The Surveillance Showdown That Fizzled

Like the weather rapidly getting colder outside, the fight over renewing, reforming, or sunsetting the mass surveillance power of Section 702 has been put on ice until spring. In the last week of legislative business before the winter break, Congress was scheduled to consider two very different proposals: H.R. 6570, the Protect Liberty and End […]

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Internet Archive Files Appeal Brief Defending Libraries and Digital Lending From Big Publishers’ Legal Attack

SAN FRANCISCO—A cartel of major publishing companies must not be allowed to criminalize fair-use library lending, the Internet Archive argued in an appellate brief filed today.  The Internet Archive is a San Francisco-based 501(c)(3) non-profit library which preserves and provides access to cultural artifacts of all kinds in electronic form. The brief filed in the […]

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Spritely and Veilid: Exciting Projects Building the Peer-to-Peer Web

While there is a surge in federated social media sites, like Bluesky and Mastodon, some technologists are hoping to take things further than this model of decentralization with fully peer-to-peer applications. Two leading projects, Spritely and Veilid, hint at what this could look like. There are many technologies used behind the scenes to create decentralized […]

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World News in Brief: End e-cigarette boom urges WHO, measles surge in Europe, Central Asia; crisis for kids in Lebanon

WHO said that 88 countries have no minimum age at which e-cigarettes can be bought and 74 countries have not implemented any e-cigarette regulations. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called on countries to ramp up prevention measures, saying that “kids are being recruited and trapped at an early age to use e-cigarettes and may get […]

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Without Interoperability, Apple Customers Will Never Be Secure

Every internet user should have the ability to privately communicate with the people that matter to them, in a secure fashion, using the tools and protocols of their choosing. Apple’s iMessage offers end-to-end encrypted messaging for its customers, but only if those customers want to talk to someone who also has an Apple product. When […]

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Is This the End of Geofence Warrants?

Google announced this week that it will be making several important changes to the way it handles users’ “Location History” data. These changes would appear to make it much more difficult—if not impossible—for Google to provide mass location data in response to a geofence warrant, a change we’ve been asking Google to implement for years. […]

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No Robots(.txt): How to Ask ChatGPT and Google Bard to Not Use Your Website for Training

Both OpenAI and Google have released guidance for website owners who do not want the two companies using the content of their sites to train the company’s large language models (LLMs). We’ve long been supporters of the right to scrape websites—the process of using a computer to load and read pages of a website for […]

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Enhance Substation Control Room Automation with Iberdrola!

Renewables and energy industry leader Iberdrola is back for another startup challenge! This time, Iberdrola seeks innovative ways to automate its electrical substation control rooms. The Iberdrola Substation Control Room Automation Startup Challenge invites startups to apply today and offers and gain exciting benefits including solution testing and investment opportunities! Iberdrola operates more than 400,000 […]

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Meta Announces End-to-End Encryption by Default in Messenger

Yesterday Meta announced that they have begun rolling out default end-to-end encryption for one-to-one messages and voice calls on Messenger and Facebook. While there remain some privacy concerns around backups and metadata, we applaud this decision. It will bring strong encryption to over one billion people, protecting them from dragnet surveillance of the contents of their […]

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EFF Reminds the Supreme Court That Copyright Trolls Are Still a Problem

At EFF, we spend a lot of time calling out the harm caused by copyright trolls and protecting internet users from their abuses. Copyright trolls are serial plaintiffs who use search tools to identify technical, often low-value infringements on the internet, and then seek nuisance settlements from many defendants. These trolls take advantage of some […]

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