Tag: EFF

The most excellent Humble Indie Bundle is back, and yet again five excellent games are available at any price you choose. This year, Braid, Machinarium, Cortex Command, Osmos and Revenge of the Titans are part of the bundle -- and again, a percentage of every donation goes to the EFF and Child's Play charities. All five games work on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The site itself has been ...

First it was OpenSolaris, now it's OpenOffice. Yes, another previously-Sun-led initiative is being forked as a 'thanks-but-no-thanks' response to the arrival of Oracle on the scene. The freshly-formed Document Foundation is being created to further the goals and aspirations of OpenOffice.org, and will produce LibreOffice -- a more community-focused project. Initial supporters of LibreOffice ...

Well, geez, color me embarrassed. If you've read my original post about Google's net neutrality proposal, you probably know I got hoodwinked by Google's promises of an FCC-regulated, perfectly neutral wired internet, which turned out to be nothing more than a sleight-of-hand distraction from its suspicious lack of promises of neutrality on wireless networks and future technologies. Yeah, wires ...

There's been a total of one blog post by Mozilla and all of its many-tendrilled offshoots this week. I don't know why -- perhaps they're trying to finish up Firefox 3.6.4 and get the 4.0 beta out of the door -- but even then, we haven't even seen a new release candidate for either 3.6.4 or 4.0. In fact, the only actual release this week was a developer preview of Gecko 1.9.3 (but more on that ...

With all the recent privacy issues that keep cropping up in the various social networks, it's no surprise that people are looking to find a way to protect users in a more proactive, permanent way. This week, the EFF got more deeply involved by posting a proposal for a Social Networking Bill of Privacy Rights. Not surprisingly, it's centered around the core tenets that users should always be kept ...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is protecting your rights online again, this time with a tool called Switzerland. Switzerland lets you check your ISPs compliance with net neutrality, making sure they're not trying to shut down specific kinds of traffic, like BitTorrent and VOIP. Naturally, Switzerland is Open Source. It's also a command-line tool, and still in alpha, so it's not ...

digg_url = "http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2008/02/15/extreme-notebook-makeover-protecting-your-notebook-from-random/"; Small business people don't travel without laptops. On July 24, 2006, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decided that US Customs and Border Patrol Officers had the right to search and seize a person's laptop computer, computer discs and other ...

If you ever needed proof that big media and big government are a big crock of... well, let's just say look no further than the SPY Act. The U.S. House of Representatives already sold you down the river but, the bill is currently making it's slimy way through the Senate. The EFF has an action alert on how you can tell your Senator exactly what you think of making it legal for the recording industry ...

If absolute privacy is a concern critics are voicing against Apple's latest move with DRM-less tracks from EMI, they should have filed their complaints over four years ago when the iTunes Store first opened. digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/There_is_no_privacy_issue_with_iTunes_Store_DRM_free_files'; As the story goes, many users and industry pundits have announced their disappointment ...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is dropping its lawsuit against Viacom. The EFF had sued Viacom over a takedown notice the media company sent regarding a Stephen Colbert parody clip posted to YouTube. The EFF had filed its lawsuit on behalf of MoveOn.org, Civic Action, and Brave New Films. The video, called "Stop the Falsiness," was created using clips from The Colbert Report, but it was a ...

Okay, so let's see if we can keep this straight. First Viacom asks YouTube to remove 100,000 videos. Then after Google takes down as many videos as it can, Viacom sues the company for $1 billion, saying Google is profiting from Viacom content including clips from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Now, about a week later, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has turned around and sued Viacom, ...

Google Desktop 3, which was released last Wednesday, has a feature that's raising they eyebrows of security-types. The Search Across Computers feature lets users of Google Desktop 3 simultaneously search files stored on multiple computers, but the EFF is warning that Google will copy the files to its servers, and that "the government could then demand these personal files with only a subpoena ...