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Former speaker Newt Gingrich The swelling coalition against the Stop Online Piracy Act gained three new members on Thursday night: Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum. The fourth debate participant, Rep[......]
Anonymous has launched a pair of operations in response to the takedown of the Megaupload.com site earlier today by the FBI and other authorities and continued support for the Stop Online Piracy Act by members of Congress. So far, the sites of the Justice Department, Universal Music Group, and several congressional sites have been affected. The attacks began as Anonymous' Sabu called for people to boycot paid media in all forms and supporting torrent and file sharing sites. [......]
Richard O'Dwyer, the 23-year-old British college student who operated the TVShack link site, can be extradited to the United States, ruled Judge Quentin Purdy of the Westminster Magistrates Court today. O'Dwyer's attorney says he will appeal the ruling. [......]
A federal appeals court on Thursday reinstated a closely watched lawsuit accusing the federal government of working with the nation’s largest telecommunication companies to illegally funnel Americans’ electronic communications to the National Security Agency without court warrants. While the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals revived the long-running case brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the three-judge panel unanimously refused to rule on the merits of the case, or whether it was true the United States breached the public’s Fourth Amendment rights by undertaking an ongoing dragnet surveillance program the EFF said commenced under the Bush administration following 9/11. The San Francisco-based appeals court reversed a San Francisco federal judge who tossed the case against the government nearly three years ago[......]
Cato's Spending Transparency Report Card Open government advocates had high hopes at the dawn of the Obama administration. Shortly after taking office, the president signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to embrace transparency. But talking about government data is much easier than actually getting useful data in the hands of the public[......]
People do stupid things when they drive. And they seem to do even more stupid things when they have a cell phone. That's not just an opinion—it's a research finding from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. [......]
While there are plenty of technical and functional concerns that have slowed adoption of public cloud computing and software-as-a-service, American companies trying to sell their cloud services outside the US or to large multinational organizations have another handicap to overcome: the USA PATRIOT Act. European, Asian, and Canadian data privacy rules and concern about US surveillance of data crossing international boundaries have even been used to market European data centers' services . Today, ComputerWeekly reported that BAE Systems had ditched Microsoft Office 365 over PATRIOT Act concerns, because Microsoft could not guarantee the company's data wouldn't leave Europe. [......]
A new report by the Swiss government argues that unauthorized file sharing is not a significant problem, and that existing Swiss law—which allows for downloading copyrighted content for personal use—is sufficient to protect copyright holders. It considers and rejects three proposed changes: a French-style "three strikes" law, Internet filtering, and a mandatory collective licensing regime that would impose a fee on all Internet users that allowed unlimited file-sharing[......]
Prosecutors have charged two New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission employees with selling names, addresses, birthdates and Social Security numbers of "unsuspecting residents" for as little as $200 per identity. The same investigation conducted by the Mercer County Prosecutor's Economic Crime Unit in Trenton led to charges against two non-government workers who allegedly used their jobs in a tax office and realty company to sell identities as part of a similar scheme. The prosecutor's office announced the identity theft charges last week. [......]
There have been a lot of articles about how many Asian countries, namely China, are starting to dominate the solar energy sector . However,[......]
Floyd Abrams is one of the nation's most famous First Amendment lawyers. He represented the New York Times in the case of New York Times v. Sullivan , which gave newspapers robust protections against libel lawsuits, and has been involved in numerous other prominent free speech cases over his half-century career. [......]
Copyright troll Righthaven has once again been hit with another big bill. The case, Righthaven v. [......]
Facebook is close to a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission that will require the social network to make all future privacy changes "opt-in." Facebook has been hit with numerous complaints that privacy changes made personal information public by default, but a pending settlement with the US government "would require Facebook to obtain users' consent before making 'material retroactive changes' to its privacy policies," the Wall Street Journal reported. [......]
While it seems only logical for the UK to include all major transportation emissions in their carbon targets, it turns out this has not been the case. The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) recently called for the UK government to no longer ignore the shipping sector’s growing environmental impact and include these emissions in its 2050 carbon targets. [......]
