 2.0' Android Charger can charge your devices 75% faster. You can even use it for non-Android devices (they'll be charged at their regular speed), so you only need to carry one gadget. Note: We earn a portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

A week and a half ago, we wrote about a story from Ken "Popehat" White revealing a highly questionable subpoena from the DOJ sent to the Libertarian website Reason.com, concerning some silly comments made by users there. The comments were talking about killing the judge who was presiding over the Ross Ulbricht/Silk Road trial, but were the usual comment nonsense that no one takes seriously. Except... the DOJ sometimes gets a little overzealous whenever comments even obliquely mention killing judges. As we mentioned, a few years ago, we were contacted by the US Marshals service under similar circumstances -- but never received a subpoena. When we told them that we wouldn't be removing the comment, they said they understood and we never heard anything else.

Over the years, we've certainly seen plenty of ridiculous attempts to overclaim trademark rights, often for the sake of censorship. While it's not always the case, generally speaking, it's smaller, less sophisticated companies and trademark holders who do this. Larger companies do have a habit of trademark bullying on the margins, but they tend to know better than to send absolutely insane trademark threats just because someone mentions their brand. Apparently, IMAX is an exception to that general rule. IMAX apparently believes that merely mentioning IMAX without a license is infringing on its trademark. Even if you're a media company writing about a product and you interview someone who says something nice about IMAX. IMAX is wrong. Also: IMAX.

There's no shortage of competitors in the anti-piracy field. Most of the manual labor involved in issuing DMCA takedowns has been handed over to proprietary software -- turning this into a high-margin, low-effort business for content protection companies. Some are only occasionally competent. Some are frequently horrific. And some are like Guard Content.

Okay, look. We've really tried to ignore Chuck Johnson. It's pretty obvious that he's the kind of guy who does a bunch of the stuff that he does to get more attention. We've never covered his various hilarious legal threats, though you can see a bunch of them nicely cataloged at this website. If you're not aware, you can do some Google searches, but suffice it to say that he plays a "journalist" on the internet, and he's somewhat infamous for the various stunts he pulls, combined with his penchant for threatening people with libel, as well as for many of his biggest stories being, well... ridiculous. A few weeks ago he threw something of a public tantrum because Twitter kicked him off its service. He had a lawyer in Missouri, John Burns, send a ridiculous threat letter to Twitter, based on an interpretation of the law that might be described as "crazy" by some and... "wrong" by many others.

More Stingray secrecy. MuckRock has been tangling with Boston's police department for several months over the release of Stingray-related documents. So far, the BPD has managed to keep these out of MuckRock's hands.

Churchix may sound like yet another niche GNU/Linux distro aimed, perhaps, at those who want to free their software as well as their souls, but it turns out to be both godly and down-to-earth (found via @latentexistence):

After the revelation that the St. Louis Cardinals are being investigated by the FBI for hacking into the Houston Astros' networks and grabbing a whole bunch of proprietary statistical and scouting data, much of the speculation centered around one or two rogue employees, who may have used old passwords to get into the Astros' systems. Those systems had been set up by the Astros' new GM, who was a former Cardinals employee and who presumably just reused his passwords. With that speculation in mind, the focus then turned to how the feds might look to use the CFAA to go after those employees for having committed a federal crime. All of that would be serious enough in and of itself, except some of the details coming out of the investigation and some of the expert opinions on which laws may be brought to bear are making all of this look much more serious than even most people's first take.

UK's The Register has noticed an Apple job posting for a rather unusual position: in-house journalist. Better surround that word with scare quotes, because it's entirely unclear how both writing fora company andbeing an ethical journalist are supposed to work together.

The infamous Wow signal that might have been an extraterrestrial message from aliens from 1977... still hasn't been completely explained. There are actually many mysterious and invisible messages flying around everywhere. Some people have tracked down the origins of a few of these signals, and the answers are probably not as exciting or dramatic as some might have hoped for. Maybe we just haven't been listening long enough....

A few years ago, law professor Mark Lemley wrote a paper arguing that one key way to deal with the problem of software patents was to get the courts to go back to actually applying existing law that effectively forbade the use of "functional claiming." In short, "functional claiming" means using a patent to claim ownership over an entire function -- i.e., traveling through time, buying something with one click -- rather than a specific invention on how to do the function. Existing patent law (namely 35 USC 112(f)) says that patents can have functional claiming, but with very specific limitations:

It seems like every presidential election cycle, which comes around far too often and lasts for far too long for my taste, there inevitably ends up being some kind of row between some musicians and some politicians over music used at campaign events. The targets of these disputes tend to be Republican candidates, due to the political demographics of musicians as a general thing, but Democrats have been targeted as well. And, as we've mentioned in the past, other than creating a stir in the media and hoping the target campaign relents, there's roughly shit-all these musicians can do about it. But that stir can often times be enough, especially if the musician uses the opportunity to pimp a rival candidate.

There's been an awful lot of discussion about the role of Facebook on journalism these days. I'm actually a lot less concerned than many who have been complaining that Facebook's growing importance is somehow "dangerous" for the future of news. The simple fact is that a huge percentage of people (especially young people) currently get their news via Facebook. But, at the very least, we should be concerned when Facebook starts to play the role of the arbitrary editor, simply deleting stories it doesn't like.

We've written enough about former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden that you should already know to take what he says with a large grain of salt. He will say basically anything to further his argument, no matter how false or disingenuous. He doesn't appear to care. He's admitted that September 11th gave him permission to reinterpret the 4th Amendment. He's claimed that terrorist attacks that weren't prevented were proof for why the NSA should keep collecting metadata. He lied about whether he and others lied about the CIA's torture program. He claimed that the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's exec summary of the CIA torture report would be the tipping point for terrorists attacking us (how'd that work out?). He's argued that no one who thinks Ed Snowden is a whistleblower should be allowed to work in government. He claimed that Senator Feinstein was too emotional about the CIA torture program to judge it effectively. And on and on and on.

The process for shoving through dangerous corporation-driven trade agreements has been a bizarre procedural mess, but unfortunately it took another step forward earlier today. As we've reported, at the end of May, after some tinkering, the Senate voted in favor of giving the President "fast track" authority (which effectively cedes Congress's Constitutional powers over international commerce to the President). There had been a brief hiccup in that process until the Senate agreed to tie the fast track bill (officially known as "Trade Promotion Authority" or TPA) to a separate program known as Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), which helps provide training programs for workers displaced over trade. At that point, everyone thought that the fight was now entirely about the House. And, in a surprise move, late last week the House overwhelmingly rejected the TAA part, with many Democrats voting against it -- even though it's a program they support. The claim was that they voted against it as a protest over the fast track provision, which they didn't like -- though, oddly, right after that they did a "show vote" approving fast track, even though it was procedurally meaningless.