In a long-awaited decision on whether and how Europeans’ private data can be protected from the roving eyes of the NSA, the Irish Commercial High Court this morning declared that “standard contractual clauses” —the procedure that tech companies like Facebook… Read More ›
Electronic Frontier Foundation 
A troubling new tactic to keep bad patents from being tossed out
On September 8, 2017, the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical company Allergan announced that it “sold” its patents relating to its eye drops “Restasis” to the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe. But this was not a usual “sale.” The Tribe doesn’t appear to… Read More ›
DHS Should Stop the Social Media Surveillance of Immigrants
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last month issued a notice that it is storing social media information on immigrants, including lawful permanent residents and naturalized U.S. citizens, apparently indefinitely, in a government database that contains “Alien Files” (A-Files)…. Read More ›
Live Blog: House Discusses Section 230
%3Ciframe%20src%3D%22https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FDyxD260Wz2Y%3Fautoplay%3D1%22%20allowfullscreen%3D%22%22%20width%3D%22560%22%20height%3D%22315%22%20frameborder%3D%220%22%3E%3C%2Fiframe%3E Privacy info. This embed will serve content from youtube.com — 9:07 a.m.: The hearing ends on a positive note, with multiple members of the committee expressing a desire to address sex trafficking in a way that preserves the protections… Read More ›
The End Game for European Upload Filtering Approaches
Update: the October 5 vote in the LIBE committee has now been postponed to an indefinite future date. If you’ve been following the slow progress of the European Commission’s proposal to introduce new upload filtering mandates for Internet platforms, or… Read More ›
EFF Asks Court to Undo Damage Done to First Amendment in Flawed National Security Letter Ruling
EFF has petitioned a federal appeals court to reconsider its flawed ruling in our national security letter case on behalf of CREDO Mobile and Cloudflare. In July, the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco upheld the NSL statute against our First Amendment… Read More ›
No Justification for Spanish Internet Censorship During Catalonian Referendum
The ruthless efficiency with which the Spanish government censored the Internet ahead of the referendum on Catalonian independence foreshadowed the severity of its crackdown at polling places on October 1. We have previously written about one aspect of that censorship; the raid of the… Read More ›
Just How Unpopular, How Wrong on the Facts, How Misguided Is the FCC Proposal to Rollback Network Neutrality and Broadband Privacy?
As the U.S. Senate debates the re-nomination of the head of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, it is worth reflecting on just how wildly unsupported by the public and wrong the agency is on its effort to end an… Read More ›
Stupid Patent of the Month: Will Patents Slow Artificial Intelligence?
We have written many times about why the patent system is a bad fit for software. Too often, the Patent Office reviews applications without ever looking at real world software and hands out broad, vague, or obvious patents on software… Read More ›
The War on General-Purpose Computing Turns on the Streaming Media Box Community
For most of the lifetime of Kodi since its release as XMBC in 2002, it was an obscure piece of free software that geeks used to manage their home media collections. But in the past few years, the sale of pre-configured Kodi… Read More ›