skids writes "Under the guise of fighting child pornography, the House Judiciary Committee approved legislation on Thursday that would require internet service providers to collect and retain records about Internet users' activity. The 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall's elections. A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses. Per dissenting Rep. John Conyers (D-MI): 'The bill is mislabeled... This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It's creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.'"

JimWise writes "The fourth Humble Bundle has been released (the third to be released was the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle). Included in this bundle are: Crayon Physics Deluxe by Klooniegames; Cogs by Lazy 8 Studios; VVVVVV by Terry Cavanagh; Hammerfight by Kranx Productions; and And Yet It Moves by Broken Rules. Each of the games in the bundle is DRM free and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as available through Steam. As with the other Humble Bundles, you pay what you want and customize how much goes towards the developers, EFF, Child's Play, and the Humble Tip."

betterunixthanunix writes "A mortgage-fraud case may have widespread implications for criminals who use cryptography to hide evidence. The US Department of Justice is pushing for the defendant to be forced to decrypt her hard drive, claiming that if they cannot force such decryptions, law enforcement will be unable to gather important evidence. The defendant's lawyer and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have made the claim that forcing such a decryption would be a violation of the defendant's fifth amendment right not to self-incriminate. The prosecutor in the case has insisted that the defendant would not be forced to disclose her passphrase, but only to enter the passphrase into a computer to decrypt the drive."

Gendou writes "The EFF issued a statement that it will no longer accept Bitcoin donations, has not used any of the donations, and will transfer all past donations to The Bitcoin Faucet. See also additional and forum threads."

jjoelc writes "The success of Wikileaks in obtaining and releasing information has inspired mainstream media outlets to develop proprietary copycat sites. Al-Jazeera got into the act first, launching the Al-Jazeera Transparency Unit (AJTU), and On May 5, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), a subsidiary of Dow Jones & Co., Inc., launched its own site, SafeHouse. According to the EFF though, both sites offer 'false Promises' of anonymity."

An anonymous reader writes "A day after Apple filed a motion to intervene in Lodsys's lawsuit against seven app developers (EFF comments), Lodsys has filed its third lawsuit this year. The latest complaint targets ten companies including Adidas, Best Buy, Best Western, Black and Decker. Lodsys sues them over two patents, one of which it also asserts against app developers in court as well as its now famous letters (an example of which has meanwhile been published as a result of Apple's intervention). The ten new assertions relate to web surveys, feedback-soliciting FAQs, and live interactive chat."

darthcamaro writes "If you're like a lot of Firefox 4 users out there, you've probably noticed that Firefox has a serious memory problem — it uses more than it really should. At long last, Mozilla developers are finally set to take this issue seriously with a dedicated team called MemShrink that are focused on the problem. 'It's pretty clear by now that this is a much bigger problem than any one person can likely tackle,' Mozilla Developer Johnny Stenback said."

geegel writes "The US Justice Department is now fighting in court demands from three WikiLeaks associates to disclose the names of several electronic service platforms that received requests to hand over user information. This comes after Twitter obtained a court order to unseal the demands in order to notify the three persons. The current legal row has seen both the ACLU and the EFF provide legal assistance to the WikiLeaks associates."

Rubinstien writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation investigated the degree to which modern web browsers are susceptible to 'device fingerprinting' via version and configuration information transmitted to websites. They implemented one possible algorithm, and collected data from a large sample of browsers visiting their Panopticlick test site, which we've discussed in the past. According to the PDF describing the study, browsers that supported Flash or Java on average supplied at least 18.8 bits of identifying information, and 94.2% of those browsers were uniquely identifiable in their sample. My own browser was uniquely identifiable from both the list of plugins and available fonts, among 1,557,962 browsers tested so far."

An anonymous reader writes "The former Illuminati Online domain, IO.com, has been sold, and all existing customers will lose all services associated with the domain. A 1990 Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games, then owner of the Illuminati Online BBS and later the IO.com domain led to the creation of the EFF and was an important milestone in the fight for online rights. While the domain has been sold in the past, the services offered to customers always remained unchanged. However, this most recent sale, to an unnamed party, will result in all services being dropped on July 1, and people will lose email addresses, web pages, and shell accounts that many have had for 15+ years." Bad news for me — io.com was my first real ISP, and I was hoping to see if I could revive the account.

ndogg writes "EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow faced down copyright heavyweights ... on a panel he described as 'the Lions Den' discussing issues of intellectual property. He was the lone dissenting voice ... Mitterand had commented that copyright debates had grown so calm now that everyone agreed upon the ground rules."

A mere few days after the EFF called upon Apple to Indemnify developers against alleged infringement of Lodsys patents on in-app purchases, Apple has sent Lodsys a letter defending developers. Apple argues that it has a license to the Lodsys patents that extends to individual developers making the Lodsys claims invalid. Hopefully the baring of legal teeth will put this matter to rest.

Julie188 writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling on Apple to indemnify its developers from Lodsys — a patent troll that's alleging patent infringement on the in-app purchasing used by iOS apps. (That's the technology developed by Apple and forced on many of its developers.) The letters Lodsys has been sending out came to light on May 13th, and apparently developers have been asking Apple for help to no avail."

An anonymous reader writes "After Dutch internet/mobile provider KPN announced they were going to blatantly do away with the idea of net-neutrality by charging their customers for using text message replacements (such as WhatsApp) to make up for diminishing use of traditional text-messaging, it has now been revealed that they have apparently employed deep packet inspection (DPI) to monitor customers' use of WhatsApp (and also VoIP services) — which happens to be illegal in the Netherlands. Many national news outlets are now finally reporting on the issue. Some doubts exists on whether it was actually DPI that was used to measure WhatsApp use (and not just IP/TCP header inspection), while some KPN insiders suggested it is actually an outsourced operation run by Alcatel-Lucent." Update: 05/13 20:26 GMT by S : The Dutch equivalent of the EFF has recommended that users report this to the police, and explained how to go about doing so (Google translation of Dutch original).

Last fall, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), which was dubbed the "internet blacklist" by opponents worried about its broad provisions for allowing the removal of websites based on vague criteria. COICA stalled in Congress, but now Leahy has proposed a new, similar piece of legislation called the PROTECT IP Act (PDF). "Like COICA, Protect IP expands the web of enforcement techniques by requiring advertising networks and financial transaction providers to cut ties to domains found to violate the law. But the new version now adds search engines and others to the list of providers who can be conscripted into complying with court orders. Protect IP would require 'information location tools' to 'take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as expeditiously as possible,' to remove or disable access to the site associated with a condemned domain, including blocking hypertext links to the site. ... Perhaps most worrisome of all, Protect IP adds a provision that allows copyright and trademark holders to sue the owner/operator of a domain directly. Again, the provision applies only to nondomestically-registered domains, but it allows the private party, like the government, to sue the domain name itself if the registrant does not have a US address. That's important because in all cases, once a suit is initiated, the plaintiff can ask the court to issue an injunction or restraining order effectively shutting the site down."

lee1 writes "If you have a 'smart meter,' it is collecting data that can reveal when you wake up, when you leave for work and come home, when you go on vacation and when you take a shower. This data is commercially valuable and, if sold to third parties, can lead to privacy invasion on a massive scale. The California Public Utility Commission is reacting to the gas and electric company's mass installation of these meters with new proposals for strong privacy protections."

lee1 writes "Sometimes political activists use a company's trademark as part of a campaign to embarrass it or call attention to an issue. And sometimes the company sues, claiming that they own the mark and its satirical use is prohibited. Now a Utah court has ruled that such suits must fail because the parodic use of the mark is not commercial and is a form of protected speech."

generalhavok writes "I read the story on Slashdot earlier about the EFF encouraging people to leave their WiFi open to share the internet. I would like to do this! I don't mind sharing my connection and letting my neighbors check their email or browse the web. However, when I used to leave it open, I quickly found my limited bandwidth dissappearing, as my neighbors started using it heavily by streaming videos, downloading large files, and torrenting. What is an easy way I can share my internet, while enforcing some limits so there is enough bandwidth left for me? What about separating the neighbors from my internal home network? Can this be done with consumer-grade routers? If the average consumer wants to share, what's the easiest and safest way to do it?"

SD-Arcadia writes "We will need a political and technological 'Open Wireless Movement' to reverse the degradation of this indispensable component of the Internet's infrastructure. Part of the task will simply be reminding people that opening their WiFi is the socially responsible thing to do, and explaining that individuals who choose to do so can enjoy the same legal protections against liability as any other Internet access provider."

decora writes "Recently the dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, accidentally admitted to wiretapping journalist Irina Khalip. Khalip is the wife of Andrei Sannikov, one of the many opposition presidential candidates who was imprisoned after the election in 2010. I am wondering how Lukashenko did this? Can a government tap a modern cellphone system without the company knowing? Or would it require cooperation, like when AT&T and others helped the NSA perform warrantless wiretapping on Americans?"