Stupid Patent of the Month: All of Patent Class 705
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...
What Is the U.S. Doing About Wassenaar, and Why Do We Need to Fight It?
On May 20, 2015, the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) published its proposed implementation of the December 2013 changes to the Wassenaar Arrangement. What follows is a long post, as we're quite troubled by the BIS proposal. In short, we're going to be...
The US Senate's Patriot Act Fail
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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‘Where is My Data?’: A Race To the Top For The Protection of Internet Users in Colombia
New Jersey Drops Investigation Into Tidbit
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...
Victory: Photo Hobbyist Prevails Over Junk-Patent Bully
TISA: Yet Another Leaked Treaty You've Never Heard Of Makes Secret Rules for the Internet
A February 2015 draft of the secret Trade In Services Agreement (TISA) was leaked again last week, revealing a more extensive and more recent text than that of portions from an April 2014 leak that we covered last year. Together with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and...
Logjam, Part 2: Did the NSA Know the Internet Was Broken?
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...
Logjam, Part 1: Why the Internet is Broken Again (an Explainer)
The discovery last week of another major flaw in TLS was announced, nicknamed "Logjam" by the group of prominent cryptographers who discovered it. It's getting so hard to keep track of these flaws that researchers at INRIA in France created a "zoo" classifying the...
EFF Joins Public Interest Groups in Asking Congress to Strengthen the Ability to Challenge Bad Patents
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...
