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The passage of appropriations bills is a seemingly casual process in which any legislator can attempt to hitch his or her hobbyhorse to it as it makes its way slowly to a vote. (And then to a government shutdown.) "Rob Peter/Pay Paul" amendments are offered for quick floor votes, adding millions to one program while siphoning the equivalent amount from another. Other amendments are simply of the "Rob Peter" variety, in which funding is stripped from programs or activities a legislator doesn't agree with.

Lawyer Ken Cuccinelli -- who's representing Rand Paul in his lawsuit against the government for its domestic surveillance programs -- has filed a motion in opposition of the resumption of the Section 215 program with the FISA Court. While Section 215 officially expired on May 31st, it lives on in altered form after the passage of the USA Freedom Act, which ends the collection of metadata and forces the government to approach telcos with targeted requests for data.

As you may have heard, DARPA, the wonderful government agency folks who helped bring us the precursors to the internet and self-driving cars, held a giant robotics competition this weekend, known as the DARPA Robotic Challenge, or DRC. It was full of amazing robots -- though everyone seems focused on the ones that fell over, despite the amazing advancements in robotics that were on display.

Many government entities do little more than tolerate the existence of the press, knowing that anything they do that appears to restrict First Amendment activities will backfire horribly. These are the smart ones. Then there are others who are too obtuse to recognize the censorious gun they think they're pointing at others is actually resting about temple-level on their own heads.

Back in 2013, we wrote about a FOIA lawsuit that was filed by William New at IP Watch. After trying to find out more information on the TPP by filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and being told that they were classified as "national security information" (no, seriously), New teamed up with Yale's Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic to sue. As part of that lawsuit, the USTR has now released a bunch of internal emails concerning TPP negotiations, and IP Watch has a full writeup showing how industry lobbyists influenced the TPP agreement, to the point that one is even openly celebrating that the USTR version copied his own text word for word.

The "do something" resulting from the Enron scandal was Sarbanes-Oxley. To date, the law has done very little to curb corporate fraud -- its intended target. But it has become a handy tool for prosecutors looking to stack charges against defendants far removed from the financial world.

Back in 2013, Techdirt wrote a story about how Netflix was using piracy as market research -- an approach that is as obvious as it is rare. The copyright maximalists doubtless hoped that would fail dismally, and that Netflix would see the error of its ways and join the industry chorus condemning piracy as a terrible scourge that impoverishes artists and causes society to collapse. Neither has happened, as an interview with Netflix's CEO, Reed Hastings, in El Mundo makes clear (original in Spanish, via TorrentFreak). Hastings confirms that looking at pirate sites to find out what people were interested in did indeed work out well in the Netherlands, and that this gives him confidence Netflix will thrive when it launches later this year in Spain -- a country that has traditionally had a high level of piracy:

If you're looking for the number of citizens killed by police officers, don't ask the government. It just doesn't know. The DOJ is nominally in charge of compiling this information, but it has not made anything resembling an honest effort to do so.

This week, the New Zealand government stepped in to stop the US from seizing all of Kim Dotcom's assets, prompting a lot of reactions from every corner. Both our top comments on the insightful side come in response to that story, the first from PRMan with a simple but distressing observation:

Five Years Ago This week in 2010, we were following mass copyright threat campaigns and disappointed to see Verizon handing names over to US Copyright Group, but happy to see the EFF, Public Citizen and the ACLU ask a judge to put a stop to the subpoenas. At the same time, we wondered if US Copyright Group and ACS:Law might be working together. It was the fourth anniversary of the raid that took down the Pirate Bay (for a couple days), which had yet to have any significant effect. We saw some early entries in what would become the Righthaven saga, a Dutch court said that just linking to movies is illegal, and Canada introduced a new copyright bill with DMCA-like anti-circumvention provisions (while admitting that the last bill was all about keeping US diplomats happy). Meanwhile, author Joe Konrath was experimenting with piracy to see how it impacted his sales, Ashton Kutcher and Lionsgate were 'self-pirating' their new film as a publicity stunt, and some successful content creators were worried about the Viacom lawsuit interfering with their use of YouTube. Scott Adams noticed (and accepted) that the price of content is trending towards zero, while David Gerrold argued that any industry that thinks filesharing is bad is ignoring customers. Ten Years Ago Last week, with the benefit of hindsight, I was able to note that the rumours of Apple switching to Intel were (for the first time) true. This week in 2005 the rumours solidified, confirming suspicions and forcing a lot of incredulous analysts to eat their words (though the official announcement wouldn't come until the following Monday). The internet was changing the way people interact with entertainment in big ways. The line between advertising and content was getting blurrier, as was the entire concept of a "television channel" (which appeared to be on the way out), and as were the borders between regions (which, as Sony was learning, had become meaningless). The perennial concern that digital music is too low-quality reared an early head with a $9,500 device that makes Pono and Tidal look like bargains. DVD-trading communities were struggling because it turns out nobody wants bad DVDs, and hotel check-in kiosks weren't doing great either. But we did see hints of an exciting future, with more examples of patron-donation models for creators. We learned that the recording industry stalked Kazaa's CEO for months, and that the MPAA was funding public surveillance of him — so it's unsurprising that lots of folks (as always way ahead of the *AA) were working on a more anonymous version of BitTorrent. ICANN agreed to create a .xxx TLD while we watched the .kids.us domain get only 21 websites in three years. Speaking of not understanding kids, California tried to ban textbooks over 200 pages in a misguided attempt to embrace the internet. Fifteen Years Ago Sony had resisted digital music sales until this week in 2000, when they made a selection of 50 tracks available for download (at a high price, in a special DRM format, of course). MP3.com was trying its own strategy — piping music directly to retailers — while The Offspring had the creative idea of cheekily selling Napster merchandise. Amidst all this, we noted that the recording industry was full of mixed messages, hating piracy but marketing to pirates. In short, it seemed like they didn't get it. Much like National Geographic didn't get Burning Man, high society didn't get the internet and its nouveau-riche, and high schools didn't get that free e-mail services are good. These seemed like uncertain days for Silicon Valley, but people were beginning to realize that VC money was not in fact drying up and they were still spending like crazy. Of course, those Dot Coms that didn't survive tended to just disappear, since they had very little to be sold off. Two-Hundred And Twenty-Five Years Ago A few weeks ago I marked the 1710 passage of the Statute of Anne, forerunner of all modern copyright law. This week, we mark the next milestone in that saga: the signing of the Copyright Act of 1790 on May 31st, the first federal copyright law in the United States, and established the well-known (around here) original copyright term of 14+14 years for books, maps and charts.

True virtual reality — the kind we've been envisioning now for decades — is inching ever closer to, well, reality. But while most of the focus is new devices that let you see a virtual world, there are some people out there working on the other senses to round out the simulated experience. This week, we're looking at Gloveone, a haptic feedback system that wants to do for touch what devices like the Oculus Rift are doing for sight. The Good I don't think I need to sell anyone on the idea of fully immersive virtual reality, which is a sci-fi dream every bit as potent as flying cars and hoverboards, but one that's looking a lot more attainable. And then there's the idea of a glove-based input and feedback device, which remains intriguing even to those who were burned in 1989. So what can I say? The Gloveone is just cool. Even basic haptic feedback has proven a boon to mobile devices and game controllers, and those systems don't begin to approach the complexity and detail of the Gloveone's, so I'm excited to see what can be done with the technology. The Bad The Gloveone isn't likely to be many people's first foray into virtual reality. It would be great to use as part of a complete multi-sensory setup, but by itself it may not be all that exciting. The ability to interact with objects on regular screens will surely have some applications, but it's alongside something like the Oculus Rift or Microsoft Hololens that the device will truly shine, and those aren't exactly household staples just yet. But, ultimately, that isn't the point: the creators surely know their direct consumer appeal is currently limited, but they are banking on a future where virtual reality setups become more and more common, and filling in an important gap. The Future And that's what the Gloveone's really about, and what makes it awesome: the (potentially) coming VR future. The creators are putting a huge focus on developers: the developer site is already up with documentation, runtimes, SDKs and a package for Unity3D (with Unreal Engine compatibility as a stretch goal, which could lead to some exciting games). This community is where the Gloveone can really shine and where most of the attention is likely to come from for the next little while, as forward-thinking developers start doing interesting and unexpected things with the technology. The truth is, there probably isn't much reason for the average person to buy something like this right now — but given a bit of time and creative innovation, the Gloveone may prove to be the prototype for the next generation of haptic devices.

We just recently wrote about a ridiculously bad lawsuit filed on behalf of patent attorney Scott Horstemeyer against the EFF after EFF called his stupid patent "stupid." It appears that Horstemeyer has hopefully come to his senses, as the lawsuit has been dismissed -- though without prejudice, meaning it's still possible he could file it again.

Pop quiz, buck-os! True or false, a billion-dollar insurance industry giant and a miniscule human resources consultant in Alaska are competing in the same industries and marketplaces? You said false? Hmm, in that case, try this next one on for size. Are you able to tell these two company logos apart from one another?

Okay, here's something I never expected to see: Facebook is enabling the use of PGP email encryption on emails sent from Facebook to email accounts:

No matter what some are claiming, there are some important reforms in the USA Freedom Act. It doesn't go far enough, and the bill is far from perfect, but as a starting point it has some value. But with three provisions expiring last night, while the Senate looks to finally vote on the USA Freedom Act, it has allowed Mitch McConnell to "fill the tree" with really bad amendments, rather than with actually useful amendments that would improve the USA Freedom Act. Chances are that McConnell's amendments won't pass either -- and the original version of the USA Freedom Act will make it through. But the whole situation should just be a reminder that whatever happens this week, we still need significantly more reform before the abuses of the intelligence community are truly limited and stopped.

When code is treated like weapons, bad things happen. Governing bodies have previously treated encryption as weaponry, ensuring that only the powerful will have access to strong encryption while the general public must make do with weaker or compromised variants.

Last year, we wrote about a potentially important First Amendment case involving Anthony Elonis, who posted some fairly nasty things online, including some about his ex-wife that some certainly read to be threatening. Elonis insisted that it was just a persona, and what he posted online were merely rap lyrics with no actual threat behind them -- but he still ended up in jail for a few years because of it. And, thus, the Supreme Court heard a case that was supposed to be about the First Amendment and whether threats need to be "true threats" to lead to charges, and what exactly "true threats" mean, and through whose eyes should the statements be seen. But, as has happened all too often with this Supreme Court, it punted on the key issue and chose not to discuss the First Amendment issues at all after realizing it could overturn the case on other grounds.

It's never a bad idea to get extra certifications in your industry to help your career along. For 91% off list, you can get one year of access to the MCSE Business Intelligence 5-Course Training through iCollege and prepare yourself for the Microsoft Certified Solutions Engineer exam. Once you've completed the five courses, you can sit for the exam at any Prometric Testing Center in the world (exam vouchers are not included in this deal). The courses cover querying and administering Microsoft SQL servers, implementing a data warehouse, creating data reports and models, and designing business intelligence solutions with Microsoft SQL servers.

While AT&T is now a part of two lawsuits to try and overturn the FCC's new net neutrality rules, there's probably no company singularly more responsible for the rules being necessary in the first place. It was AT&T that really got the neutrality debate rolling in the States just about a decade ago, when then CEO Ed Whitacre proudly proclaimed he was going to start charging companies like Google a "troll toll" just for touching his network.

Yesterday morning, prior to the Senate debate that has resulted in the (brief) expiration of a few provisions in the PATRIOT Act, CIA director John Brennan went on one of those Sunday morning talk shows and made a complete fool of himself, pretending that merely debating things like the 4th Amendment was helping the terrorists. It started off with a claim that various bad people are "watching carefully" what happens, as if anyone honestly believes that terrorists are looking at last night's vote and thinking, "Oh boy, now we can plan a new bombing campaign by calling America again!"

We've got another double-winner this week. That Anonymous Coward scored first place for both insightful and funny with the same comment: his response to the absurd trademark situation in which a 1000-year-old village was told to stop using its name. As he pointed out, the company that sends out these demands for trademark holders should probably change its slogan:

Five Years Ago News was flying in every direction on the copyright front this week in 2010. An unauthorized Catcher In The Rye sequel sparked a copyright fight that remains near the center of the debate about transformative works, but a ruling against the idea that you could copyright the concept of sneaking veggies into kids' food upheld the idea/expression dichotomy. Two different studies (and the chair of the Featured Artist Coalition) underlined the fact that innovation is more important than worrying about piracy. A UK court found that sports schedules could be covered by copyright, while German court ruled that RapidShare is not liable for infringement by users, and a Costa Rican artist was claiming that the country's new money infringes on his artwork. At home, a court ruled that an album is a single work for the purpose of damages, while Google was seeking a declaratory judgement that linking to files is not infringement. In the world of journalism, Sumner Redstone was saying that all newspapers would be gone within two years. While that hasn't exactly been the case, it's an understandable thought at a time when Rupert Murdoch was getting shy about his newly-paywalled websites and The Economist was warning about paywalls creating news pirates — all while Fox News was aggregating copyrighted photographs. At least the New Hampshire Supreme Court recognized that new media can be news media. Ten Years Ago It's not like that was the first sounding of the bell for old media. Back in 2005, faltering ad revenues had already driven newspapers to advertising to advertisers, seeking advertising. The New York Post was irritating readers not with a paywall, but with a broken registration wall. But what was bad news for print also appeared to be good news for digital, and Forbes' online revenue was set to surpass its print revenue. Online advertising was booming, though we noted that it might not grow forever, and video game ads were the next big source of hype. On the copyright front, we were disturbed to see the Boy Scouts offer an intellectual property badge, but happy to see the RIAA's lectures at colleges fall on deaf ears. We were intrigued by an analysis suggesting the RIAA's high damage amounts in copyright lawsuits were unconstitutional, but sad to see the Supreme Court pass on a case that could have let it give some teeth to people targeted by bogus DMCA takedowns. Fifteen Years Ago Five years before that, in 2000, we heard the RIAA's own words about its lawsuits against MP3.com and Napster. Already, people were realizing that the world of MP3s (still a hot topic) extended far beyond those two famous services, though its future was unclear. This was also the time of the fallout from the Microsoft antitrust verdict, leading some to imagine alternate futures and question the company's kindergarten-level manners. These were days before the cult of Steve Jobs, when there was still a cult of Bill Gates. A dispute between Disney and Time Warner broke out this week in 2000, leading the former to pull ABC from the latter's cable service and causing some to question the future of the AOL/Time Warner merger. Star Wars, on the other hand, was still in the pocket of George Lucas, who finally agreed to release it on DVD. Sixty-Three Years Ago All of modern computing is based on the integrated circuit. As with all monumental inventions, it has its roots in several incremental innovations and sparks of inspiration that came before it, but it was on May 7th, 1952 that British radio engineer Geoffrey Dumner fully formulated and described the idea in a public speech, saying:

For this week's awesome stuff, we're looking at a project that aims to beat Bluetooth at its own game: the HearNotes WireFree earbuds. These headphones use their own wireless technology to, supposedly, deliver higher-quality audio than Bluetooth with no danger of interference or interruption. The Good It's a wireless world, but Bluetooth audio simply isn't up to par. If the HearNotes technology — dubbed "Kleer" — really can deliver better, more reliable sound, then that's an obvious plus. I suspect that the "reliable" part of that equation is actually the more important and could make these a popular product, since pairing and range issues with Bluetooth devices are especially infuriating when you just want to listen to music, whereas the sound quality issue is something of a wildcard: it's questionable just how much people actually notice better sound in blind tests, and devices sold on sound quality have both sunk and swam in the past. In the world of wireless headphones, however, almost everyone agrees they are still noticeably worse than wired options, so it seems like there is some genuine room for improvement. Beyond that core question of sound, the little details of the HearNotes are top notch, like the inductive charging case and the design of the earbuds themselves. The Bad The big showstopper is the price. The estimated MSRP is $349, and though there are some decent savings for Kickstarter backers and early birds, it still puts the HearNotes in the same range as the highest-end Bluetooth headphones. That just further enforces the need for these to deliver on the core promises of convenience and quality if they are to stand a chance on the market. The other obvious issue is the need to have a special transmitter plugged into your headphone jack. They describe it as "versatile" but I'm not really sure what that means as it actually looks quite cumbersome. That said, it seems like there are many popular uses for wireless audio that involve leaving your phone on a desk while you move about (which, with the boasted 50-foot range, would be very possible) so a bulky transmitter might not be a big deal. Still, it would be nice to see options such as building the transmitter into a phone case, or perhaps making it a module for last week's Awesome Stuff project. The Nauseating I fully understand that entrepreneurs and innovative people in general have to get very passionate when talking about their work. At Techdirt, we do it ourselves all the time. But there's something extremely offputting about HearNotes' self-serious Kickstarter video (can we retire the phrase "allow me to enlighten you"?) and strained marketing jargon. The greatest irritation is the insistent branding of these earbuds as WireFree, and the claims that this is distinct from wireless because it offers a greater and more reliable degree of freedom. The thinking behind this is actually understandable because, as noted, convenience is the real selling point for a Bluetooth replacement. Despite all our wireless technology, it's actually rare to get that seamless sci-fi feeling of just grabbing-and-going with a wireless device; instead, we generally have to tap out a password or open an app or at least press a button somewhere. If HearNotes can offer a new level of "just works" satisfaction, then it's got a major hook. But somehow the clarity of that point gets lost in the WireFree branding and the photos of people dancing in a meadow. (Though they do, quite fairly, point out that a lot of wireless Bluetooth earbuds are connected to each other by... a wire.)

Non-disparagement clauses are one of the stupidest things any company can enact. In most cases, it's almost impossible to enforce them, no matter how artfully crafted. Most aren't. Most non-disparagement clauses found lying around the internet have been lazily copied and pasted from pre-existing bad ideas instituted by other companies.

Normally, reading a report on an earnings forecast by a video game company is no more interesting than it would be if the company made, say, toilet bowl brushes. But every so often, you can catch a glimpse of where a company thinks the gaming industry is going and how gaming might evolve next. One such report on Activision's earnings has some interesting tidbits to go along with the company's acknowledgement of the known trends in digital distribution.

Hangovers are pretty common for alcohol drinkers, but oddly, medical science doesn't really have an exact cause for the phenomenon. Sure, there's a bit of dehydration and trace amounts of toxic compounds from some alcoholic spirits, but brain inflammation from high alcohol levels seems to be just something that happens (pending further study). There have been some studies on hangovers, but no reliable cure just yet. If you want to try a few things that might work, check out some of the links below.

We recently wrote about some dangerous terms of service from a big prison messaging service, JPay, in which the company claimed to flat out own any content that anyone sent through its service. While the company itself did not appear to be doing stupid things to enforce this, this clause did allow prison guards to put one prisoner in solitary confinement after his sister posted a video he had sent via JPay to social media. The prison claimed it was doing so to protect JPay's intellectual property.

For many years now, we've been talking about the problematic practice of "pay for delay" in the pharma industry. This involved patent holders paying generic pharmaceutical makers some amount of money to not enter the market in order to keep their own monopoly even longer. There's a complex process behind all of this, which often involves the larger pharmaceutical company first suing a generic maker, and then "settling" by agreeing to pay a sum of money to the generic maker. But, part of the "settlement" is that the generic drugmaker stays out of the market for longer than they otherwise would have needed to do so. Not surprisingly, the rise of such pay for delay, or "reverse payment" deals, came as a result of the Hatch-Waxman Act from 1984, which was supposed to encourage generic drugs to enter the market. But, because Congress does a really crappy job understanding game theory, those behind the bill failed to realize they were actually setting up incentives for the reverse (we'll get to how and why in a moment).

Five Years Ago By this time in 2010, everyone had seen the leaked draft of ACTA — so, naturally, the USTR decided it was time to release it. It was, as we put it, "only very slightly less awful than expected", and it was missing a critical piece of information: what each country is pushing for. Speaking of pushes by various countries, this week in 2010 we saw Canada's recording industry begin a campaign for draconian copyright laws, while India introduced draft copyright amendments that were a mixed bag. We were unsurprised to discover that UK piracy statistics are bunk too (while at home the MPAA was refusing to reveal how it came up with its own bogus numbers). Amidst all this, Google launched its tool for looking up international takedown stats, though it seemed to have significant limitations. Also in 2010: Blizzard sold $2-million worth of virtual horses in four hours while Ubisoft was busy annoying customers with its DRM; still-free Hulu announced its paid subscription service while DirecTV struck another customer-confusing release deal with movie studios; and we looked at possibilities for reforming copyright such as returning it to its roots or using compulsory licensing to build an "abundance-based" system. Ten Years Ago Plenty of what happened in 2010 wasn't exactly new to that year. Five years earlier the same week, the Canadian recording industry was already trying to kill online music stores with tariffs, the UK recording industry was already saying stupid thinks about filesharing, and bad DRM was already annoying customers. The entertainment industry was exerting a lot of influence on law enforcement, and sharing songs or movies before their release became a felony with three years of jailtime. Not content to be overly protective of the movies themselves, the MPAA was also sending C&Ds to people who use its movie rating system for other things. Not content to be overly protective of the songs themselves, the recording industry in Germany was forcing a bunch of lyrics sites to shut down. Microsoft Encarta was still around in 2005, and beginning to adopt some vaguely Wikipedia-like features, but it was too little too late. Macromedia was also still around, and this week Adobe announced that it would buy it for $3.4-billion. And catalog shopping was still around, but not for long, it seemed. Book publishers were starting to freak out about Google's scanning plans, while newspaper editors were surprisingly and naively not freaking out about Craigslist (if they even knew what it was). Fifteen Years Ago Just this morning, I was calibrating the voice-wakeup on my phone and being frustrated by its general lack of responsiveness. Despite this, I can't deny it's come a long way from visions of voice-based WAP shopping all the way back in 2000, when AltaVista was still around and postponing its IPO, and colleges were bizarrely cracking open the subject of internet ethics. This week in 2000 also featured a big announcement from Mirimax: an experiment in putting feature films online, something nobody had done before. It was impossible not to consider the turbulent future of that move, since this was also a time of rampant discussion and controversy around Napster, including some side-switching and the decision of a few fans to put together a system for donating money to Metallica. Fifty Years Ago Predictions are abundant in the technology world. They are also almost always wrong, usually either vastly overestimating change in the short-term or vastly underestimating it in the long-term. But there's one fundamental and famous tech prophecy that has held true throughout all the twists and turns of the entire digital revolution: Moore's Law, which turned 50 this week. Put in the simplest terms, the law states that the power of computer processors (more technically, the number of transistors in dense integrated circuits) will double every two years — and that's exactly what's happened for half a century.

As with last week's awesome stuff, we're trying out something slightly different. Instead of gathering three new crowdfunded products, we're focusing on just one and taking a slightly closer look at it. Please let us know what you think in the comments! This week, we're looking at a potentially exciting new addition to the maker's toolkit: the Orbit1 tabletop electroplater. The Good The Orbit1 simplifies, streamlines and compacts the complex process of electroplating a wide variety of materials with various metal coatings, and could open up a whole new world of possibilities for all sorts of creators. 3D printers get so much focus in these discussions that it's easy to forget there are other pieces to the puzzle, and a tabletop electroplater fills in a big gap. There are many things you can't do with plastic, metal 3D printing is still expensive and not easily accessible, and electroplating typically means forking over cash to professionals with large machines — so the Orbit1 is enabling countless new avenues for prototyping, jewellerymaking, art and more. It even enables the creation of printed circuit boards with a standard 3D printer. That will make it a boon to future Kickstarter projects too: many creators go as far as they can doing home prototyping work with their 3D printers, and the Orbit1 pushes that limit considerably further for many projects. The Bad As with virtually all new devices these days, the Orbit1 is going to be unnecessarily shackled to its proprietary apps and cloud system. Thankfully, it appears they aren't going too far with this: the device can be controlled with the app via Bluetooth so it isn't online-only, and the "expert mode" (where all the various settings are under your control) is useable even without an account on the online service. But it sounds like many other features — including the ability to automatically determine settings and store various settings profiles — will be tied to the cloud. There's also no desktop app for controlling the Orbit1: it's limited to Android and iOS. This approach to new devices is becoming a huge headache. Backing many things on Kickstarter now means not just betting that the creators will be able to produce the product successfully, but that they will also evolve into a sustainable company that keeps its servers running and properly manages your account. Using such devices means additional accounts and passwords (we all need more of those right?), putting your personal data on yet another distant server (best practice!), and having even more limited cloud storage (the Orbit1 comes with 5gb) scattered in fragments across the web. Mobile-only control means you're also relying on the apps to remain active and updated in proprietary app stores, with the potential for issues on that end of things to suddenly and randomly brick your new toy. The Admirable, But Problematic There is, however, some justification for the Orbit1's desire to tie users into an ongoing relationship: the creators appear to have a sincere commitment to environmental responsibility and safety (not to mention a genuine need to comply with various countries' regulations). Electroplating can be dangerous — the solutions used in some settings are highly poisonous, and all of them require proper disposal to avoid serious environmental damage. While the Orbit1 can work with any electroplating solution, and those with more knowledge of the process will surely make use of that, the creators are also focused on selling their own line of the safest possible solutions along with a free recycling service. Here's the catch, though: the solutions are available to people with Orbit1 accounts, and those accounts can get cancelled if people fail to return their used solutions to be recycled. The details are slightly unclear, but it seems like this means a full account cancellation, which would also include all the additional cloud-tied features mentioned above. Now, while I understand and even approve of the desire to put real pressure on people to use the Orbit1 in a responsible way, I can't help but think this is going to screw some undeserving users.

At some point, the corporations and authorities in America are going to have to get over this knee-jerk reaction complex they have in going after citizens kindly pointing out technology and security flaws for them. You see this over and over and over again: someone notices a flaw in a system, points it out publicly instead of exploiting the flaw, and is thoroughly punished for his or her efforts. Often times there is a mealy-mouthed explanation for these punishments, which, chiefly, have to do with security risks in publicizing the flaw even though the ultimate goal should be fixing the exploit to begin with.

The UK's Freedom of Information law was a long time coming. In contrast to the United States government, which (begrudgingly) (and only sort of) threw open its filing cabinets for its citizens' perusal in 1966, the UK's version didn't go live until 2005, after nine years of legislative maneuvering. Tony Blair, who started the push as an opposition leader, was already expressing his regrets five years later.

Our senses can be fooled pretty easily. A blue dress can look like it's white. And if our eyes can be fooled so easily, our tastebuds don't really stand much of a chance. If someone tells you a bottle of wine is aged and expensive, it's not easy to disprove that assertion with a taste test. Here are just a few other ways to fool people's tastebuds.

Pay attention to the gaming scene and the way gamers interact with game companies and journalists and you'll see that times are a little tense these days. Without diving into any of the debates currently being had throughout Gamerdom (Gamerstan? Gaming Nation?), let's just all agree that there is a big fat trust vacuum at the moment and that this vacuum is being filled by all kinds of reactions, some of which are reasonable, some of which are silly and overreaching. What's happened since in the last year or so has exacerbated the distrust to the point where companies operate on tip-toes with their audiences or they suffer the consequences. What cannot be done in a time like this, if a company wants to make money and keep its fanbase loyal, is to further breach that trust.

We've written a few times about the so-called left shark, the internet meme that took off after one of singer Katy Perry's backup dancers (in a shark costume, naturally) looked a little "off" during her Super Bowl performance earlier this year. The internet went crazy and created all sorts of memes around "left shark." A guy named Fernando Sosa started selling 3d printed Left Shark figurines -- and then Perry's lawyers freaked out and basically claimed ownership to all things "left shark."

If only the endlessly-escalating West Coast cost of living could have prevented this:

Last week, we had a brief post on the disturbing news that Nevada's very good and very useful anti-SLAPP law was about to be destroyed by a new bill that basically gutted all of the important stuff in Nevada's bill. This would be pretty tragic, as anti-SLAPP laws are important in protecting free speech -- especially in protecting the free speech of those who challenge the wealthy and powerful. As you may know, there are a lot of wealthy and powerful people in Nevada, and it may be difficult to figure out which of them stand to benefit the most from killing off a law that prevents them from using hoards of cash to silence critics.

There are plenty of ethical issues with organ transplants and how to handle the undersupply of donors. Hopefully, medical science is getting advanced enough to grow organs and eliminate the shortage of organs for patients who need them. Here are just a few stories about organs in modern medicine.

The long-running defamation suit against anonymous Yelp reviewers -- brought by Hadeed Carpet Cleaning -- finally has produced some good news… sort of. Hadeed's lawsuit defines "problematic," seeing as it both threatens anonymous speech and is predicated not on actual defamatory statements, but on the allegations that the reviewers were never actual customers of the business. Hadeed has argued that a review from a non-customer is defamation in and of itself, which obviously contains some very negative implications for free speech -- anonymous or not -- if he succeeds in his legal efforts.

To hear politicians and the media talk about things, "cybersecurity" threats are some sort of existential threat that can only be stopped by giving the government more information and more control over our data. There is, of course, little to actually support that notion. And, two new studies show that (as has been the case for decades), the real threats are not because of super sophisticated technology and tools for hacking, but rather because end users are fallible and IT folks don't do a very good job locking doors (hat tip: WarOnPrivacy):

Anyone can have an idea. Multiple people can independently have the same idea. It's the expression that counts, but Alara Mills, the creator of oneversion of a periodic table of HTML5 elements, seems to think she should be able to curb other expressions of this idea.

Ken White, over at Popehat, has a story on the ridiculous situation concerning how lawyer/psychotherapist Jose Arcaya is going after lawyer Scott Greenfield (whose work we often mention around these parts). The history of how it got this far is a bit convoluted, and you can read the full Popehat post for the details, but here's my shortened version: An apparently unsatisfied former client of Arcaya left a negative review of Arcaya on Yelp. Arcaya sued for defamation, arguing that being called "absolute scum" is not merely an opinion because of the use of the word "total" (which as far as I can tell is not actually used in the review -- though perhaps he means "absolute" or perhaps something was edited. Also, for the record, the review appears to call him "absolute scum" not "absolute scum bag" though I doubt the difference matters):

Back in December, when the Sony emails first leaked, we wrote a detailed post about the bizarre views of the MPAA on site blocking, in that it was absolutely obsessed with putting site blocking in place while admitting it didn't understand the technical issues. That was based on the reporting done by some reporters who had seen a few of the emails. Now that Wikileaks has released the entire trove, we can discover some more details, like the fact that part of the MPAA's plan was to figure out how to create pro-censorship propaganda. It really is incredible, but that's a bulletpoint in an email from the MPAA's top lawyer, Steven Fabrizio, about part of the strategy at a "site blocking confab" the major studios held last fall:

As we noted last week, India is in the midst of a heated conversation about net neutrality, as the government puts out feelers to determine how best to define an "open internet." As part of this conversation, Facebook's Internet.org initiative has come under particular scrutiny; the platform offering users in some countries walled gardens to a limited crop of zero rated apps and content. While Facebook consistently emphasizes the philanthropic nature of this effort, content companies have been dropping out of the project in droves, arguing that they don't like the idea of Facebook (or an ISP) determining who does and doesn't get cap-exempt treatment (and therefore a leg up in the market).

Five Years Ago This week in 2010, the patent office hired an economist in a move we hoped would help bring some reason to the patent system. Meanwhile, we wondered if you could save software patents with a team of "obviousness" developers, and one IP lawyer was telling people to stop wasting money on patents. We also took a closer look at how bogus patents get approved, and witnessed a patent fight over the Dominos pizza tracker. Over in the UK, the house of commons hatched a plan to rush through the Digital Economy Bill, and then did just that. One ISP quickly said it would not follow the rules while a member of the UK Musician's Union (which supported the bill) wrote an excellent open letter about his disappointment. All told, it was a bill proposed by the unelected, debated by the ignorant, and voted on by the absent. Ten Years Ago Back in 2005, technology was rapidly changing life in sometimes-unexpected ways. Watchmakers looked on in horror as their once-widespread devices were replaced by smartphones, while plumbers capitalized on a booming new business in retrieving phones from toilets. Online groceries were catching on in NYC, and kids were buying (crappy) homework online. Of course, not all trends were entirely true: Pew admitted that it pumped up the numbers on the prevalence of podcasting, and the creator of the idea of "toothing" (finding sex hookups via Bluetooth) admitted it as all a hoax. We were already noting the fact that copy protection was not the issue faced by the entertainment industries, and that there were lots of opportunities to sell music the way people want it, especially since sharing music is a cultural thing and the newfound ease of content creation was already making its mark. Fifteen Years Ago Let's all say happy birthday to Verizon, I guess. It was this week in 200 that Bell Atlantic and GTE announced that, in their merger, they would abandon both brands and operate as the shiny new "Verizon". Meanwhile, we also learned of another big merger negotiation between BellSouth and SBC. Also in 2000: the Microsoft antitrust ruling came out, leading some to wonder just how much it meant; Mattel dumped The Learning Company that it had bought only a year before; Dot Coms were struggling to find events to sponsor, while we noticed some were being run by kids who were hiring their parents; it turned out the question of deep linking wasn't quite closed; and we pointed to an article saying something that has been a guiding principle of Techdirt for a long time: that you need to understand the legal system to understand the goings-on in technology. Three-Hundred And Five Years Ago Most of you probably know that basically all modern copyright descends from the Statute of Anne, an early 18th-century British law that created the first ever government-run copyright system. Well, it was on April 5th, 1710 that the bill passed and received royal assent, and the Statute of Anne became law.

For this week's awesome stuff, we're looking at some devices that help you monitor, track and control things that are useful to monitor, track and control. WEZR Most people's knowledge of the weather is limited to forecasts, the thermostat, and looking out the window. The savvy may check live atmospheric maps and other data, but few people are able to build their knowledge based on the full synthesis of information available to them. WEZR aims to change that: it's a weather monitor that combines forecasts with a variety of live data and its own array of sensors to derive specific, hyper-local and constantly-updated weather conditions and pipe them to your smartphone. It then shares sensor data to help improve accuracy for all users. Planty Anyone who's kept houseplants has also, at some point, let one die — while some of us have given up the endeavour entirely after minor massacres. Planty aims to make the task of caring for plants a little easier and smarter: it's a wi-fi connected planter pot that monitors soil, temperature, light and water levels and sends you alerts when upkeep needs to be done. Even better, it includes an automatic watering system that you can remotely control to feed plants exactly what the amount of water they need from anywhere. Meld Home appliances are getting smarter and smarter, but not everyone has the funds or even the desire to replace all of their stuff just to get access to some time-saving features. That's why devices like this are so cool: they add some of those features without requiring a complete upgrade or even significant alterations. Meld is an automated range knob that simply clips onto your existing stove and communicates with a wireless sensor that goes inside the oven. It can be programmed to make automatic, on-the-fly adjustments throughout cooking according to the needs of the specific dish. Not only does this make life easier, it vastly improves the accuracy of cooking temperatures since the average range is poorly calibrated.

Remember Personal Audio? That's the company that claimed it had a patent (8,112,504) from years ago that covered all podcasting and then sued a bunch of top podcasters over it. The company got itself lots of attention, including from EFF, who filed with the UPSTO to invalidate the patent. In response, Personal Audio tried to intimidate EFF's donors. Eventually, Personal Audio realized that podcasters don't actually make that much money and settled a bunch of its lawsuits -- even with Adam Carolla (which actually does make a bunch of money) who had insisted he wasn't going to settle.

FOIA clearinghouse MuckRock has scored another revealing document, this time from Customs and Border Protection. As we're well aware, the US border isn't technically considered to be part of the United States, at least not as far as the Constitution is concerned. All bets are off, 4th (and others) Amendment-wise. If you're traveling with anything-- whether its a vehicle, suitcase or laptop -- expect it to be searched.

It's difficult to keep a good thing going without changing and adapting to the times. McDonald's is a national icon -- and it basically represents America to certain parts of the world. There's even a Big Mac Index to gauge currency exchange rates and global purchasing-power parity. McDonald's business has had some challenges in the last year, and the brand is the default whipping boy for activists. If you're still lovin' it, though, maybe you can get your favorite McBreakfast any time of the day now.