In choosing this month’s Stupid Patent, we realized that we couldn’t choose just one. Instead, we decided to give the award to the entirety of patent class 705.
By way of explanation: every Tuesday, the Patent Office officially publishes new patents in the “Patent Gazette.” (This week’s is...

The US Senate did something big last week. In a midnight session, the Senate clearly rejected a clean reauthorization of the NSA’s bulk phone records collection program, voting 45-54 against proceeding with S. 1357, a two-month reauthorization of Section 215 and two other expiring provisions of the Patriot Act.
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We’re happy to announce that the New Jersey Attorney General has dropped its investigation of Tidbit as detailed in a consent order filed yesterday in Essex County Superior Court in New Jersey.Tidbit was a project of four Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students who developed the software for a...

In part 1, we described the technical details of Logjam. Here we'll discuss some of the disturbing questions this vulnerability raises about secure communication on the Internet and NSA's apparent failure in its "information assurance" role to keep the Internet safe from large-scale threats.
First, this vulnerability provides...

Amidst the clamor of surveillance reform and TPP Fast Track negotiations, Congress is still finding time to work out the kinks of patent reform. One of the big topics of the day: inter partes review (IPR). This procedure lets third parties (like EFF) challenge bad patents (like the one...

The Senate passed a bill Friday night to put the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on the Fast Track to approval. Its passage followed a series of stops and starts—an indication that this legislation was nearly too rife with controversy to pass. But after a series of...

The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) yesterday released another report on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s use of Section 215 of the Patriot Act between 2007 and 2009. The report was long delayed due to declassification and redaction issues, but the timing is appropriate considering...