All posts in Electronic Frontier Foundation

Favorite Last year, Greek businessman Victor Restis filed a defamation lawsuit against United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), an advocacy group which, as part of a “name and shame” campaign, had accused his shipping company of doing business with Iran. Restis denies the allegations, while UANI sticks by them. Ordinarily, each side would have its day…

Favorite EFF recently learned about a patent that covered a method of filming a yoga class. We reviewed the patent and discovered that it was just as ridiculous as it sounded. Despite our familiarity with absurd patents and our concerns about cursory review at the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), we were still surprised that…

Favorite Trade delegates and ministers held another week of secret, back-room meetings over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement in Australia, which ended yesterday with seemingly little advancement towards a final deal. The most recent leak of the TPP Intellectual Property chapter revealed that on top of the many threats to user rights we’ve already known…

Favorite What needs to be in your tool belt if you plan to report on a massively funded and ultra-secret organization like the NSA? In the credits of her newly released CITIZENFOUR, director Laura Poitras gives thanks to a list of important security resources that are all free software. We’ve previously written about CITIZENFOUR and…

Favorite Update (Oct. 29, 2014): Yesterday, the Court granted [PDF] Capstone’s Motion for Judgment on the pleadings, finding that all claims were invalid for claiming unpatentable subject matter, applying Alice v. CLS Bank. We’re glad Capstone fought against these patents and achieved a total victory, despite the significant costs associated with doing so. We’re also happy that the court…

Favorite EFF proudly participated in the eighth annual Open Access Week last week, a celebration of making scholarly research immediately and freely available for people around the world to read, cite, and re-use. We published multiple blog posts each day, including a post from our friends at Wikimedia and a letter from Colombian scientist, Diego…

Favorite EFF has criticized Vietnam’s crackdown on independent media and bloggers for years, including the imprisonment of Le Quoc Quan and attempts to spy on bloggers and journalists using malware. We are heartened to learn of last week’s release of Vietnamese blogger Dieu Cay, but today we join with organizations including Viet Tan, Access, and…

Favorite Lumen View is a typical patent troll. Armed with a vague patent on “facilitating bilateral and multilateral decision-making,” it sent out aggressive letters demanding payment. It refused to explain how its targets actually infringed its patent. Instead, it made shakedown offers it knew would be less than the cost of defending a lawsuit. When…

Favorite School districts across the country are grappling with how to deal with their students’ use of technology and social media. All too often, in an attempt to protect students, they end up implementing technology polices that give administrators too much power and go too far in restricting what students can do online. Williamson County…

Favorite The Patriot Act continues to wreak its havoc on civil liberties. Section 213 was included in the Patriot Act over the protests of privacy advocates and granted law enforcement the power to conduct a search while delaying notice to the suspect of the search. Known as a “sneak and peek” warrant, law enforcement was…