There's an excellent article, Keeping Secrets, on medium today (originally from the November/December 2014 issue of Stanford Magazine) about the conflict between academic work on cryptography and the NSA's role in national security. Most of the focus is on what happened and not on who was right or wrong …

Launched just ahead of the first move by the US to switch from first-to-invent to first-to-file, a new site, FirsttoDisclose.org has launched, with the idea of putting your materials in the public view in order to limit other people from attempting to claim patent protection for ideas you are …

There's been a lot of commentary over the last few months about Comcast and their filtering/traffic manipulation/smoothing/whathaveyou. In general, customers are up-in-arms about one of their one-to-two choices for high-speed internet doing things behind their backs to change the way the internet appears to them. However, there's …

The Register had an article last week quoting Richard Whitt, senior policy director at Google saying that Google is creating a set of tools to allow users to determine if their ISPs are filtering their access to the Internet. This is going to raise the bar a little...

Yesterday was a joyous day for all related to patents and technology! The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that patents require actual innovation, lest they be considered obvious. This does not completely remove all existing ridiculously obvious patents, but it does raise the bar for obviousness to …

CNet has published an article rating senators and representatives based on how they voted for and against technology issues. It leads to some interesting conclusions, including high marks for George Allen (R-VA)--whose stance on net neutrality is up for grabs, but who's definitely in the camp of not calling …

Reading the responses of one of my sitting Senators, George Allen, to a local newspaper's candidate survey, I found the following comment by the Senator: "I voted for the Internet Consumer Bill of Rights Act, which addresses the issue of Net Neutrality in a way that promotes Internet freedom by …

I know there are going to be plenty of people out there on the net that disagree with me, but yesterday's 66-34 vote that missed by one the opportunity to amend the US Constitution is both a happy thing and a sad thing. I'm certainly happy that it didn't make …

The following is the text of a letter that I wrote in response to an article in the Washington Post this morning. The article asserted that pro-net neutrality groups' call to "keep the Internet where it belongs -- in the hands of its consumers" is "empty fluff that is obviously designed …

OK, here's a great article from Slate talking about all of those claims that "it costs the US Economy $..." however much each year for some stupid thing that obviously doesn't cost the US Economy however much a year.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted an article requesting that users take care when activating the "Search Across Computers" option in Google Desktop (available only for the PC right now). Although the article certainly raises an interesting question, there are some specifics that might mitigate at least some of this …

In an important ruling, a Nevada court found that Google's cache of the data of web sites does not violate copyright law and is covered by the "safe harbor" provisions of the DMCA and other laws. Comments from the EFF are available in an online article, as is the ruling …

In a well-written article from Ars Technica, Hannibal chases down an item that appears in the EFF's Deeplinks section. The EFF article describes an attempt by the RIAA and MPAA to restrict future electronics to supporting only "customary historic use" of content, and they describe how they want it implemented …

Last week was an interesting one for me. Just before the break for the holidays, Congress delivered (or failed to deliver) on three items of particular note: ANWAR drilling, the Patriot Act renewal, and Senator McCain's anti-torture provisions. To be assured, movement on each of these is not exactly what …

eBay has gotten its wish in a patent dispute with MercExchange of Great Falls, VA. The online auction powerhouse's call for a hearing in front of the nine justices of the Supreme Court has been accepted (according to an article in the New York times). The case, as you may …

According to a press release from the ACLU and tons of other places, there is a move afoot to schedule a vote next week on Representative Sensenbrenner's HR 3199 which would completely repeal the sunset provision in the Patriot Act... you remember the part that the lawmakers told us made …

Well, it appears that the over-zealous FCC is once again on the verge of diminishing choice and competition in an area that has been dominated by monopolies for years. An article from CNet this morning discusses the likely overriding of state laws that currently require (in some jurisdictions) the incumbent …

AOL, the world's largest ISP and foremost purveyor of instant messaging, has made a change to their Terms of Service to "clarify certain things and explain it a little better to our users" about their privacy rules for AOL, according to a report from eWeek. The whole issue comes about …

As reported in this article from ARS Technica, the DMCA lawsuit by Lexmark against a producer of chips to work-around Lexmark's toner reuse hack is not progressing well. It may be the first sign of a serious crack in the much-vaunted DMCA protections for everything from software to toner.

While reading a recent letter to The Economist, I noticed a citation of the 1997 Treaty with Tripoli on the issue of the US as a religious state. I did a quick Google search to find out more and found a ton of citations around the net from various groups …