ARTICLES - HOT OFF THE FAGGOT

Help EFF Find Out How Your Local Police Agency is Using Drones

Electronic Frontier Foundation 
In our 611th issue:

Help EFF Find Out How Your Local Police Agency is Using Drones

Thanks to an EFF lawsuit, Americans now have access to a list of the public agencies that have received FAA approval to fly domestic drones. Yet barely any information is known about what law enforcement agencies plan to do with these unmanned flying vehicles. We want your help to gather this information into one place. Please call your local police department and ask them these simple questions.

What What!: Appeals Court Affirms South Park Parody Was Obvious Fair Use

In an important ruling for free speech, an appeals court affirmed that a parody of a popular online video called "What What (In the Butt)" was a clear case of fair use. EFF filed an amicus brief in support of South Park parent company Viacom, explaining that being able to dismiss a case early in litigation--before legal costs can really add up--is crucial to protect free speech and discourage frivolous litigation.

The Cybersecurity Act Threatens Online Rights - a Handout for Your Senator

Worried about the Lieberman-Collins Cybersecurity Act? You should be. As we've explained before, it poses serious threats to online rights. We've prepared a one-page handout you can use share with friends, hand to Senate staffers, publish online, and use as talking points when explaining the issue to someone for the first time. Download it here and please spread it around!

EFF Updates

In light of the recent data breach at LinkedIn, in which 6.5 million unsalted SHA-1 hashes of account passwords were leaked publicly, we thought this would be a good opportunity to remind users about best practices for managing passwords online in order to stay safe. In particular, we want to emphasize that users should never re-use passwords across multiple accounts, and that using a password safe provides an easy way to manage lots of strong passwords across multiple online accounts.
The patent system is broken. Inventors are shutting down their businesses, small developers are removing their products from the U.S. market to avoid bogus legal threats, and industry groups are warning members that obvious technological improvements might draw lawsuits. But it's not all bleak: we keep learning of more and more ways innovators can navigate the system and hack it to serve its original purpose.
During the Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue this month, U.S. and European consumer organizations meeting with intellectual property (IP) and trade agencies further exposed some underlying flaws in state policy approaches regulating global IP enforcement. It is clear that IP/trade agencies' biased understanding of what constitutes a "stakeholder" and a "key interest" in agreements like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) -- as well as their unfounded high valuation of what they call "IP-intensive" industries -- are some of the problems that plague the U.S. global IP enforcement agenda.
Internet shutdowns, content filtering, arrests of bloggers, and online surveillance in North Africa have been headline news for the past year and a half, while Internet issues in the rest of the African continent haven't received quite as much press coverage. But Internet censorship and content filtering are well-established in Ethiopia.
The US Public Policy Council of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) has come out against CISPA, the cybersecurity legislation recently passed by the US House. They are joining a diverse group of individuals and organizations opposing this bill, including a wide array of digital civil liberties organizations like EFF, computer scientists like Bruce Schneier and Tim Berners-Lee, and companies like the Mozilla Foundation.
An Access2Research petition supporting open access -- specifically free access over the Internet to academic articles arising from taxpayer-funded research -- crossed its target of 25,000 signatures two weeks ahead of schedule. The Obama administration has promised to respond to petitions that pass that threshold, so the issue of access to research should now be firmly on the White House agenda.

miniLinks

The Defensive Patent License (DPL) is a new legal mechanism to protect innovators by networking patents into powerful, mutually-beneficial legal shields.
The so-called ITU "Internet takeover" attempt leaked to the Internet Governance Project in a "mysterious email."
Google will now notify you if they think your account is the target of a state-sponsored attack.

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