In June, we published an article highlighting the problems with uploading sensitive documents to two Wikileaks imitators, the Al-Jazeera Transparency Unit (AJTU) and the Wall Street Journal's Safehouse. Apart from the well-documented security problems of both sites, we noted that their terms of use (TOU) offered...

Patent law, supposed to spur innovation, is instead unfortunately often full of barriers to innovation: trolls targeting phone app developers, standards making it harder rather than easier to invalidate bad patents, and toothless patent reform legislation, for example. But the law does do some things right, like...

This week's news roundup takes us to Iran, where censorship is getting worse, Turkey, where it might be getting better, and Zimbabwe, where a blogger is under threat.
Iran sets out to build ‘national Internet’
Iran already ranks amongst the world’s worst when it comes to online...

By now, we’ve all heard the traditional content industries complain about how technology hurts their business model. But, of course, the story does not end there. While the record labels, movie studios, and video game producers have not figured out a way to compete with free, others have. And this...

by Oscar Montezuma Panez, Google Policy Fellow
We all know that HTML links are the heart of the World Wide Web. What many don’t appreciate is that legal liability for linking varies greatly across countries. Given the importance of linking to the World Wide Web, whether websites can be...

In countries across the world, IP rightholders are pushing website blocking as the latest weapon against online copyright infringement. United Nations’ Human Rights experts, security engineers, law professors and others are pushing back, noting both the enormous collateral damage such blocking can cause and the likelihood that...

In a cursory opinion issued today that left us scratching our heads, a federal judge has ruled that the government does not have to return a domain name seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), because its seizure did not create a substantial hardship. Really?
Puerto 80 is...

By ICSI researchers Christian Kreibich, Nicholas Weaver and Vern Paxson, with Peter Eckersley.
UPDATE, 8/25/11: There are a couple of revisions to this post which are marked inline below, and explained further here.
Earlier this year, two research papers reported...

Last month, we wrote about Cisco’s plans to help the Chinese government build a massive camera surveillance network in the city of Chongqing. This is the same company that sold equipment to China to build the Great Firewall, which prevents Chinese Internet users from accessing much of the Internet,...