Cory over at Boing Boing blogged last week about an online service that helps you manage bills and informal cash flows with your roommates and friends. The service, called BillMonk, is interesting, but what's even more interesting is BillMonk's privacy policy, which is the shortest, clearest, and...

The Washington Post reports a cautionary tale about a financial executive's mistaken attempt to censor a blogger. Not only did it not make the story go away, the blogger posted the request from his service provider, which in turn led to the story gathering prominence throughout the...

It's the latest digital media murder mystery: TiVo Series2's TiVoToGo enabled limited portability of recorded content to PCs and other devices, but the TiVo Series3 HD did not include this feature when recently released. In other words, if you want to upgrade to HD, you have to downgrade your...

Last month, California's state legislature passed a bipartisan, groundbreaking new law that would institute tough privacy safeguards for Radio Frequency Identification RFID chips embedded in state identification cards. Unfortunately, over the weekend Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the Identity Information Protection Act and prevented Californians from gaining control over...

Last Friday, Congress went into its pre-election recess, and, thanks to the tireless efforts of individual constituents like you, many bad bills were held in check.
Thousands of phone calls and letters to Congress helped stop Senator Specter's surveillance bill and other proposals that could have let the...

The district court in the MGM v. Grokster case issued its ruling yesterday, granting summary judgment in favor of the entertainment industry plaintiffs against StreamCast Networks (the other defendants, Grokster and Sharman Networks, have settled). This comes 15 months after the Supreme Court ruling that sent the...

As has been widely reported, the DRM on files restricted by Microsoft's "PlaysForSure" DRM has been repeatedly broken by an anonymous reverse engineer known as "viodentia."Now Microsoft has filed a lawsuit in federal court in Seattle against "John Does," in order to get the power to issue...