Mar 20
Do you drive a car in the greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area? According to the L.A. Police Department and L.A. Sheriff’s Department, your car is part of a vast criminal investigation.
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Jan 27
Network neutrality—the idea that Internet service providers (ISPs) should treat all data that travels over their networks equally—is a principle that EFF strongly supports. However, the power to enforce equal treatment on the Internet can easily become the power to control the Internet in less beneficent ways. Some people have condemned last week’s court decision to reject the bulk of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Open Internet Order as a threat to Internet innovation and openness. Others hailed it as a victory against dangerous government regulation of the Internet. Paradoxically, there is a lot of truth to both of these claims.
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Oct 26
One of the trends we’ve seen is how, as the word of the NSA’s spying has spread, more and more ordinary people want to know how (or if) they can defend themselves from surveillance online. But where to start?
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Oct 05
The man alleged to be "Dread Pirate Roberts," the founder and operator of the Silk Road—an online marketplace where bitcoins were traded for a range of goods and services, including drugs—was arrested by the FBI in San Francisco Wednesday. The criminal complaint, released today, provides many details about how the site and its users relied on widespread anonymity technology, including Tor and Bitcoin.
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Aug 06
The Engadget Show 45: Security with Cory Doctorow, John McAfee, Microsoft, the EFF and more!
Posted in: Today's Chili
Welcome to the wild world of security and surveillance. From CCTV to massive government spying initiatives, there’s no escaping it. Recent high-profile leaks have served as a sobering reminder of just how present it is in all of our lives, so we figured what better time to take a deep dive? We kick things off with one of the strangest (and raciest) segments in Engadget Show history: a visit to the set of John McAfee’s latest web video. The one-time security software guru and fugitive discusses the state of antivirus, bath salts and offers some unsolicited advice to Edward Snowden, one exile to another. Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation sits down for an animated discussion of recent NSA surveillance revelations, including a breakdown of which major tech companies are doing right by their user base.
Boing Boing editor, sci-fi author and privacy activist Cory Doctorow climbs a tree in San Diego to discuss Wikileaks, the NSA, the “surveillance state” and more. “Edward Snowden is a hero,” he begins, not speaking on behalf of the EFF, mind you — and things get really good from there. Cryptographer and computer security specialist Bruce Schneier also chimes in on wiretapping, whistleblowing and “security theater.”
Next up, we pay a visit to The New Yorker‘s midtown office to talk Strong Box, the magazine’s secure deposit box for anonymous whistleblowers. The team behind Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs joins us to discuss partnering with computer security company Kaspersky to bring a realistic portrait of the world of hacking to its much anticipated title. And one-time hacker turned head of security community outreach at Microsoft, Katie Moussouris, discusses Redmond’s Bluehat bounty program and working with the hacking community to build safer software.
All that, plus the usual prognosticating from resident philosopher John Roderick in this month’s Engadget Show, just after the break.
Filed under: Cameras, Gaming, Wireless, Internet, Software, Microsoft
Jun 22
The Guardian published a new batch of secret leaked FISA court and NSA documents yesterday, which detail the particulars of how government has been accessing Americans’ emails without a warrant, in violation of the Constitution. The documents lay bare fundamental problems with the ineffectual attempts to place meaningful limitations on the NSA’s massive surveillance program.
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Mar 07
The Engadget Interview: EFF’s Julie Samuels talks patents, podcasting and the SHIELD Act
Posted in: Today's Chili 
We’ve heard it shouted from the mountaintops more times than we’d care to mention: the patent system is fundamentally broken. But that manner of righteous indignation can often fail to make an impression on those attempting to live their lives unaffected on the sidelines, as hardware behemoths level a seemingly endless string of suits based on often overly broad language. One’s perspective shifts easily, however, when targets change and the defendants themselves are no longer aggressively litigious corporations with an arsenal of filing cabinets spilling over with intellectual property, as was the case when one company used a recently granted patent to go after a number of podcasting networks.
When we wanted to get to the bottom of this latest example in a long line of arguably questionable patent litigation, we phoned up Julie Samuels, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has also been designated the organization’s Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents. Samuels has been fighting the battle against dangerously broad patents for some time now, recently traveling to DC to support passage of the SHIELD Act (Saving High-tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes), a congressional bill that would impose heavy fines against so-called patent trolls.
We spoke to Samuels about supposed trolls, podcasts, SHIELD and how those with microphones can make their voices heard.
Note: The owner of the podcasting patent in question declined to comment on the matter.
Jan 09
Live from the Engadget CES Stage: an interview with the EFF’s Julie Samuels (update: video embedded)
Posted in: Today's Chili 
The topic no one wants to talk about at CES? Yep, it’s gonna be a half-hour of frank patent litigation talk with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Julie Samuels. If you care at all about legal kerfuffles, you’re not gonna want to miss this one.
January 9, 2013 5:30 PM EST
Check out our full CES 2013 stage schedule here!
Update: video embedded
Oct 26
DMCA update shuts down new phone unlocking next year, allows rooting (but not for tablets)
Posted in: Today's Chili 
And so it passed that Congress didst layeth its blessing on the jailbreaking and rooting of all manner of devices; the hacking community saw the miracle and rejoiced. But that amendment to the DMCA two years ago was just a temporary exemption and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been vigorously lobbying to get it reinstated. The Library of Congress has now done just that through a new three year extension, but with some serious caveats: After 90 days, unlocking of new phones will be verboten and all tablet mods will still be illegal. This differs from the 2010 decision which did allow unlocking, because the Librarian decided that a recent copyright ruling means fair use rules no longer apply to a handset’s OS. It also said the exception isn’t needed anymore because carrier rules regarding unlocking are now more liberal — although the lawmaker may be confounding chicken with egg by that reasoning.
Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile
DMCA update shuts down new phone unlocking next year, allows rooting (but not for tablets) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Oct 2012 08:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink 
Ars Technica | 
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Aug 07
A federal appeals court has ruled today that the US government can tap into Americans’ communications without worrying over frivolous things like “being sued” by its people. In what most sane civilians will probably see as a depressing loss of protection, a three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that citizens can sue the United States for damages stemming from the use of information collected via wiretap, but not for the collection of information itself. In typical pass-the-buck fashion, Wired reports that Judge Michael Daly Hawkins and Judge Harry Pregerson added the following: “Although such a structure may seem anomalous and even unfair, the policy judgment is one for Congress, not the courts.” Alrighty. For those unaware, the back and forth surrounding this issue extends back to Congress’ authorization of the Bush spy program in 2008, and more specifically, a pair of US lawyers and the now-defunct al-Haramain Islamic Foundation — a group that was granted over $2.5 million combined in legal fees after proving that they were spied on sans warrants. The full report can be found in the PDF below.
Filed under: Internet
Federal appeals court says warrantless wiretapping is legal originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Aug 2012 16:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink Wired | US Court of Appeals [PDF] | Email this | Comments
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