We’ve seen a few such cases in the past — and they usually end with a judge telling the suing company to shove off, but here we have yet another company upset that its being labeled as an adware/spyware provider. In …
Over the last couple of years, we’ve had a series of interesting stories about how the Malaysian gov’t is dealing with “blogs.” First, a gov’t official slammed blogs and tried to pass a law requiring bloggers to register with the government. Outrage …
At the end of an interesting post about the changes in the American economy during the latter half of the 20th century, Dane Stangler has an interesting aside about the role of the military in the early development of Silicon Valley. He notes that …
Whenever we talk about business models involving scarce and infinite goods, a few folks show up repeatedly in the comments claiming that the only scarce goods musicians can sell are t-shirts or concert tickets — and then go on to complain that this will …
As was rumored back in May, Comcast has finally come out and officially announced that it’s capping its broadband at 250 GB per month as of October 1. Despite earlier reports, there was no confirmation of any overage fees for those …
We’ve pointed to plenty of examples concerning how pharmaceutical patents actually do more to hold back life-saving cures, and here’s another example. It’s actually a continuation of a story we wrote about a year and a half ago, about Indonesia’s decision to …
We report on so many stories where technology is used in bad or oppressive ways, that it’s important to note when it’s being used in positive ways as well. Technology, itself, is just a tool that can be used in both good and bad …
While the US gov’t clearly overplayed its claims that Gary McKinnon was the “world’s biggest hacker” after having him arrested for breaking into US military computers, that doesn’t mean that McKinnon hasn’t overreacted back in response. The US offered him a plea …
Last year, HP announced a special button that could be put on blogs to let users more easily print blog posts, without all the extraneous stuff on the website. At the time, we didn’t see the value at all, but plenty of folks …
Remember the Phantom? Depending on your perspective, this mysterious gaming console, first announced in 2003, was either a too ambitious product that could never get off the ground (living up to its “phantom” name in that it was almost never actually seen) or …
Usually, when you’re dealing with a bank, they encrypt your passwords so that no one else can read them. However, apparently that isn’t always the case — and this allowed an employee at Lloyds TSB to change the password of one member …
We’ve seen a few cases against the RIAA in which either state officials or defendants will point out that the RIAA’s hired hands in tracking down file sharers — companies like MediaSentry — are violating state laws requiring private investigators’ licenses for certain activities. …
This is hardly a new phenomenon, but the Wall Street Journal is noting that some bands and some record labels are avoiding putting music on iTunes (or in some cases, pulling music off iTunes) in an effort to force people to buy the …
We’ve been talking about the variety of new and different business models springing up around investigative reporting, and here’s another interesting take on the matter. Wikileaks, the site that’s become rather infamous for publishing all sorts of leaked documents is experimenting with …
Back in June, we were bothered by the fact that the FBI was wasting its time investigating a blogger who had posted some unreleased Guns N’ Roses tracks on his site. Music gets leaked all the time, and it’s difficult to see why …
A judge has ruled that online video hosting site Veoh is not guilty of copyright infringement for videos uploaded by its users. The judge made the proper ruling here, noting that the DMCA’s safe harbors protect Veoh. The lawsuit was brought …
The Patriot Act allows the FBI to issue “National Security Letters” to ISPs and other organizations, seeking information on users of those service providers — with an automatic gag order forbidding the service provider from telling anyone that they have received an NSL. Not …
Following the recent post we had about Apple taking down popular games from its App store, the latest buzz in on Apple denying a comic book reader entrance to its iPhone app store because the primary comic book being offered was too …
At some point, it won’t make sense to post these sorts of examples any more because it will just be common sense that bands can and do benefit from so-called “piracy,” but every time we post one of these stories, we get people complaining that …
Apparently this is the week for force feedback “haptics” company Immersion to settle its various patent lawsuits. We already noted the infamous teledildonics case has been settled and now it’s settled an ongoing lawsuit with Microsoft as well. We wrote …