Big news from Texas: Adam Carolla has settled with the podcasting patent troll Personal Audio. Although the settlement is confidential, we can guess the terms. This is because Personal Audio sent out a press release last month saying it was willing to walk away from its suit with...

The events depicted in the superhero movie The Dark Knight Rises are not real. For example, when Cat Woman pursues software called “Clean Slate” to erase all traces of her criminal past, you are watching a fictional character seek fictional software. If that point strikes you as obvious,...

Should interpretation of the laws and Constitution of the United States take place in one-sided secretive courts, away from the public eye?
For years, it has. But even Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) judges don’t agree on how exactly the FISC should work. Since the Snowden disclosures, hundreds of...

Today, Mexico’s newest data retention law entered into force. The Mexican telecom law compels telecom providers to retain, for two years, the details of who communicates with whom, for how long, and from where. It also allows the authorities access to these details without a court...

In a bold and welcome move to protect users, Google announced on Wednesday that they have started prioritizing sites offering HTTPS (HTTP over TLS) in their page ranking algorithm. Google's Online Security Blog explains that domains with transport layer encryption have a slight advantage in search results, and the...

The FCC is slated to close the written comment window for the net neutrality proceeding on September 10th, but that doesn’t mean that the FCC is going to make up its mind anytime soon. In fact, it doesn’t even mean that the FCC will be done hearing from...

Ever since the Snowden revelations, honest (and some dishonest) efforts have been made in Congress to try to scale back at least some of the NSA’s spying. It’s a complex problem, since the NSA has overstepped reasonable bounds in so many different directions and there is intense secrecy surrounding...