The primary investigation - when the guy was first stopped and agreed to let customs agents look at his laptop - showed some files with names that indicated that they were child pornography. It didn't ...

Heh, I had been trying to think of a good pun on their catchphrase, but they've had so many over the years. ...

yay, an award! ...

Ex post facto laws are laws that subject people to criminal liability after the fact, by punishing you for doing something yesterday that wasn't illegal at the time you did it. It's rooted in the fair ...

I totally agree -- if bandwidth is the problem, address the bandwidth issue, whether by throttling all users or offering tiered pricing for higher use. What someone chooses to use that bandwidth for i ...

Whoa there, I'm all about the EULA issue, but what happened here wasn't it. When the photographer posted the photo to Flickr, he had to manually and affirmatively choose to license it the way he did. ...

How's this for a defense: the Copyright Act makes "distribution" an infringement of copyright, and what Ms. Thomas did wasn't distribution. She made files available in a shared folder, sure, but has t ...

The original sniff may not be a search, but detaining people long enough to be smelled counts as a seizure. If the dogs indicate the presence of contraband, police then have to conduct a search to fin ...

@Mad Beaver: when I use someone else's photo, I credit them at the bottom of the post by saying something like "Thumbnail photo courtesy of [someone]" and their name is a link to the photo, usually on ...

US Airways, actually. Finally got on a plane several hours late, to discover that the new plane had tvs in the back of every seat. "Well, that's cool at least," I thought. Until I realized the tvs did ...

I totally agree, by the way, that this is more the result of MPAA and RIAA lobbying than any real security concerns. ...

Working from home is not uncommon - but I do wonder why the DoT employee made her work files accessible to her teenaged daughter. What I read was that no classified information was released, and the o ...

That begs the question. If Tivo built its service on GPL-licensed software, then they are bound by the terms of the GPL license, which says users must be allowed to modify the software, full stop. The ...

WillSmith: "Don't you guys have Facebook pages for this kind of inane chatter?" We do, but haven't you heard? Facebook is so over. Nathan: I am a *code* monkey, you half-monkey half-pony monster ...

Yeah, because when everyone can join your elitist network, who's left for you to be cooler than? But seriously, Facebook is circling the myspace-visual-atrocity drain with all these apps. I don't w ...

An e-voting scholar gave an interesting talk here the other day. It turns out there's more to worry about than just transparency and accuracy. We have a strong tradition of secret voting in this coun ...

There are a number of reasons not to blindly trust anyone, especially the government, to... well, to put it bluntly, to break the law. Yep, that's what they're doing. There are a number of laws in ...

As far as I know, Anton Piller orders only exist in the UK and a few other countries. The US analogue would be the Stored Communications Act orders invalidated by the Warshak decision. The court said ...

Even though the Murph has already stepped in, I feel the responsibility to defend his honor. Dave Murphy is the prettiest geek in the schoolyard! ...