You probably remember the online outrage over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) copyright enforcement proposal. Last week, the Department of Commerce’s Internet Policy Task Force released a report on digital copyright policy that endorsed one piece of the controversial proposal: making the streaming of copyrighted works a felony. As it stands now, streaming a copyrighted work over the Internet is considered a violation of the public performance right. The violation is only punishable as a misdemeanor, rather than the […]

I know people who do it. You probably know people who do it. And we’re not talking about falling in love. File sharing, the euphemism for copying and sharing copyrighted material without paying, was one of the early hallmarks of the digital, anything-goes-on-the-Internet age. Names like Napster became synonymous with killing the music industry. And there were countless lawsuits against groups and individuals aimed at curbing illegal sharing — but nothing seemed to work. Now, […]

The clock to unlock a new mobile phone is running out. In October 2012, the Library of Congress, who determines exemptions to a strict anti-hacking law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), decided that unlocking mobile phones would no longer be allowed. But the library provided a 90-day window during which people could still buy a phone and unlock it. That window closes on Jan. 26. Unlocking a phone frees it from restrictions that keep […]

As displayed at the Chaos Communication Conference on December 29th, the most popular Cisco IP phone is vulnerable to an easy hack that allows full control of the phone. This means not only listening to conversations on the phone, but using its mic to listen to what is going on in the room. The hack, demonstrated for NBC News, allows the researchers to turn on a telephone’s microphone and listen in on conversations from anywhere around […]

Ready for your ISP’s and media outlets to know exactly what you are downloading, when, and where from? They have been doing that, but now they are not only keeping track of it, but they are going to use it against you. It is about to get a bit more difficult to download TV shows, movies or music online. A new alert system, rolling out over the next two months, will repeatedly warn and possibly […]