Chances are that you didn't go a few days without hearing the word "cyber" last year. It's for good reason. It was a year of data breaches and hacks, impacting the public and private sector alike. Congress used some of these incidents to fear-monger and pass fundamentally...

In October 2015, all six editors of the linguistics journal Lingua quit at once, along with its 31-member editorial board. The walkout brought mainstream attention to a debate that has been brewing for years over the future of academic publishing.
Elsevier—Lingua’s publisher—classifies it as a hybrid journal....

When it comes to net neutrality, 2015 started off with a blast. In February the FCC reclassified retail broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service, and issued strong new net neutrality rules while forbearing from almost all the other Title II regulations. In other words, ...

If you’ve spent any time reading about encryption this year, you know we’re in the midst of a “debate.” You may have also noted that it’s a strange debate, one that largely replays the same arguments made nearly 20 years ago, when the government abandoned its...

As another year goes by without action from Congress, patent trolls have returned in record numbers. The first half of 2015 saw an unprecedented number of patents suits, with most of the growth fueled by patent trolls filing in the Eastern District of Texas. If there is any...

In one of the darkest chapters in medical ethics, the United States government ran an experiment from the 1930s to the 1970s in which it withheld treatment and medical information from rural African-American men suffering from syphilis. The public uproar generated by the Tuskegee Syphilis Study eventually resulted in...

From a cell in a South Carolina prison, seven inmates filmed a rap video on a cell phone and uploaded it to a popular hip-hop website. The track, “On Fire,” caught fire online—but the viral clip also caught the attention of prison administrators. As Buzzfeed...