Facebook is facing down another embarrassing episode of censorship this week after refusing to show ads submitted by the Just Say Now marijuana legalization campaign. The gag is an important reminder that social networks like Facebook — while useful, interesting, and pretty — are "walled gardens" with overseers whose...

We're pleased to announce that EFF's Legal Director, Cindy Cohn, has won a 2010 Intellectual Property Institute Vanguard Award from the State Bar of California.Cindy was one of four legal professionals honored for spearheading new developments in the world of intellectual property. We're proud to see the...

Good news in the fight against bad software patents: a jury in the Eastern District of Texas recently found the Firepond/Polaris patent (U.S. Patent No. 6,411,947) invalid. This patent was on EFF's "Most Wanted" list, targeted because it claimed nothing more than a system using natural...

An Indian computer scientist was arrested this weekend when he refused to disclose an anonymous source who provided an electronic voting machine to a team of security researchers.
Hari Prasad is the managing director of Netindia Ltd., an Indian research and development firm. He and other researchers have long...

Yesterday, Facebook introduced Places, a new location feature that competes with popular services like Foursquare, Google Latitude, Loopt, and Gowalla. Places allows Facebook users to 'check in' to real world locations and to tag their friends as present (similar to how Facebook allows tagging in photos). Everyone who is...

This is part two of a two part series. Read part one.In the midst of recent controversies over Facebook’s privacy settings, it’s easy to forget how much personal information is available from other sources on the Internet. But the government remembers. EFF recently received a number of documents...

EFF will soon be launching the SSL Observatory project, an effort to monitor and secure the cryptographic infrastructure of the World Wide Web. There is much work to be done, and we will need the help of many parties to make the HTTPS-encrypted web genuinely trustworthy. To see why,...