When universities invent, those inventions should benefit everyone. Unfortunately, they sometimes end up in the hands of patent trolls—companies that serve no purpose but to amass patents and demand money from others. When a university sells patents to trolls, it undermines the university’s purpose as a driver of innovation....

Join us as we tweet at Gov. Jerry Brown that he must sign A.B. 2298 to protect the privacy and civil liberties of hundreds of thousands of Californians who have been caught up in the state's flawed CalGang gang affiliation database.
CalGang is...

A new federal government policy will result in the government releasing more of the software that it creates under free and open source software licenses. That’s great news, but doesn’t go far enough in its goals or in enabling public oversight.
A few months ago, we wrote about...

With high-profile hacks in the headlines and government officials trying to reopen a long-settled debate about encryption, information security has become a mainstream issue. But we feel that one element of digital security hasn’t received enough critical attention: the role of government in acquiring and exploiting vulnerabilities and hacking for...

Diego Gomez is a recent biology graduate from the University of Quindío, a small university in Colombia. His research interests are reptiles and amphibians. Since the university where he studied didn’t have a large budget for access to academic databases, he did what any other science grad...

Imagine if local governments were like restaurants, where you could pick up a menu of public datasets, read the names and description, then order whatever suits your open data appetite?
This transparency advocate’s fantasy became reality in California on July 1, when a new law took effect. ...

Today, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the R&D arm of the US military) is holding the finals for its Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) competition at DEF CON. We think that this initiative by DARPA is very cool, very innovative, and could have been a little dangerous.
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