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Do it now! https://secure.eff.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=383

Probably none at all.

At least one. And two apps that would otherwise have been written for the iPhone are on the Android Market instead. Yes, I don't matter in isolation. But there are quite a few of us that still cling to the wacky notion that we should have control of products that we purchase.

For Apple to have "China like rules" they would be throwing people in jail for writing the apps for android that they don't like.

Apple has filed comments with the US Copyright Office saying that jailbreaking is and should remain a criminal act. So it actually is their position that you should go to jail for enabling "your" iPhone to run apps they don't approve.

The final piece of the puzzle puts the filing in Texas Northern District Court, which might be close enough to Texas Eastern District Court to write this off as a new kind of 'false patent marking troll' targeting big fish with deep coffers.

Troll? Hardly. The Electronic Frontier Foundation routinely files lawsuits like this one on the public's behalf. Compare PCG's lawsuit against alleged patent fraud to EFF's investigations and other actions against alleged copyfraud. So what's the big difference between a "false patent marking troll" and EFF?

I don't entirely agree with the concept that businesses are entities in the view of the law, but you're making a strong case why they should be. If going out of your way to make your neighbor lose money or sanity via harassment, assault, theft, stalking, or just by criminal negligence , is illegal--and well it ought to be--then doing so to a business is equally heinous, irrespective of whether you are a direct competitor or just an average Joe.

Ermmm? Businesses go out of their way to make one another lose money all the time, and I might do so by, for example, advocating a boycott. Businesses aren't people (don't particularly care what the Supreme Court said), and they are not entitled to the human rights that my neighbor is. That being said, it's not illegal for me to modify property I purchase from my neighbor, either. What you're suggesting is an even higher standard for businesses, that has nothing to do with assault, theft, criminal negligence (really?) or any other crime.

That doesn't by any means suggest that they should be allowed to harass, assault, steal from, stalk, or be negligent to you, either.

I'm sure millions of Windows users will be glad to hear that they will no longer need to deal with the forced installation of "genuine advantage" (or whatever they call it these days). Forced phoning home, harassment of the user (in many cases inaccurately), even the ability to remotely kill the system? Sounds like harassment to me. Of course, because of crap like that, I make them lose money-I don't use their operating system at all. Send the cops, I use an operating system no one at all gets paid for!

That doesn't make any sense, for one specific reason: any modification, and in particular reverse engineering, has the potential to amount to industrial espionage in a way that there is no feasible way to contractually forbid (except by EULA). They spent millions of dollars making a system like that--when nobody else would have or could have--gathered the people necessary to create a market, found exactly the right combination of everything involved, and then someone with your mindset comes in, provides the plans that took millions of dollars to produce, and churns it out with a couple hundred bucks of R&D in total, maybe a few thousand if you count lost hours of productivity. You are technically capable of distributing these plans to the lowest bidder or even for free, at which point equivalent but significantly cheaper hardware could undercut the company. If this were a person instead of a company, they'd have you in chains, because you just stole millions of dollars from them.

You've every right to try to make money. You've no right to succeed at it. If what you're selling is essentially a commodity, that can be easily replicated by anyone, you'd best factor that into your business plan. Your failure to do so is not "theft" on my part, it's poor planning on yours. And in fact, reverse engineering to make compatible equipment is actually one of the very few things the US DMCA did have the sense to allow. That's actually been upheld many times.

The Chamberlain case there is one that's easily on point for this, as is Lexmark. It does not matter a bit that your business model is to sell these garage door openers which can be circumvented, or that it's to sell printers cheap and gouge for ink. In both cases, someone can make something that interoperates with your item, even if it undercuts that model. Failure to plan for inevitabilities on your part should lead to a smack to the back of the head, not legal protection. And, yes, in a capitalist system, someone competing with you and trying to undercut you is an inevitability. To try and have that not happen is not capitalism, it's effectively c

So what do you want? A gold star?

Or could you just not resist sticking your tongue out at the slashdot masses?

Don't get me wrong, your point is a good one and well made. And, vindictively so, it seems there was some truth to your prediction. However, posting a, 'neener neener neener I told you so,' post does little more than piss people off and make you feel good. So, in all your foresight and wisdom, rather than tell us how silly or stupid the slashdot posters were X many years ago, why not post a call to action, or some idea on how to fix a royally screwed IP system? Hell, you could at least link to the EFF website and suggest to slashdotters that they write a letter or an e-mail to said company to team up with UVEX to fight the corrupt bastards that make up the IOC.

Or you could just post an indignant message on the internet and make yourself feel better for some wrong committed upon you years ago by anonymous wankers on the internet.

Your choice.

I'm wondering basically if there are actual valid reasons for leaving the phone as apple sold it.
Or more specifically, I'd like to hear some real-world reasons people have.

Well, according to Apple, jailbreaking is illegal.

Besides, I think we live in a world where we have obscurity through density, instead of obscurity through privacy. Billions of people on this earth, nearly a billion of them connected to the 'net. Embrace it. Eventually, if enough personal data gets out there, it may become worthless to mine it due to the sheer volume available.

Panopticlick wants to disagree.

That, and "billions" / "sheer volume" are meaningless in the face of computers processing billions of cycles a second. The whole point of data mining is software can find neat correlations and connections that a human never could. You are not hidden in the billion bits of data.

Besides, I think we live in a world where we have obscurity through density, instead of obscurity through privacy. Billions of people on this earth, nearly a billion of them connected to the 'net. Embrace it. Eventually, if enough personal data gets out there, it may become worthless to mine it due to the sheer volume available.

Panopticlick wants to disagree.

That, and "billions" / "sheer volume" are meaningless in the face of computers processing billions of cycles a second. The whole point of data mining is software can find neat correlations and connections that a human never could. You are not hidden in the billion bits of data.

I agree with you 100%, but the government has been flouting the spirit of the 4th amendment for quite some time. For example, it's illegal for a government agency (say, the CIA) to collect detailed dossiers on citizens without any suspicion of wrong-doing. However, it's not illegal for a company to do it. So when the government takes a sudden interest in you, they just buy your file (containing everything from physical addresses to magazine subscriptions) for $30. The end result is the same, but the process skirts the wording of the law.

Just because there's a 3rd party (phone company) involved doesn't mean 4th amendment goes out the window.

They probably think that they're in the clear now since a judge recently dismissed EFF's case against the NSA for its warrantless wiretapping program. If this decision holds, there's really not much that can be done about companies simply offering up their records on citizens to the government of their own free will.

>The courts even rules that placing a tracking device on someone was technically NO DIFFERENT than an officer following them, and was thus considered completely acceptable.

Uhh, No. At least not in Massachusetts and New York.

Going about your business, even out in public, is still none of the government's business unless they have some real reason to make it their business - by getting a warrant.

>The courts even rules that placing a tracking device on someone was technically NO DIFFERENT than an officer following them, and was thus considered completely acceptable.

Uhh, No. At least not in Massachusetts and New York.

Going about your business, even out in public, is still none of the government's business unless they have some real reason to make it their business - by getting a warrant.

See EFF page http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2010/02/08, but the interesting bit is FBI testimony from page 39 in this document http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/celltracking/Filed%20Cell%20Tracking%20Brief.pdf

See EFF page http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2010/02/08, but the interesting bit is FBI testimony from page 39 in this document http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/celltracking/Filed%20Cell%20Tracking%20Brief.pdf

[v]enue for federal obscenity prosecutions lies "in any district from, through, or into which" the allegedly obscene material moves, according to 18 U.S.C. 3237. This may result in prosecutions of persons in a community to which they have sent materials which is obscene under that community's standards though the community from which it is sent would tolerate the same material.

> There has never, and will never be a federal or state case where someone gets arrested because someone received spam that may have contained illegal items.

http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/AABBS_Thomases_Memphis/aabbs_case.docs
Note:
                  I have a hand written and signed statement from Inspector
                  Dirmeyer in the form of a PERMISSION TO SEARCH document he
                  filled out to get his child pornography back.
                  In describing the property he wrote:
                  "namely priority mail package from Lance White sent without
                  his knowledge."
and:
                  Inspector Dirmeyer made statements to me the morning of January 15th
                  which caused me a great deal of alarm. In conversation in
                  front of a San Jose Police officer, he stated that 1) sending
                  unsolicited child pornography to a person who operates a
                  computer bulletin board system and 2) executing a search
                  warrant of questionably legality within minutes of its
                  receipt is "normal investigative procedure."

The owners of this BBS were raided once for "child porn" - and had everything returned no charges, by california officers, because no CP found.
Then they were raided again after being mailed (not emailed) unsolicted CP from Tenessee, sent to Tenessee and convicted of obscenity (by Tenessee standards, for the same stuff that california previously had no problem with). They were not convicted of the CP charge that got them raided and sent to Tenessee.

Ridiculous ? Yep.
Never occurred ? Wrong.

[Also see the EFF's page about this if you're having a hard time coming up with a letter.]

This is my comment about the '2010 Special 301 Review' for the United States Trade Representatives. I would like to complain about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, also known as ACTA. As a firm believer in transparency of government and democracy, I would like to strongly object to the outright secrecy displayed around these negotiations. In a modern age, this simply isn't an appropriate forum for creation of new law.

Furthermore, what I have seen in leaked versions of the ACTA is deeply upsetting, on many levels:

- The "Border Measures" provisions are unconstitutional, as well as extremely alarming -- search and seizure without probable cause, on no grounds more severe than suspicion.

- The ISP regulation is also extremely alarming, unduly allowing enforcement agents to remove the privacy and anonymity of citizens without a warrant.

- "Graduated response" programs, such as those required by the ACTA, threaten to deprive citizens of Internet access without probable cause. As Internet access becomes more and more central to civic and daily life, this becomes increasingly threatening.

- In general, the criminalization of copyright infringement, which has always been a civil crime, is a huge provision for what is presumably a "trade agreement" and is frankly arbitrary and despotic.

The creation of ACTA is wholly inappropriate given the existence of another intellectual property organization, WIPO. As a citizen of the United States, I demand that my government cease participation in this mockery of democracy at once.

Thank you for your time.

Ethan

Of course there are some geeks like us, who want more. We get the jailbreak. It's no big deal and it looks like it's ok with Apple too. I mean they are not really fighting much against it. So, we have the choice.

They constantly fix the jailbreaks in updates (according to TFS), they claim that it's a violation of the DMCA (going against established legal precedent in this claim according to EFF) and a gateway to further piracy. In what way does it appear that Apple are okay with jailbreaking?

If they were really supportive of jailbreaking and just wanted a minor hurlde in place to prevent casual piracy, fair enough, I would expect some model to allow jailbreaking that didn't get fixed and for Apple to tip the wink to the geeks, much as they appeared to do with the whole iTunes DRM which could be circumvented by burning a CD and re-importing. That, however, does not appear to be the case.

"What?" indeed.

This is exactly the same technique as the EFF DES cracker used in 1998, except using FGPAs instead of custom chips.

http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/DESCracker/HTML/19980716_eff_des_faq.html#howsitwork

Yes, but GOOGLE doesn't know what sites you visit if you don't use their search or their toolbar or visit a site with their ads on it. But they want to know everything. So in the name of "better internet", not unlike the things people do in the name of Jesus, a little egg with evil inside is laid.

By the way, if you haven't seen panopticlick you should check it out. If you add the first three octets of ip address there would be more than enough info to identify your computer. What's scary is that Google (and msft and others [feds?]) have been doing this for years to track browser and no one has heard about it publically. Eric Schmidt says "if you're doing something online you don't want anyone knowing about, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." And that's all good in a utopian balanced world where there is no evil that might one day become stronger than you and you'll need to hide from it to battle it effectively. As such, and as such as the founders of this country sought never to happen AGAIN in this world, I think it would be best to leave the frickin broken ass, slow, decentralized DNS system alone and anonymous. Of course, the root servers know all ;) Thanks Verisign (who also is the root of most SSL certs and decides whether or not to vouch for them). It's amazing but when you really look at it, there's really only 5-10 companies that control the bulk of the internet.

For that other 5%, jailbreaking is trivial and allows complete control.

Last I checked, circumventing DRM is ILLEGAL with real prison sentences and everything. How is that TRIVIAL?

So we can have control of our devices, but we might have to go to prison for it. Nice.

It is , eff mentions it in a blog : http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/net-neutrality-plan-would-permit-blocking-bittorrent

Your linked paper is a report by a bunch of non-lawyers asking working scientists whether they think their work is adversely affected by IP law, and you consider that useful why?

Because the claim was made that IP (particularly patents) hobbles traditional biotech research. The paper shows directly that scientists are not changing their research behavior because of patents. If research continues unabated and unaltered despite patents, then the claim that patents hobble traditional research is incorrect. Would you care to explain why that is incorrect? If it's because the potential for lawsuits still exists, then I'll explain why that's wrong in a moment.

Would you also quote a paper that claims the copyright threat is overblown, because the vast majority of music downloaders self-report that they aren't being sued?

If the paper's claim was that the threat of copyright to the individual music downloader is overblown, then yes, I would. Most music downloaders will never be sued, especially now that the RIAA has basically stopped filing new suits (there were a few that were already prepared when they announced they were stopping and those got filed afterward but it's pretty much stopped now). According to the EFF, there were 28,000 people threatened with legal action or sued and there are roughly 60 million file sharers in US. That's .05% or 1 in 2,000. You are more likely to die of injury in a year than to get threatened or sued by the RIAA. (odds of dying by injury in a year in the United States: 1 in 1,643, source)

But even so, music downloaders and biotech researchers cannot be compared so simply. For starters, copyright and patents are very different (e.g., no statutory damages for patent infringement). The nature of patent damages makes it such that it's not economically rational for patentees to sue non-commercial researchers in most cases. Thus, patentees are unlikely to start suing researchers, especially since the recent trend has been to weaken patents, not strengthen them (see, e.g., the eBay and KSR cases).

Furthermore, patent infringement by a biotech researcher is pretty obvious. If the researcher publishes that he or she used Chemical X in a study but the patentee never sold any Chemical X to the researcher, you can bet there was infringement. And researchers keep detailed logs of their experiments. So, again, if patentees aren't suing it's not because it wouldn't be easy to prove infringement.

There are also comparatively few biotech researchers. If one researcher gets sued it would have a much larger impact than the downloader suits. So again, if patentees wanted to shape researcher behavior through lawsuits they would've done it by now.

The real problem is that the IP laws exist in the first place: they are a Sword of Damocles upon researchers, whether they look up or not.

First, in all probability, no, they are not. We have decades of history to show that. Second, legally, no, they are not. Post-eBay it's unlikely that a patentee would be able to enjoin an academic or non-commercial researcher and the damages would be minimal in any case. The rational thing for researchers to do is to continue their research unabated, which is exactly what they're doing.

Remember, most of these researchers work for universities, which have money and patent lawyers. If there were any real risk from a patent suit, the university would tell the researchers to do something else.

Your linked paper is a report by a bunch of non-lawyers asking working scientists whether they think their work is adversely affected by IP law, and you consider that useful why?

Because the claim was made that IP (particularly patents) hobbles traditional biotech research. The paper shows directly that scientists are not changing their research behavior because of patents. If research continues unabated and unaltered despite patents, then the claim that patents hobble traditional research is incorrect. Would you care to explain why that is incorrect? If it's because the potential for lawsuits still exists, then I'll explain why that's wrong in a moment.

Would you also quote a paper that claims the copyright threat is overblown, because the vast majority of music downloaders self-report that they aren't being sued?

If the paper's claim was that the threat of copyright to the individual music downloader is overblown, then yes, I would. Most music downloaders will never be sued, especially now that the RIAA has basically stopped filing new suits (there were a few that were already prepared when they announced they were stopping and those got filed afterward but it's pretty much stopped now). According to the EFF, there were 28,000 people threatened with legal action or sued and there are roughly 60 million file sharers in US. That's .05% or 1 in 2,000. You are more likely to die of injury in a year than to get threatened or sued by the RIAA. (odds of dying by injury in a year in the United States: 1 in 1,643, source)

But even so, music downloaders and biotech researchers cannot be compared so simply. For starters, copyright and patents are very different (e.g., no statutory damages for patent infringement). The nature of patent damages makes it such that it's not economically rational for patentees to sue non-commercial researchers in most cases. Thus, patentees are unlikely to start suing researchers, especially since the recent trend has been to weaken patents, not strengthen them (see, e.g., the eBay and KSR cases).

Furthermore, patent infringement by a biotech researcher is pretty obvious. If the researcher publishes that he or she used Chemical X in a study but the patentee never sold any Chemical X to the researcher, you can bet there was infringement. And researchers keep detailed logs of their experiments. So, again, if patentees aren't suing it's not because it wouldn't be easy to prove infringement.

There are also comparatively few biotech researchers. If one researcher gets sued it would have a much larger impact than the downloader suits. So again, if patentees wanted to shape researcher behavior through lawsuits they would've done it by now.

The real problem is that the IP laws exist in the first place: they are a Sword of Damocles upon researchers, whether they look up or not.

First, in all probability, no, they are not. We have decades of history to show that. Second, legally, no, they are not. Post-eBay it's unlikely that a patentee would be able to enjoin an academic or non-commercial researcher and the damages would be minimal in any case. The rational thing for researchers to do is to continue their research unabated, which is exactly what they're doing.

Remember, most of these researchers work for universities, which have money and patent lawyers. If there were any real risk from a patent suit, the university would tell the researchers to do something else.

Nah, just leave the main URL blank and it will go through, even if someone has sent in a crappy submission before you. Or find another source to use as your main link (pretty much everything gets reported on several different sites these days). But do NOT try to rewrite AP or Reuters stories. I think their EULA thingy is BS, but Slashdot seems to feel otherwise, so don't even bother and don't link directly to them, either. You can almost always find a better source than them, anyhow, if you Google the story. This generally only matters if you're linking to reuters.com, so don't worry too much if you're linking to some newspaper website with AP credits or something.

Also, they're definitely NOT beholden to posting the first guy to submit the story. There's at least some small window before they've accepted any story on the subject where anyone has a shot at it. It's really not that hard to get stories submitted here, though you do have to be able to find hot news while it's still (relatively) new. If the story is important enough and you do a decent job on the writeup (at least as compared to anyone else who sent it in), you have maybe a 1-in-4 shot of getting accepted. What you do need (sadly) is to hype the story a bit. Like that in that Facebook story, the big deal was how open your data was to insiders, but the most eye-catching detail was that stupid thing about how the internal master password spelled out 'Chuck Norris'.

If all you want is to say that you've successfully submitted a story here, just trawl the main geek news sites, find something hot, and give it a decent writeup. Back when I was really trying to find news, I could get several submissions per day more often than not. Just one caveat: be careful of oversimplifying anything. Some people will get upset over the smallest things, even if you bend over backwards to try and write decent stories reasonably quickly and do your best to cram all the important details from a long story into a tiny summary. It gets to be quite a bit of work for each story once you start doing things like looking up the names of the researchers who rarely get named in the stories about their discovery, or adding Coral cache links for small sites and Wordpress blogs, etc. These days, I simply don't have enough free time to report as much as I used to. I mean, I don't get paid for this and I don't even have a blog to advertise.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

The backdoor in question is likely only available on Google's internal network. If it's guarded by VPN, this is fairly secure. Of course, there are many ways to hack into a company's internal network, as the Chinese hack demonstrates. But the law enforcement interface isn't uniquely problematic in this regard. Once you're into the internal network, there are all types of things you can do.

The real problem here is pen register taps, and it's application to email. The police can get as much "traffic analysis" information as they want without a warrant. This law enforcement interface was designed to allow easy access to this information, further invading our privacy through warrantless activities.

* All email header information other than the subject line, including the email addresses of the people to whom you send email, the email addresses of people that send to you, the time each email is sent or received, and the size of each email that is sent or received.
* Your IP (Internet Protocol) address and the IP address of other computers on the Internet that you exchange information with, with timestamp and size information.
* The communications ports and protocols used, which can be used to determine what types of communications you are sending using what types of applications.

From the EFF.

80% of home Windows computers have been compromised by one or more viruses.

IE market share is below 40%

You do the math.

Interestingly, even though most of those apps you mentioned as sources of vulnerabilities exist on other platforms, the rates of infection of anything other than Windows remains at zero or close to it. I'd say that points to a platform problem, not an application one.

A 3% marketshare for Bing is hardly anything to get excited about. Bing is seriously terrible compared to Google. Try any other language than english and you're fucked.

Also, Microsoft is terrible at privacy compared to Google. You may be too young to remember Google fighting off a subpoena to hand over user information, while Yahoo and Microsoft caved:

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39248192,00.htm
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2006/01/19

Also, where was microsoft when Google was making a stand in China? Yup, nowhere...

Lastly, you mention that microsoft is deleting user data within 6 months as if it's a policy used today. If you read their own announcement, what they're saying is that they'll remove IP addresses from queries after 6 months and remaining cross-session IDs after 18 months. But they plan to implement this policy a year to a year and a half from now!

http://microsoftontheissues.com/cs/blogs/mscorp/archive/2010/01/19/microsoft-advances-search-privacy-with-bing.aspx

It's called http://tor.eff.org/

Talk about an unwieldy name

A distributed service like has existed for years now, so there's not really a need for a replacement. It's called http://tor.eff.org/

This is exactly why I donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation every year. Until these rights are tested for the 'new' electronic medium in a court of law, we need a lobby group dedicated to securing them.

He'd be fighting so hard to get ANYTHING passed through congress that little issues like this one would be given up in some kind of compromise.

This assumes that it goes through Congress, which ain't necessarily so.

"The Office of the USTR has chosen to negotiate ACTA as a sole executive agreement. Because of a loophole in democratic accountability on sole executive agreements, the Office of the USTR can sign off on an IP Enforcement agenda without any formal congressional involvement at all."

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/11/stopping-acta-juggernaut

Troll. Congress is involved in health care where they are excluded from ACTA.

Absolutely...and everyone should encourage their representatives to start asking why: https://secure.eff.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=420

By the way, how many suits has Apple launched against jailbreakers?

They may not have filed any lawsuits yet, but they have petitioned the DMCA rulemaking committee to declare it illegal.

Doesn't anyone find this creepy where you allow some company to find your location and see how you associate with anyone at any given time. Of course throw in the Patriot Act.

FBI Audit Exposes Widespread Abuse Of Patriot Act Powers
http://www.aclu.org/national-security/fbi-audit-exposes-widespread-abuse-patriot-act-powers

FOIA: National Security Letters (NSLs)
http://www.eff.org/issues/foia/07656JDB

FBI Employees Face Criminal Probe Over Patriot Act Abuse
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/07/exigentinvestigation

FBI Admits More Privacy Violations
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/06/2310206

Grokster does apply, because it created the precedent of "inducement".

http://w2.eff.org/IP/P2P/MGM_v_Grokster/

The "Safe Harbor" defense is a red herring. That doesn't apply because IsoHunt wasn't hosting material and then taking it down when asked. It was inducing users to click links which allowed copyright infringement.

The Berne Convention agreement, in conjunction with a closed court case, makes it very likely that Canadia will throw the book at this guy.

Basically, this is the final patch of the legal loophole that allows linking to content as long as you're not hosting it. You have to be a generic search engine, not one dedicated to finding illegal software. (The name "ISO Hunt" does not have that many non-infringing connotations, especially the comments made on the site about being the best place for juarez).

Sigh... we geeks really have to work on our marketing... we need an image consultant!

you can start by making a contribution/donation here ...

> If you don't want to pay the fee, you should avoid it by not signing an agreement with Verizon. If you don't like Verizon's customer service, you should avoid it by not signing an agreement with Verizon.

That's a very good idea. That's pretty much why I wrote this story: to make sure that potential customers know what they're getting into. If they sign the contract even after knowing, well, that's their fault. But it might do them a lot of good to know that Verizon changed the contract on them (and they can, therefore, be made to drop it because Verizon isn't living up to what they originally agreed to). Most people don't have time to read 800 page contracts every few days, just to see if they've changed.

In other words, even if Verizon is doing everything legally, people still have a very good reason to want to know about this fee hike. One of the free market axioms is that customers are able to make informed decisions. This story helps support that idea.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

'So in exchange for CCTV surveillance everywhere, UK residents get more reasonably priced mobile data service.'

Absolutely!. How else could Airstrip One get a Telescreen not just on every street corner, but in every pocket..?

Of course, in some areas we still have a lot of catching up to do:

http://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/02/14/050214fa_fact6

Blizzard online game protocols ...
Fortunately reverse engineering a product for the purpose of interoperability is allowed under the DMCA.

That's assuming, of course, that you can convince a judge that your purpose was interoperability. Last I heard, it was still illegal to make a client interoperate with Blizzard's servers, and illegal to make a server interoperate with Blizzard's clients.

That could maybe double the bandwidth available, no?

http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3597701/EFF+Charges+ATT+Assisted+NSA+in+Surveillance+Plan.htm

http://www.eff.org/nsa/faq

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdawg/93928749/

Just ranked dead last in customer satisfaction by Consumer Reports, AT&T also illegally spied on American citizens and then successfully lobbied to get themselves retroactive immunity. Not only will they not be punished, but no one will ever find out the extent of their crimes. Technicians have stumbled into secret rooms used to "shunt its customers' Internet traffic to data-mining equipment" for the NSA.

And don't believe bloated Luke Wilson--many iPhone users I know tell me they have shitty GSM coverage.

Meanwhile, Time Magazine just called the Verizon Droid phone the top gadget of the year and Droid has been rooted, so you know it won't be long before a custom ROM comes our way.

And now AT&T wants to charge for usage? Well, their exclusive contract is almost over with Apple. And if you ask me, not a moment too soon.

As far as I know not a single MMORPG maker has gone to court with people running private servers.

http://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd

Interesting, true, but (FTFA) ...

it was untrue that IPR negotiations are normally secret, mentioning as examples that drafts of the other IPR texts, including the proposed WIPO treaty for disabilities and the climate change agreement language on IPR, as well as several drafts of the FTAA text and the 1996 WIPO copyright treaties had been public. Kirk said that ACTA "was different" and the topics being negotiated in ACTA were "more complex."

Perhaps because instead of dealing with nations, they were dealing with corporations? "Corporate paymaster" tin hat comments aside, the corporations may simply not have as many cut-outs as they like in this discussion.

Don't imagine that even public sessions are innocent affairs.

The encryption technology used to prevent eavesdropping in GSM (Global System for Mobile communications), the world's most widely used cellphone system, has more security holes than Swiss cheese, according to an expert who plans to poke a big hole of his own.

I hope I am not the first to say: "giggity."

Each GSM phone has its own secret key, which is known by the network. Every time a call is initiated, a new session key for that particular call is derived from the secret key and used to encrypt the call. Nohl aims to crack the session key.

This actually doesn't sound like a bad encryption scheme.

To speed up computing time, the project relies on some components not always found in your standard PC, such as Nvidia Corp.'s CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) graphics cards and Xilinx Virtex field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

So, are those of us without fancy video cards or FPGAs allowed to help? Even if we can't compute keys as quickly?

That's the point Nohl hopes to drive home: The A5/1 algorithm is a broken 64-bit encryption technology, a relic of the Cold War era, when laws prohibited the export of strong encryption technology from the United States. It needs to be replaced--ideally by the much stronger, 128-bit A5/3 system

So GSM itself isn't that insecure, it's that they're using a short key length. This is rather old news then. All they are doing is brute-forcing the whole key space rather than breaking the algorithm. This is basically what brought down RC5-56 and DES (although DES had other flaws as well).

Aside from the numerous instances documented in older Slashdot stories, the EFF has a nice list http://www.eff.org/wp/unsafe-harbors-abusive-dmca-subpoenas-and-takedown-demands of examples where a corporation's lawyers sent DMCA takedown letters alleging infringement by content they later admitted they do not own.

At this point only a District Attorney would prima facie "be fairly confident [the subject of a DMCA takedown letter from Yahoo] is a Yahoo document."

While the Lenihan order and decision did say that the government cannot demand location information without a search warrant, that decision has been appealed by the current administration. And even if the DOJ loses that appeal, the decision would only apply to a limited section of the country - other courts could decide differently.

The bigger issue is that electronic communications laws are badly out-of-date. There are so many grey areas and loopholes that Sprint and the DOJ can easily argue with a straight face that GPS records are not protected by the Constitution, are not protected by federal or state law, can be demanded without a search warrant, can even be voluntarily handed over with no process whatsoever, do not have to be logged, and do not require anyone ever to tell the person whose location information was collected that they were tracked. And while the courts often do get it right eventually, that's a really slow battle - we need a better approach than that.

We (the ACLU) are launching a new campaign, Demand Your dotRights, to push companies and lawmakers to provide real protections for our personal information. The "Electronic Communication Privacy Act," which is supposed to protect information like GPS records, was passed in 1986(!) - it just doesn't fit any more.

We hope you will all sign on and join our efforts to push Sprint, lawmakers, and others to respect individual privacy. It clearly won't be an easy battle (seeing how Sprint is actually proud of its "over 8 million GPS record requests served" title), but with enough support, we hope to make a difference - and we could use your help!

That shouldn't be a serious worry since the Wikimedia Foundation has section 230 immunity.

Section 230 immunity does not apply to copyright. Are you thinking of Section 512 immunity?

Except for sometimes in military affairs, it is an iron law that secrecy in Government is intended to cover up malfeasance. Like the ACTA, if it's secret it's bad.

I think this is already an exemption under the DMCA. See here: http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2006/index.html

A DMCA exemption request has been filed for jailbreaking iPhones and will be reviewed soon. A more explicit request for an exemption for unlocking has also been filed. See here: http://www.eff.org/cases/2009-dmca-rulemaking

isn't it down to the DOJ to go after them?

Not if the Bush/Obama administration tells DoJ not to. Look at the pattern for the last 9 years and there's little reason to expect DoJ getting involved. As far as I can tell, these days the DoJ's main purpose in computers and communication industries seems to be to fight FOIA requests, keep cases out of courts, etc.